of well-stored memories, with a lively wit and sprightly fancy,
with a strong desire to please and an ambition to shine, she never
failed to win admiration, while her sweetness of temper and delicate
consideration for others gained for her a general regard. For many years
she was the friend who did most to make Johnson's life happy. He was a
constant inmate at Streatham. "I long thought you," wrote he, "the first
of womankind." It was her "kindness which soothed twenty years of a life
radically wretched." "To see and hear you," he wrote, "is always to hear
wit and to see virtue." She belonged, in truth, to the most serviceable
class of women,--by no means to the highest order of her sex. She was
not a woman of deep heart, or of noble or tender feeling; but she had
kindly and ready sympathies, and such a disposition to please as gave
her the capacity of pleasing. Her very faults added to her success. She
was vain and ambitious; but her vanity led her to seek the praises of
others, and her ambition taught her how to gain them. She was selfish;
but she pleased herself not at the expense of others, but by paying them
attentions which returned to her in personal gratifications. She was
made for such a position as that which she held at Streatham. The
highest eulogy of her is given in an incidental way by Boswell. He
reports Johnson as saying one day, "'How few of his friends' houses
would a man choose to be at when he is sick!' He mentioned one or two. I
recollect only Thrale's."

All the world of readers know the main incidents of Mrs. Thrale's life.
Her own books, Boswell, Madame d'Arblay, have made us almost as familiar
with her as with Dr. Johnson himself. Not yet have people got tired of
wondering at her marriage with Piozzi, or of amusing themselves with
the gossip of the old lady who remained a wit at eighty years old, and,
having outlived her great contemporaries, was happy in not outliving
her own faculties. Few characters not more remarkable have been more
discussed than hers. Macaulay, with characteristic unfairness, gave
a view of her conduct which Mr. Hayward, in his recently published
entertaining volumes,[A] shows to have been in great part the invention
of the great essayist's lively and unprincipled imagination. In the
autobiographical memorials of Mrs. Piozzi, now for the first time
printed, there is much that throws light on her life, and her relations
with her contemporaries. They do not so much raise one'