And people did. For the best description of life at Streatham we must turn to the pages of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay). Her diary is a work of art, but that part of it which pleases most is where the art is so concealed that one feels that the daily entries are intended for no other eye than the writer’s. It is its confidential character which is its greatest charm. As the years pass, it loses this quality, and to the extent that it does so it becomes less interesting to us. “Evelina” has just been published and Fanny has become a welcome guest at the Thrales’ when the record opens. “I have now to write an account of the most consequential day I have spent since my birth; namely, my Streatham visit,” is an early entry. Johnson is there and “is very proud to sit by Miss Burney at dinner.” Mrs. Thrale, described as a very pretty woman, gay and agreeable, without a trace of pedantry, repeats some lines in French, and Dr. Johnson quotes Latin which Mrs. Thrale turns into excellent English.
Then the talk is of Garrick, who, some one says, appears to be getting old, on which Johnson remarks that it must be remembered that his face has had more wear and tear than any other man’s. Then Mrs. Montagu is mentioned, and the merits of her book on Shakespeare are discussed, and Reynolds and his art, and finally the talk drifts back again to “Evelina,” and Dr. Johnson, stimulated by the gayety of an excellent dinner in such surroundings, cries, “Harry Fielding never drew so good a character.... There is no character better drawn anywhere—in any book, by any author”; and Fanny pinches herself in delight, under the table, as she had a right to do, for was not the great Cham of literature praising her?
And so with talks and walks and drives and dinners and tea-drinkings unceasing, with news, gossip, and scandal at retail, wholesale, and for exportation, it was contrived that life at Streatham was as delightful as life can be made to be. Occasionally there was work to be done. Dr. Johnson was called on for an introduction to something, or the proof-sheets of “The Lives of the Poets” arrived, and it became Mrs. Thrale’s duty to keep the Doctor up to his work—no easy task when a pretty woman was around, and there were always several at Streatham. Breakfast was always served in the library, and tea was pouring incessantly. Thanks to Boswell and to “Little Burney,” we know this life better than we know any other whatever; and what life elsewhere is so intimate and personal, so well worth knowing?
One morning Mrs. Thrale, entering the library and finding Johnson there, complained that it was her birthday, and that no one had sent her any verses. She admitted to being thirty-five, yet Swift, she said, fed Stella with them till she was forty-six. Thereupon Johnson without hesitation began to compose aloud, and Mrs. Thrale to write at his dictation,—
“Oft in danger, yet alive,
We are come to thirty-five;
Long may better years arrive,
Better years than thirty-five.
Could philosophers contrive
Life to stop at thirty-five,
Time his hours should never drive
O’er the bounds of thirty-five.
High to soar, and deep to dive,
Nature gives at thirty-five.
Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at thirty-five;
For howe’er we boast and strive,
Life declines from thirty-five;
He that ever hopes to thrive
Must begin by thirty-five;
And all who wisely wish to wive
Must look on Thrale at thirty-five,”—