"
After another visit to Dr. Adams, at Pembroke College, he returned on
the 16th Nov. to London, where he died on the 13th Dec. 1784. The
proximate cause of his death was dropsy; and there is not the
smallest sign of its having been accelerated or embittered by
unkindness or neglect.
Whoever has accompanied me thus far will be fully qualified to form
an independent opinion of Lord Macaulay's dashing summary of Mrs.
Piozzi's imputed ill-treatment of Johnson:
"Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirmities of age
were coming fast upon him. That inevitable event of which he never
thought without horror was brought near to him; and his whole life
was darkened by the shadow of death. He had often to pay the cruel
price of longevity. Every year he lost what could never be replaced.
The strange dependants to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in
spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off
one by one; and, in the silence of his home, he regretted even the
noise of their scolding matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no
more; and it would have been well if his wife had been laid beside
him. But she survived to be the laughing-stock of those who had
envied her, and to draw from the eyes of the old man who had loved
her beyond any thing in the world, tears far more bitter than he
would have shed over her grave.
"With some estimable, and many agreeable qualities, she was not made
to be independent. The control of a mind more steadfast than her own
was necessary to her respectability.
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