[1083] Mrs. Thrale, this same summer, 'asked whether Mr. Langton took any better care of his affairs. "No, madam," cried the doctor, "and never will. He complains of the ill-effects of habit, and rests contentedly upon a confessed indolence. He told his father himself that he had no turn to economy, but a thief might as well plead that he had no turn to honesty!"' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 75.
[1084] Locke, in his last words to Collins, said:—'This world affords no solid satisfaction but the consciousness of well-doing, and the hopes of another life.' Warburton's Divine Legation, i. xxvi.
[1085] Not the young brewer who was hoped for (ante, iii. 210); therefore she is called 'poor thing.' One of Mr. Thrale's daughters lived to Nov. 5, 1858.
[1086] On Oct. 15 Johnson wrote:—'Is my master [i.e. Mr. Thrale, ante, i. 494, note 3] come to himself? Does he talk, and walk, and look about him, as if there were yet something in the world for which it is worth while to live? Or does he yet sit and say nothing? To grieve for evils is often wrong; but it is much more wrong to grieve without them.' Piozzi Letters. ii. 22. Nine days later he wrote:—'You appear to me to be now floating on the spring-tide of prosperity. I think it very probably in your power to lay up £8000 a-year for every year to come, increasing all the time, what needs not be increased, the splendour of all external appearance. And surely such a state is not to be put into yearly hazard for the pleasure of keeping the house full, or the ambition of out-brewing Whitbread? Piozzi Letters, p. 24.
[1087] See ante, ii. 136. The following letter, of which a fac-simile is given at the beginning of vol. iii. of Dr. Franklin's Memoirs, ed. 1818, tells of 'a difference' between the famous printer of Philadelphia and the King's Printer of London.
'Philada., July 5, 1775.
'Mr. Strahan,
'You are a Member of Parliament, and one of that Majority which has doomed my Country to Destruction.—You have begun to burn our Towns, and murder our People.—Look upon your Hands!—They are stained with the Blood of your Relations! You and I were long friends:—You are now my Enemy,—and
'I am, yours,