The narration before the fact, as prophecy has been called, sometimes quite
as true as the narration after the fact, is very ridiculous when it is
wrong. Why, the pre-narrator could not know; the post-narrator might have
known. A good collection of unlucky predictions might be made: I hardly
know one so fit to go with Byron's as that of the Rev. Daniel Rivers,
already quoted, about Johnson's biographers. Peter Pindar[434] may be
excused, as personal satire was his object, for addressing Boswell and Mrs.
Piozzi[435] as follows:
"Instead of adding splendor to his name,
Your books are downright gibbets to his fame;
You never with posterity can thrive,
'Tis by the Rambler's death alone you live."
But Rivers, in prose narrative, was not so excusable. He says:
{273}
"As admirers of the learning and moral excellence of their hero, we glow at
almost every page with indignation that his weaknesses and his failings
should be disclosed to public view.... Johnson, after the luster he had
reflected on the name of Thrale ... was to have his memory tortured and
abused by her detested itch for scribbling. More injury, we will venture to
affirm, has been done to the fame of Johnson by this Lady and her late
biographical helpmate, than his most avowed enemies have been able to
effect: and if his character becomes unpopular with some of his successors,
it is to those gossiping friends he is indebted for the favor."
Poor dear old Sam! the best known dead man alive! clever, good-hearted,
logical, ugly bear! Where would he have been if it had not been for Boswell
and Thrale, and their imitators? What would biography have been if Boswell
had not shown how to write a life?
Rivers is to be commended for not throwing a single Stone at Mrs. Thrale's
second marriage. This poor lady begins to receive a little justice. The
literary world seems to have found out that a blue-stocking dame who keeps
open house for a set among them has a right, if it so please her, to marry
again without taking measures to carry on the cake-shop. I was before my
age in this respect: as a boy-reader of Boswell, and a few other things
that fell in my way, I came to a clearness that the conduct of society
towards Mrs. Piozzi was _blackguard_. She wanted nothing but what was in
that day a woman's only efficient protection, a male relation with a brace
of pistols, and a competent notion of using them.