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.
