"He is very ill-favoured ..." she wrote to a friend "his body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down.... He is shockingly near-sighted, and did not, till she held out her hand to him, even know Mrs Thrale. He poked his nose over the keys of the harpsichord, till the duet was finished, and then my father introduced Hetty to him as an old acquaintance, and he kissed her! When she was a little girl, he had made her a present of The Idler. His attention, however, was not to be diverted five minutes from the books, as we were in the library; he pored over them, almost touching the backs of them with his eye-lashes, as he read their titles. At last, having fixed upon one, he began, without further ceremony, to read, all the time standing at a distance from the company. We were all very much provoked, as we perfectly languished to hear him talk."
Fanny Burney
At last Dr Burney dragged him into the conversation, which happened to be about one of Bach's concerts:
"The Doctor ... good-naturedly put away his book, and said very drolly, 'And pray, Sir, who is Bach? is he a piper?'"
Fanny's greatest achievement was her novel, Evelina, or a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. She planned it when she was fifteen and wrote it some years later. She had "an odd inclination" to see her work in print and, without putting any name to the manuscript or letting her secret be known outside her own family, she offered her story to the booksellers and eventually received twenty pounds for it.
When it was published, it took the town by storm. Johnson "got it by heart" and, as soon as the author was revealed, introduced Fanny to the circle at Streatham and made her one of his closest friends. He called her his "dear little Burney" and was always making pretty speeches to her:
"Miss Burney, calling on him the next morning, offered to make his tea. He had given her his own large arm-chair which was too heavy for her to move to the table. 'Sir' quoth she 'I am in the wrong chair.' 'It is so difficult,' cried he with quickness, 'for anything to be wrong that belongs to you, that it can only be I that am in the wrong chair to keep you from the right one.'"
They were guests together of Mrs Thrale at Brighton and one night "to the universal amazement" Johnson went to a ball: