During those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson, to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to subjects about which Johnson was likely to say something remarkable, and to fill quarto note books with minutes of what Johnson had said.In this way were gathered the materials out of which was afterwards constructed the most interesting biographical work in the world.
Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connection less important indeed to his fame, but much more important to his happiness, than his connection with Boswell.Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound and cultivated understanding, rigid principles, and liberal spirit, was married to one of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women, who are perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly right, but who, do or say what they may, are always agreeable.In 1765 the Thrales became acquainted with Johnson;and the acquaintance ripened fast into friendship.They were astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of his conversation.
They were flattered by finding that a man so widely celebrated, preferred their house to any other in London.Even the peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for civilised society, his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the strange way in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which he devoured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of anger, his frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity, increased the interest which his new associates took in him.For these things were the cruel marks left behind by a life which had been one long conflict with disease and with adversity.In a vulgar hack writer such oddities would have excited only disgust.But in a man of genius, learning, and virtue their effect was to add pity to admiration and esteem.Johnson soon had an apartment at the brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment at the villa of his friends on Streatham Common.A large part of every year he passed in those abodes, abodes which must have seemed magnificent and luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in which he had generally been lodged.But his chief pleasures were derived from what the astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called "the endearing elegance of female friendship." Mrs Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and, if she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper.When he was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses.
No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise, was wanting to his sick-room.He requited her kindness by an affection pure as the affection of a father, yet delicately tinged with a gallantry, which, though awkward, must have been more flattering than the attentions of a crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, now obsolete, of Buck and Maccaroni.It should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during about sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales.He accompanied the family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to Brighton, once to Wales, and once to Paris.But he had at the same time a house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the north of Fleet Street.In the garrets was his library, a large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling to pieces and begrimed with dust.On a lower floor he sometimes, but very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner, a veal pie, or a leg of lamb and spinage, and a rice pudding.Nor was the dwelling uninhabited during his long absences.It was the home of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought together.At the head of the establishment Johnson had placed an old lady named Williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and her poverty.But, in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs Desmoulins, whose family he had known many years before in Staffordshire.Room was found for the daughter of Mrs Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom her generous host called Polly.An old quack doctor named Levett, who bled and dosed coal-heavers and hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper, completed this strange menagerie.All these poor creatures were at constant war with each other, and with Johnson's negro servant Frank.Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their hostilities from the servant to the master, complained that a better table was not kept for them, and railed or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make his escape to Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern.And yet he, who was generally the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt to resent anything which looked like a slight on the part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron, bore patiently from mendicants, who, but for his bounty, must have gone to the workhouse, insults more provoking than those for which he had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance to Chesterfield.Year after year Mrs Desmoulins, Polly, and Levett, continued to torment him and to live upon him.