disappearance; still more, that a further explanation must be had with Lucy, and an understanding come to with her father. And yet for the time the prospect of having to do this seemed utterly distasteful. The very notion that he should be scheming plans for happiness and wedded life appeared like a sacrilege to the memory of his first love in her lonely wretchedness.
The train passed through Shoalbrook Junction, stopping there for a minute; the carriage was full as usual of business men returning home, each with his little basket of fish or game: some slept, others discussed the evening papers; while hard by, on the bank of the river which flowed swiftly on, were the two unhappy beings whose tragic fate he was watching, unable to avert.
MRS. THRALE (PIOZZI): THE FRIEND OF DR. JOHNSON.
IN TWO PARTS.
Part I. — 1741 to 1780.
Among the crowd of remarkable Englishwomen of the eighteenth century there is none concerning whom so much has been written, in her lifetime and afterwards, and whose story is so mixed up with the literary history of that period, as Hester Lynch Salusbury, known as Mrs. Thrale, afterwards Piozzi, who for twenty years was the most popular leader of literary society in London, and the acknowledged "provider and conductress" of Dr. Johnson.
Mrs. Thrale was not a little proud of her good old Welsh descent, and knew the Salusbury pedigree by heart, from old Adam de Saltzburg, who "came to England with the Conqueror," downwards. She was born in a little cottage at Bodville, in Caernarvonshire, in January 1741. Her parents were cousins — the mother, a daughter of Sir Thomas Salusbury Cotton, Bart, of Combermere in Cheshire and Llewenny Hall in Denbighshire; and the father, John Salusbury, of the Salusburys of Bachygraig, a younger branch of the same stock. Her mother's fortune of 10,000l. was spent in paying the debts of her husband; and, when John Salusbury inherited Bachygraig, he so impoverished it by looking for lead in its soil that he ended by emigrating to Nova Scotia — his wife and little girl remaining behind, and living as they best could upon the hospitality of richer Salusburys in various parts of the country. The brightest years of Hester's youth were spent with her mother at Offley Place, in Hertfordshire, the domain of her paternal uncle, Sir Thomas Salusbury, a judge of the admiralty, who had married a wealthy heiress; where, when the Nova Scotia adventure had resulted only in duels and discontents, John Salusbury rejoined his family. Uncle Thomas's heiress wife died while Hester was still a child; and then Hester's mother was to all intents and purposes the mistress of Offley Place, and her little girl was tacitly recognized as her childless uncle's heir. "Here," says Mrs. Thrale, "I reigned long, a fondled favourite;" and her richest recollections of youth and hope were connected with this Hertfordshire home.
Among Hester's early friends were Dr. Collier, a kind-hearted old dominie, who taught her Latin, logic, and rhetoric, and his friend James Harris, author of a learned treatise upon language and universal grammar. In her later life Mrs. Thrale remembered the conversations and correspondences she had had with these two old sages with an almost tearful enthusiasm.
It was in London, in one of the winters of those happy Offley years, that Hogarth made her sit for his picture of "The Lady's Last Stake." He promised her the painting should be hers; but he died soon, and it fell into other hands; and many years afterwards she saw her own young face hanging on the walls of a public exhibition in Pall Mall.
Hester Salusbury was still in her early teens when she blushed into authorship, and her first scribblings appeared anonymously, without the knowledge of her mother or Dr. Collier, in St. James's Chronicle. Her uncle shared his affections pretty equally between her and his horses. His stud was the finest in all the country round; and his house was haunted, she tells us, by young wealthy sportsmen, whom she mimicked for Dr. Collier's amusement, preferring still the dominie's learned talk and Latin lessons to the gayest wooer among them. And so matters went on until, one day, when her father and Dr. Collier were both absent from Offley Place, her uncle Thomas brought news from London that a friend of his, "a real sportsman," was coming to pay them a visit. The next day Mr. Thrale arrived; and it was not long before he won the heart, not of Hester, but of Hester's mother, who with the uncle
