With such marrying blood in her veins it is easily understood that, as soon as Thrale’s halter was off her neck,—this sporting phrase, I regret to say, is Dr. Johnson’s,—she should think of marrying again; and that having the first time married to please her family, she should, at the second venture, marry to please herself. But this chapter is moving too rapidly—the lady is not yet born.
Hester Lynch Salusbury’s birthplace was Bodvel, in Wales, and the year, 1741. She was an only child, very precocious, with a retentive memory. She soon became the plaything of the elderly people around her, who called her “Fiddle.” Her father had the reputation of being a scamp, and it fell to her uncle’s lot to direct, somewhat, her education. Handed from one relation to another, she quickly adapted herself to her surroundings. Her mother taught her French; a tutor, Latin; Quin, the actor, taught her to recite; Hogarth painted her portrait; and the grooms of her grandmother, whom she visited occasionally, made her an accomplished horsewoman. In those days education for a woman was highly irregular, but judging from the results in the case of Mrs. Thrale and her friends, who shall say that it was ineffective? We have no Elizabeth Carters nowadays, good at translating Epictetus, and—we have it on high authority—better at making a pudding.
Study soon became little Hester’s delight. At twelve years she wrote for the newspapers; also, she used to rise at four in the morning to study, which her mother would not have allowed had she known of it. I have a letter written many years afterwards in which she says: “My mother always told me I ruined my Figure and stopt my Growth by sitting too long at a Writing Desk, though ignorant how much Time I spent at it. Dear Madam, was my saucy Answer,—
“Tho’ I could reach from Pole to Pole
And grasp the Ocean with my Span,
I would be measur’d by my Soul.
The Mind’s the Standard of the Man.”
She is quoting Dr. Watts from memory evidently, and improving, perhaps, upon the original.
But little girls grow up and husbands must be found for them. Henry Thrale, the son of a rich Southwark brewer, was brought forward by her uncle; while her father, protesting that he would not have his only child exchanged for a barrel of “bitter,” fell into a rage and died of an apoplexy. Her dot was provided by the uncle; her mother did the courting, with little opposition on the part of the lady and no enthusiasm on the part of the suitor. So, without love on either side, she being twenty-two and her husband thirty-five, she became Mrs. Thrale. “My uncle,” she records in her journal, “went with us to the church, gave me away, dined with us at Streatham after the ceremony, and then left me to conciliate as best I could a husband who had never thrown away five minutes of his time upon me unwitnessed by company till after the wedding day was done.”
