She saw also Miss Thrale,[26] then barely entered into adolescence, though full of sense and cultivated talents; but as shy as herself, and consequently as little likely to create alarm.
One visitor only was at the house, Mr. Seward, afterwards author of Biographiana; a singular, but very agreeable, literary, and beneficent young man.
The morning was passed in the library, and, to the Doctor and his daughter was passed deliciously: Mrs. Thrale, much amused by the presence of two persons so peculiarly situated, put forth her utmost powers of pleasing; and though that great engine to success, flattery, was not spared, she wielded it with so much skill, and directed it with so much pleasantry, that all disconcerting effects were chased aside, to make it only produce laughter and good humour; through which gay auxiliaries every trait meant, latently, for the fearful daughter, was openly and plumply addressed to the happy father.
“I wish you had been with us last night, Dr. Burney,” she said; “for thinking of what would happen to-day, we could talk of nothing in the world but a certain sweet book; and Dr. Johnson was so full of it, that he quite astonished us. He has got those incomparable Brangtons quite by heart, and he recited scene after scene of their squabbles, and selfishness, and forwardness, till he quite shook his sides with laughter. But his greatest favourite is The Holbourn Beau, as he calls Mr. Smith. Such a fine varnish, he says, of low politeness! such struggles to appear the fine gentleman! such a determination to be genteel! and, above all, such profound devotion to the ladies,—while openly declaring his distaste to matrimony!——All this Mr. Johnson pointed out with so much comicality of sport, that, at last, he got into such high spirits, that he set about personating Mr. Smith himself! We all thought we must have died no other death than that of suffocation, in seeing Dr. Johnson handing about any thing he could catch, or snatch at, and making smirking bows, saying he was all for the ladies,—every thing that was agreeable to the ladies, &c. &c. &c., ‘except,’ says he, ‘going to church with them! and as to that, though marriage, to be sure, is all in all to the ladies, marriage to a man—is the devil!’ And then he pursued his personifications of his Holbourn Beau, till he brought him to what Mr. Johnson calls his climax; which is his meeting with Sir Clement Willoughby at Madame Duval’s, where a blow is given at once to his self-sufficiency, by the surprise and confusion of seeing himself so distanced; and the hopeless envy with which he looks up to Sir Clement, as to a meteor such as he himself had hitherto been looked up to at Snow Hill, that give a finishing touch to his portrait. And all this comic humour of character, he says, owes its effect to contrast; for without Lord Orville, and Mr. Villars, and that melancholy and gentleman-like half-starved Scotchman, poor Macartney, the Brangtons, and the Duvals, would be less than nothing; for vulgarity, in its own unshadowed glare, is only disgusting.”
This account is abridged from a long journal letter of the Memorialist; addressed to Mr. Crisp; but she will hazard copying more at length, from the same source, the original narration of her subsequent introduction to the notice of Dr. Johnson; as it may not be incurious to the reader, to see that great man in the uncommon light of courteously, nay playfully, subduing the fears, and raising the courage, of a newly discovered, but yet unavowed young author, by unexpected sallies and pointed allusions to characters in her work; not as to beings that were the product of her imagination, but as to persons of his own acquaintance, and in real life.
“TO SAMUEL CRISP, ESQ.
“Chesington, Kingston, Surrey.
Well, when, at last, we were summoned to dinner, Mrs. Thrale made my father and myself sit on each side of her. I said, I hoped I did not take the place of Dr. Johnson? for, to my great consternation, he did not even yet appear, and I began to apprehend he meant to abscond. ‘No,’ answered Mrs. Thrale; ‘he will sit next to you,—and that, I am sure, will give him great pleasure.’