And so with talks and walks and drives and dinners and tea-drinkings unceasing, with news, gossip, and scandal at retail, wholesale, and for exportation, it was contrived that life at Streatham was as delightful as life can be made to be. Occasionally there was work to be done. Dr. Johnson was called on for an introduction to something, or the proof-sheets of "The Lives of the Poets" arrived, and it became Mrs. Thrale's duty to keep the Doctor up to his work--no easy task when a pretty woman was around, and there were always several at Streatham. Breakfast was always served in the library, and tea was pouring incessantly. Thanks to Boswell and to "Little Burney," we know this life better than we know any other whatever; and what life elsewhere is so intimate and personal, so well worth knowing?
[Illustration: MRS. THRALE'S BREAKFAST-TABLE]
One morning Mrs. Thrale, entering the library and finding Johnson there, complained that it was her birthday, and that no one had sent her any verses. She admitted to being thirty-five, yet Swift, she said, fed Stella with them till she was forty-six. Thereupon Johnson without hesitation began to compose aloud, and Mrs. Thrale to write at his dictation,--
"Oft in danger, yet alive, We are come to thirty-five; Long may better years arrive, Better years than thirty-five. Could philosophers contrive Life to stop at thirty-five, Time his hours should never drive O'er the bounds of thirty-five. High to soar, and deep to dive, Nature gives at thirty-five. Ladies, stock and tend your hive, Trifle not at thirty-five; For howe'er we boast and strive, Life declines from thirty-five; He that ever hopes to thrive Must begin by thirty-five; And all who wisely wish to wive Must look on Thrale at thirty-five,"--
adding, as he concluded, "And now, my dear, you see what it is to come for poetry to a dictionary-maker. You may observe that the rhymes run in alphabetical order exactly."
But life is not all cakes and ale. Mr. Thrale's ample income was constantly in jeopardy from his business speculations. He was led by a charlatan to spend a fortune in the endeavor to brew without hops; this failing, he sought to recoup himself by over-brewing, despite the protests of his wife, seconded by Dr. Johnson, who was becoming an excellent man of affairs. Listen to the man whose boast was that he was bred in idleness and the pride of literature. "The brewhouse must be the scene of action.... The first consequence of our late trouble ought to be an endeavor to brew at a cheaper rate, an endeavor not violent and transient, but steady and continual, prosecuted with total contempt of censure or wonder, and animated by resolution not to stop while more can be done. Unless this can be done, nothing can help us; and if this is done we shall not want help. Surely there is something to be saved; there is to be saved whatever is the difference between vigilance and neglect, between parsimony and profusion."