"'At early morn I to the market haste, Studious in ev'ry thing to please thy taste. A curious _fowl_ and _sparagrass_ I chose; (For I remember you were fond of those:) Three shillings cost the first, the last seven groats; Sullen you turn from both, and call for OATS.' He laughed, and asked in whose name I would write it. I said in Mrs. Thrale's. He was angry. 'Sir, if you have any sense of decency or delicacy, you won't do that.' _Boswell_. 'Then let it be in Cole's, the landlord of the Mitre tavern, where we have so often sat together.' _Johnson_. 'Ay, that may do.'" Again, at Inverary, when Johnson called for a gill of whiskey that he might know what makes a Scotchman happy, and Boswell proposed Mrs. Thrale as their toast, he would not have _her_ drunk in whiskey. Peter Pindar has maliciously added to this reproof:-- "We supped most royally, were vastly frisky, When Johnson ordered up a gill of whiskey. Taking the glass, says I, 'Here's Mistress Thrale,' 'Drink her in _whiskey_ not,' said he, 'but _ale_.'" So far from making light of her scholarship, he frequently accepted her as a partner in translations from the Latin. The translations from Boethius, printed in the second volume of the Letters, are their joint composition. After recapitulating Johnson's other contributions to literature in 1766, Boswell says, "'The Fountains,' a beautiful little fairy tale in prose, written with exquisite simplicity, is one of Johnson's productions; and I cannot withhold from Mrs. Thrale the praise of being the author of that admirable poem 'The Three Warnings.'" _Marginal note_: "How sorry he is!" Both the tale and the poem were written for a collection of "Miscellanies," published by Mrs. Williams in that year. The character of Floretta in "The Fountains" was intended for Mrs. Thrale, and she thus gracefully alludes to it in a letter to Johnson in Feb. 1782: "The newspapers would spoil my few comforts that are left if they could; but you tell me that's only because I have the reputation, whether true or false, of being a _wit_ forsooth; and you remember _poor Floretta_, who was teased into wishing away her spirit, her beauty, her fortune, and at last even her life, never could bear the bitter water which was to have washed away her wit; which she resolved to keep with all its consequences." Her fugitive pieces, mostly in verse, thrown off from time to time at all periods of her life, are numerous; and the best of them that have been recovered will be included in these volumes. In a letter to the author of "Piozziana," she says:--"When Wilkes and Liberty were at their highest tide, I was bringing or losing children every year; and my studies were confined to my nursery; so, it came into my head one day to send an infant alphabet to the 'St. James Chronicle':-- "'A was an Alderman, factious and proud; B was a Bellas that blustered aloud, &c.'