OLIYEK GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1764. was at this time as pretty as she was lively, garrulous, and
mis. young;* to more than a woman's quickness of observation,
added all a woman's gentleness and Mndness of heart;
indulged in literary airs and judgments, which she put on
with an audacity as full of charms as of blunders; and
beyond measure captivated Johnson. She was his Madam,
My Mistress, his Dearest of all Dear Ladies, whom he lectured
only because he loved; for where she came, she brought him
sunshine. Like some "gay creature of the element" she
flitted past the gloomy scholar, still over-toiled and weary,
though resting at last. " You little creatures," he exclaimed,
on her appearing before him one day in a dark-coloured
dress, " you should never wear those sort of clothes ; they
" are unsuitable in every way. What! have not all insects
" gay colours ? " f The house of the hospitable brewer became
* Mr. Croker is the only infallible authority I know on the question of a lady's
age, and he has settled Mrs. Thrale's, though not without great difficulty. In
his last edition oiJBoswell (170), he says, "She was about twenty-four or twenty-
" five years of age, when this acquaintance commenced. At the time of my
."first edition I was unable to ascertain precisely Mrs. Piozzi's age—but a sub-
" sequent publication, named Piozsiana, fixes her birth on her own authority to the
" 16th January, 1740 ; yet even that is not quite conclusive, for she calls it 1740
" old style, that is, 1741. I must now of course adopt, though not without some
" doubt, the lady's reckoning.". Happily this doubt was solved before the com-
pletion of his labour, though not in the lady's favour, for in a subsequent note
(650) he says, " I have found evidence under her own hand that my suspicion was
"just, and that she was born in 1740, new style." In another note to the same
edition, Mr. Croker has the satisfaction of settling the late Lady Cork's age, long
held to be insoluble. " I found by the register of St. James's parish that she had
"understated her age by one year. She died on the 30th of May, 1840, aged 95."
(646). I need hardly add that the same ruthless authority discovered, at the cost
of a journey to a much more distant parish-register, that poor Fanny Burney
had understated her age by no less than ten years; and that instead of being a
girl of seventeen, hardly out of the nursery, when she surprised the world by
Ihielina, she was in truth a mature young lady of twenty-seven ! Nevertheless
this was a fact in literary history worth setting right, and gratitude is due to
Mr. Oroker accordingly.
t Anecdotes, 279. Her greatest fault was a kind of saucy carelessness of
speech, which showed itself sometimes in "little variations in narrative," never
deliberate, and which she would have excused on the score that one cannot be