“The birth of my second husband is not meaner than that of my first,” she wrote; “his sentiments are not meaner; his profession is not meaner; and his superiority in what he professes acknowledged by all mankind. It is want of fortune, then, that is ignominious; the character of the man I have chosen has no other claim to such an epithet. The religion to which he has always been a zealous adherent, will, I hope, teach him to forgive insults he has not deserved; mine will, I hope, enable [me] to bear them at once with dignity and patience. To hear that I have forfeited my fame is indeed the greatest insult I ever yet received. My fame is as unsullied as snow, or I should think it unworthy of him who must henceforth protect it.”
This brought the surly burly mass of offended dignity to his proper level; but still he would not offer the lady who had been his benefactress for twenty years an apology for his brutality. He had the presumption to offer his advice instead—advice and the story (highly appropriate from his point of view) of Mary Queen of Scots and the Archbishop of St. Andrews. He advised her to remain in England—he would not relinquish his room in her house and his place at her table without a struggle—as her rank would be higher in England than in Italy, and her fortune would be under her own eye. The latter suggestion was a delicate insult to Piozzi.
Mrs. Piozzi, as she then became, showed that she esteemed this piece of presumption, under the guise of advice, at its true value. Immediately after her marriage she went abroad with her husband, though eventually she settled with him in England.
Now, most modern readers will, we think, when they have become acquainted with the whole story of Mrs. Thrale's life, arrive at the conclusion that it was her first marriage that was the mésalliance, not her second.
Henry Thrale was a man of humble origin—a fact that revealed itself almost daily in his life—and he was incapable of loving any one except himself. He certainly never made a pretence of devotion to his wife, and it is equally certain that, although she did more for him than any other woman would have done, she never loved him. It might be going too far, considering the diversity of temperament existing among womankind, to assert that he was incapable of being loved by any woman; but beyond a doubt he was not a lovable man. He was a stiff, dignified, morose, uncongenial man, and he was a Member of Parliament into the bargain. What could a pretty, lively, brilliant girl of good family see in such a man as Thrale to make her love him? She never did love him—at times she must have detested him. But she married him, and it was a lucky day for him that she did so. Twice she saved him from bankruptcy, and three times she induced his constituents, who thoroughly hated him, to return him to Parliament as their representative. He never did anything in Parliament, and he did little out of it that was worth remembering. It is customary to make large allowances for a man of business who finds that his wealth and a charming wife serve as a passport into what is called society, though latterly such men do not stand in need of such a favour being shown to them. But if a man betrays his ignorance of certain social usages—not necessarily refinements—his friends excuse him on the ground that he is a first-rate business man. Thrale, however, was unworthy of such a title. He inherited a great scientific business, but he showed himself so incapable of appreciating the methods by which it had been built up, that he brought himself within a week or two of absolute ruin by listening to a clumsy adventurer who advocated the adoption of a system of adulteration of his beer that even a hundred and fifty years ago would have brought him within sight of a criminal prosecution.
His literary wife, by her clever management, aided by the money of her mother and of sundry of her own, not her husband's, friends, succeeded in staving off the threatened disaster. But the pig-headed man did not accept the lesson which one might imagine he would have learned. Seeing the success that crowned other enterprises of the same character as his own, he endeavoured to emulate this success, not by the legitimate way of increasing his customers, but by the idiotic plan of over-production. He had an idea that in the multiplying of the article which he had to sell he was increasing his business. Once again he was helped from the verge of ruin by his literary wife.
He must have been a dreadful trial to her, and to a far-seeing manager whom he had—a man named Perkins. Of course it was inevitable that the force of character possessed by this Mr. Perkins must eventually prevail against the dignified incompetence of the proprietor. The inevitable happened, and the name of Perkins has for more than a hundred years been bracketed with Barclay as a going concern, while the name of Thrale has vanished for ever from “the Borough.”