Dr. Johnson’s friendship with the Thrales commenced in 1765, and continued until the brewer’s death. The Doctor lived sometimes in a house near the brewery, and sometimes in the villa at Streatham. Up to 1832, when the brewery was destroyed by fire, a room near the entrance gate used to be shown, which was said to have been the Doctor’s study. In Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ are numerous letters and reports of conversations relating more or less to the Brewery. One of the last letters written by the Doctor was to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and contained proposals for the establishment of a convivial club, as _The_ Club was getting overweighted with Bishops. The Doctor scoffed at the idea that persons, however learned, could meet habitually merely for the purpose of discussing philosophy or the sciences without material refreshment, and he gravely warned Mrs. Thrale that if she forbade {341} card-tables in her drawing room, she must at least give her guests plenty of sweatmeats, else nobody would come to see her. But the Doctor, and not the bonbons or card-tables, must have been the loadstone which filled Mrs. Thrale’s reception rooms. At Thrale’s death Dr. Johnson, Mrs. Thrale, and three gentlemen, named Cator, Smith and Crutchley, found themselves appointed Executors, and determined to carry on the business; but Dr. Johnson, who by nature could not help taking the lead in whatever he was concerned, was not born to be a brewer, and the undertaking was not a success. Mrs. Thrale, in _Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson_, has left a very lively account of these amateur brewers’ proceedings. In June, 1781, when the Executors had made the resolve to sell the business, she wrote: “Dear Dr. Johnson was somewhat unwilling—but not much at last—to give up a trade by which in some years £15,000 or £16,000 had undoubtedly been got, but by which in some years its possessor had suffered agonies of terror and tottered twice upon the verge of bankruptcy . . . adieu to brewing and borough wintering; adieu to trade and tradesmen’s frigid approbation. May virtue and wisdom sanctify our contract, and make buyer and seller happy in the bargain!”