Chapter X: Part 10

"1790, _December 1st_.--Dr. Parr and I are in correspondence, and his letters are very flattering: I am proud of his notice to be sure, and he seems pleased with my acknowledgments of esteem: he is a prodigious scholar ... but in the meantime I have lost Dr. Lort."[1]

[Footnote 1: He died November 5th, 1790.]

In the Conway Notes, she thus sums up her life from March 1787 to 1791:

"On first reaching London, we drove to the Royal Hotel in Pall Mall, and, arriving early, I proposed going to the Play. There was a small front box, in those days, which held only two; it made the division, or connexion, with the side boxes, and, being unoccupied, we sat in it, and saw Mrs. Siddons act Imogen, I well remember, and Mrs. Jordan, Priscilla Tomboy. Mr. Piozzi was amused, and the next day was spent in looking at houses, counting the cards left by old acquaintances, &c. The lady-daughters came, behaved with cold civility, and asked what I thought of _their_ decision concerning Cecilia, then at school. No reply was made, or a gentle one; but she was the first cause of contention among us. The lawyers gave her into my care, and we took her home to our new habitation in Hanover Square, which we opened with music, cards, &c., on, I think, the 22nd March. Miss Thrales refused their company; so we managed as well as we could. Our affairs were in good order, and money ready for spending. The World, as it is called, appeared good-humoured, and we were soon followed, respected, and admired. The summer months sent us about visiting and pleasuring, ... and after another gay London season, Streatham Park, unoccupied by tenants, called us as if _really home_. Mr. Piozzi, with more generosity than prudence, spent two thousand pounds on repairing and furnishing it in 1790;--and we had danced all night, I recollect, when the news came of Louis Seize's escape from, and recapture by, his rebel subjects.'"

The following are some of the names most frequently mentioned in her Diary as visiting or corresponding with her after her return from Italy: Lord Fife, Dr. Moore, the Kembles, Dr. Currie, Mrs. Lewis (widow of the Dean of Ossory), Dr. Lort, Sir Lucas Pepys, Mr. Selwin, Sammy Lysons (_sic_), Sir Philip Clerke, Hon. Mrs. Byron, Mrs. Siddons, Arthur Murphy, Mr. and Mrs. Whalley, the Greatheads, Mr. Parsons, Miss Seward, Miss Lee, Dr. Barnard (Bishop of Killaloe, better known as Dean of Derry), Hinchcliffe (Bishop of Peterborough), Mrs. Lambert, the Staffords, Lord Huntingdon, Lady Betty Cobb and her daughter Mrs. Gould, Lord Dudley, Lord Cowper, Lord Pembroke, Marquis Araciel, Count Marteningo, Count Meltze, Mrs. Drummond Smith, Mr. Chappelow, Mrs. Hobart, Miss Nicholson, Mrs. Locke, Lord Deerhurst.

Resentment for her imputed unkindness to Johnson might have been expected to last longest at his birthplace. But Miss Seward writes from Lichfield, October 6th, 1787:

"Mrs. Piozzi completely answers your description: her conversation is indeed that bright wine of the intellects which has no lees.... I shall always feel indebted to him (Mr. Perkins) for eight or nine hours of Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi's society. They passed one evening here, and I the next with them at their inn."

Again to Miss Helen Williams, Lichfield, December, 25th, 1787:

"Yes, it is very true, on the evening he (Colonel Barry) mentioned to you, when Mrs. Piozzi honoured this roof, his conversation greatly contributed to its Attic spirit. Till that day I had never conversed with her. There has been no exaggeration, there could be none, in the description given you of Mrs. Piozzi's talents for conversation; at least in the powers of classic allusion and brilliant wit."

Mrs. Piozzi's next publication was "Letters To and From the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., &c." In the Preface she speaks of the "Anecdotes" having been received with a degree of approbation she hardly dared to hope, and exclaims, "May these Letters in some measure pay my debt of gratitude! they will not surely be the _first_, the _only_ thing written by Johnson, with which our nation has not been pleased." ... "The good taste by which our countrymen are distinguished, will lead them to prefer the native thoughts and unstudied phrases scattered over these pages to the more laboured elegance of his other works; as bees have been observed to reject roses, and fix upon the wild fragrance of a neighbouring heath."

Whenever Johnson took pen in hand, the chances were, that what he produced would belong to the composite order; the unstudied phrases were reserved for his "talk;" and he wished his Letters to be preserved.[1] The main value of these consists in the additional illustrations they afford of his conduct in private life, and of his opinions on the management of domestic affairs. The lack of literary and public interest is admitted and excused:

[Footnote 1: "Do you keep my letters? I am not of your opinion that I shall not like to read them hereafter."--_Letters_, vol. i. p. 295.]

"None but domestic and familiar events can be expected from a private correspondence; no reflexions but such as they excite can be found there; yet whoever turns away disgusted by the insipidity with which this, and I suppose every correspondence must naturally and almost necessarily begin--will here be likely to lose some genuine pleasure, and some useful knowledge of what our heroic Milton was himself contented to respect, as

"'That which before thee lies in daily life.'

"And should I be charged with obtruding trifles on the public, I might reply, that the meanest animals preserved in amber become of value to those who form collections of natural history; that the fish found in Monte Bolca serve as proofs of sacred writ; and that the cart-wheel stuck in the rock of Tivoli, is now found useful in computing the rotation of the earth."

In "Thraliana" she thus refers to the reception of the book:

"The Letters are out. They were published on Saturday, 8th of March. Cadell printed 2,000 copies, and says 1,100 are already sold. My letter to Jack Rice on his marriage (Vol. i. p. 96), seems the universal favourite. The book is well spoken of on the whole; yet Cadell murmurs. I cannot make out why."

This entry is not dated; the next is dated March 27th, 1788.

"This collection," says Boswell, "as a proof of the high estimation set on any thing that came from his pen, was sold by that lady for the sum of 500_l_." She has written on the margin: "How spiteful."

Boswell states that "Horace Walpole thought Johnson a more amiable character after reading his Letters to Mrs. Thrale, but never was one of the true admirers of that great man." Madame D'Arblay came to an opposite conclusion; in her Diary, January 9th, 1788, she writes:

"To-day Mrs. Schwellenberg did me a real favour, and with real good nature, for she sent me the letters of my poor lost friends, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, which she knew me to be almost pining to procure. The book belongs to the Bishop of Carlisle, who lent it to Mr. Turbulent, from whom it was again lent to the Queen, and so passed on to Mrs. S. It is still unpublished. With what a sadness have I been reading! What scenes has it revived! What regrets renewed! These letters have not been more improperly published in the whole than they are injudiciously displayed in their several parts. She has given all, every word, and thinks that perhaps a justice to Dr. Johnson, which, in fact, is the greatest injury to his memory.

"The few she has selected of her own do her, indeed, much credit; she has discarded all that were trivial and merely local, and given only such as contain something instructive, amusing, or ingenious."

She admits only four of Johnson's letters to be worthy of his exalted powers: one upon Death, in considering its approach, as we are surrounded, or not, by mourners; another upon the sudden death of Mrs. Thrale's only son. Her chief motive for "almost pining" for the book, steeped as she was in egotism, may be guessed:

"Our name once occurred; how I started at its sight! 'Tis to mention the party that planned the first visit to our house."

She says she had so many attacks upon "her (Mrs. Piozzi's) subject," that at last she fairly begged quarter. Yet nothing she could say could put a stop to, "How can you defend her in this? how can you justify her in that? &c. &c." "Alas! that I cannot defend her is precisely the reason I can so ill bear to speak of her. How differently and how sweetly has the Queen conducted herself upon this occasion. Eager to see the Letters, she began reading them with the utmost avidity. A natural curiosity arose to be informed of several names and several particulars, which she knew I could satisfy; yet when she perceived how tender a string she touched, she soon suppressed her inquiries, or only made them with so much gentleness towards the parties mentioned, that I could not be distressed in my answers; and even in a short time I found her questions made in so favourable a disposition, that I began secretly to rejoice in them, as the means by which I reaped opportunity of clearing several points that had been darkened by calumny, and of softening others that had been viewed wholly through false lights. To lessen disapprobation of a person, and so precious to me in the opinion of another, so respectable both in rank and virtue, was to me a most soothing task, &c."

This is precisely what many will take the liberty to doubt; or why did she shrink from it, or why did she not afford to others the explanations which proved so successful with the Queen?

The day following (Jan. 10th), her feelings were so worked upon by the harsh aspersions on her friend, that she was forced, she tells us, abruptly to quit the room; leaving not her own (like Sir Peter Teazle) but her friend's character behind her:

"I returned when I could, and the subject was over. When all were gone, Mrs. Schwellenberg said, 'I have told it Mr. Fisher, that he drove you out from the room, and he says he won't do it no more.'

"She told me next, that in the second volume I also, was mentioned. Where she may have heard this I cannot gather, but it has given me a sickness at heart, inexpressible. It is not that I expect severity; for at the time of that correspondence, at all times indeed previous to the marriage with Piozzi, if Mrs. Thrale loved not F. B., where shall we find faith in words, or give credit to actions. But her present resentment, however unjustly incurred, of my constant disapprobation of her conduct, may prompt some note, or other mark, to point out her change of sentiment. But let me try to avoid such painful expectations; at least not to dwell upon them. O, little does she know how tenderly at this moment I could run into her arms, so often opened to receive me with a cordiality I believed inalienable. And it was sincere then, I am satisfied; pride, resentment of disapprobation, and consciousness if unjustifiable proceedings--these have now changed her; but if we met, and she saw and believed my faithful regard, how would she again feel all her own return! Well, what a dream I am making!"

The ingrained worldliness of the diarist is ill-concealed by the mask of sensibility. The correspondence that passed between the ladies during their temporary rupture (_ante_, p. 230) shews that there was nothing to prevent her from flying into her friend's arms, could she have made up her mind to be seen on open terms of affectionate intimacy with one who was repudiated by the Court. In a subsequent conversation with which the Queen honoured her on the subject, she did her best to impress her Majesty with the belief that Mrs. Piozzi's conduct had rendered it impossible for her former friends to allude to her without regret, and she ended by thanking her royal mistress for her forbearance.

"Indeed," cried she, with eyes strongly expressive of the complacency with which she heard me, "I have always spoken as little as possible upon this affair. I remember but twice that I have named it: once I said to the Bishop of Carlisle that I thought most of these letters had better have been spared the printing; and once to Mr. Langton, at the drawing-room I said, 'Your friend Dr. Johnson, Sir, has had many friends busy to publish his books, and his memoirs, and his meditations, and his thoughts; but I think he wanted one friend more.' 'What for, Ma'am?' cried he. 'A friend to suppress them,' I answered. And, indeed, this is all I ever said about the business."

Hannah More's opinion of the Letters is thus expressed in her Memoirs:

"They are such as ought to have been written but ought not to have been printed: a few of them are very good: sometimes he is moral, and sometimes he is kind. The imprudence of editors and executors is an additional reason why men of parts should be afraid to die.[1] Burke said to me the other day, in allusion to the innumerable lives, anecdotes, remains, &c. of this great man, 'How many maggots have crawled out of that great body!'"

[Footnote 1: In reference to the late Lord Campbell's "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," it was remarked, that, as regards persons who had attained the dignity, the threatened continuation of the work had added a new pang to death. I am assured by the Ex-Chancellor to whom I attributed this joke, that it was made by Sir Charles Wetherell at a dinner at Lincoln's-Inn.]

Miss Seward writes to Mrs. Knowles, April, 1788:

"And now what say you to the last publication of your sister wit, Mrs. Piozzi? It is well that she has had the good nature to extract almost all the corrosive particles from the old growler's letters. By means of her benevolent chemistry, these effusions of that expansive but gloomy spirit taste more oily and sweet than one could have imagined possible."

The letters contained two or three passages relating to Baretti, which exasperated him to the highest pitch. One was in a letter from Johnson, dated July 15th, 1775:

"The doctor says, that if Mr. Thrale comes so near as Derby without seeing us, it will be a sorry trick. I wish, for my part, that he may return soon, and rescue the fair captives from the tyranny of B----i. Poor B----i! do not quarrel with him; to neglect him a little will be sufficient. He means only to be frank, and manly, and independent, and perhaps, as you say, a little wise. To be frank, he thinks is to be cynical, and to be independent, is to be rude. Forgive him, dearest lady, the rather, because of his misbehaviour, I am afraid he learned part of me. I hope to set him hereafter a better example."

The most galling was in a letter of hers to Dr. Johnson:

"How does Dr. Taylor do? He was very kind I remember when my thunder-storm came first on, so was Count Manucci, so was Mrs. Montagu, so was everybody. The world is not guilty of much general harshness, nor inclined I believe to increase pain which they do not perceive to be deserved.--Baretti alone tried to irritate a wound so very deeply inflicted, and he will find few to approve his cruelty. Your friendship is our best cordial; continue it to us, dear Sir, and write very soon."

In the margin of the printed copy is written, "Cruel, cruel Baretti." He had twitted her, whilst mourning over a dead child, with having killed it by administering a quack medicine instead of attending to the physician's prescriptions; a charge which he acknowledged and repeated in print. He published three successive papers in "The European Magazine" for 1788, assailing her with the coarsest ribaldry. "I have just read for the first time," writes Miss Seward in June, 1788, "the base, ungentleman-like, unmanly abuse of Mrs. Piozzi by that Italian assassin, Baretti. The whole literary world should unite in publicly reprobating such venomed and foul-mouthed railing." He died soon afterwards, May 5th, 1789, and the notice of him in the "Gentleman's Magazine" begins: "Mrs. Piozzi has reason to rejoice in the death of Mr. Baretti, for he had a very long memory and malice to relate all he knew." And a good deal that he did not know, into the bargain; as when he prints a pretended conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Thrale about Piozzi, which he afterwards admits to be a gratuitous invention and rhetorical figure of his own, for conveying what is a foolish falsehood on the face of it.

Baretti's death is thus noticed in "Thraliana," 8th May, 1789:

"Baretti is dead. Poor Baretti! I am sincerely sorry for him, and as Zanga says, 'If I lament thee, sure thy worth was great.' He was a manly character, at worst, and died, as he lived, less like a Christian than a philosopher, refusing all spiritual or corporeal assistance, both which he considered useless to him, and perhaps they were so. He paid his debts, called in some single acquaintance, told him he was dying, and drove away that _Panada_ conversation which friends think proper to administer at sick-bedsides with becoming steadiness, bid him write his brothers word that he was dead, and gently desired a woman who waited to leave him quite alone. No interested attendants watching for ill-deserved legacies, no harpy relatives clung round the couch of Baretti. He died!

"'And art thou dead? so is my enmity:
I war not with the dead.'

"Baretti's papers--manuscripts I mean--have been all burnt by his executors without examination, they tell me. So great was his character as a mischief-maker, that Vincent and Fendall saw no nearer way to safety than that hasty and compendious one. Many people think 'tis a good thing for me, but as I never trusted the man, I see little harm he could have done me."

In the fury of his onslaught Baretti forgot that he was strengthening her case against Johnson, of whom he says: "His austere reprimand, and unrestrained upbraidings, when face to face with her, always delighted Mr. Thrale and were approved even by her children. 'Harry,' said his father to her son, 'are you listening to what the doctor and mamma are talking about?' 'Yes, papa.' And quoth Mr. Thrale, 'What are they saying?' 'They are disputing, and mamma has just such a chance with Dr. Johnson as Presto (a little dog) would have were he to fight Dash (a big one).'" He adds that she left the room in a huff to the amusement of the party. If scenes like this were frequent, no wonder the "yoke" became unendurable.

Baretti was obliged to admit that, when Johnson died, they were not on speaking terms. His explanation is that Johnson irritated him by an allusion to his being beaten by Omai, the Sandwich Islander, at chess. Mrs. Piozzi's marginal note on Omai is: "When Omai played at chess and at backgammon with Baretti, everybody admired at the savage's good breeding and at the European's impatient spirit."

Amongst her papers was the following sketch of his character, written for "The World" newspaper.

"_Mr. Conductor_.--Let not the death of Baretti pass unnoticed by 'The World,' seeing that Baretti was a wit if not a scholar: and had for five-and-thirty years at least lived in a foreign country, whose language he so made himself completely master of, that he could satirise its inhabitants in their own tongue, better than they knew how to defend themselves; and often pleased, without ever praising man or woman in book or conversation. Long supported by the private bounty of friends, he rather delighted to insult than flatter; he at length obtained competence from a public he esteemed not: and died, refusing that assistance he considered as useless--leaving no debts (but those of gratitude) undischarged; and expressing neither regret of the past, nor fear of the future, I believe. Strong in his prejudices, haughty and independent in his spirit, cruel in his anger,--even when unprovoked; vindictive to excess, if he through misconception supposed himself even slightly injured, pertinacious in his attacks, invincible in his aversions: the description of Menelaus in 'Homer's Iliad,' as rendered by Pope, exactly suits the character of Baretti:

"'So burns the vengeful Hornet, soul all o'er,
Repuls'd in vain, and thirsty still for gore;
Bold son of air and heat on angry wings,
Untamed, untired, he turns, attacks, and stings.'"

In reference to this article, she remarks in "Thraliana":

"There seems to be a language now appropriated to the newspapers, and a very wretched and unmeaning language it is. Yet a certain set of expressions are so necessary to please the diurnal readers, that when Johnson and I drew up an advertisement for charity once, I remember the people altered our expressions and substituted their own, with good effect too. The other day I sent a Character of Baretti to 'The World,' and read it two mornings after more altered than improved in my mind: but no matter: they will talk of _wielding_ a language, and of _barbarous_ infamy,--sad stuff, to be sure, but such is the taste of the times. They altered even my quotation from Pope; but that was too impudent."

The comparison of Baretti to the hornet was truer than she anticipated: _animamque in vulnere ponit_. Internal evidence leads almost irresistibly to the conclusion that he was the author or prompter of "The _Sentimental_ Mother: a Comedy in Five Acts. The Legacy of an Old Friend, and his 'Last Moral Lesson' to Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale, now Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi. London: Printed for James Ridgeway, York Street, St. James's Square, 1789. Price three shillings." The principal _dramatis personae_ are Mr. Timothy Tunskull (Thrale), Lady Fantasma Tunskull, two Misses Tunskull, and Signor Squalici.

Lady Fantasma is vain, affected, silly, and amorous to excess. Not satisfied with Squalici as her established gallant, she makes compromising advances to her daughter's lover on his way to a _tete-a-tete_ with the young lady, who takes her wonted place on his knee with his arm round her waist. Squalici is also a domestic spy, and in league with the mother to cheat the daughters of their patrimony. Mr. Tunskull is a respectable and complacent nonentity.

The dialogue is seasoned with the same malicious insinuations which mark Baretti's letters in the "European Magazine;" without the saving clause with which shame or fear induced him to qualify them, namely, that no breach of chastity was suspected or believed. It is difficult to imagine who else would have thought of reverting to Thrale's establishment eight years after it had been broken up by death; and in one of his papers in the "European Magazine," he holds out a threat that she might find herself the subject of a play: "Who knows but some one of our modern dramatic geniusses may hereafter entertain the public with a laughable comedy in five long acts, entitled, with singular propriety, 'the _Scientific_ Mother'?"

Mrs. Piozzi had some-how contracted a belief, to which she alludes more than once with unfeigned alarm, that Mr. Samuel Lysons had formed a collection of all the libels and caricatures of which she was the subject on the occasion of her marriage. His collections have been carefully examined, and the sole semblance of warrant for her fears is an album or scrap-book containing numerous extracts from the reviews and newspapers, relating to her books. The only caricature preserved in it is the celebrated one by Sayers entitled "Johnson's Ghost." The ghost, a flattering likeness of the doctor, addresses a pretty woman seated at a writing table:

"When Streatham spread its pleasant board,
I opened learning's valued hoard,
And as I feasted, prosed.
Good things I said, good things I eat,
I gave you knowledge for your meat,
And thought th' account was closed.

"If obligations still I owed,
You sold each item to the crowd,
I suffered by the tale.
For God's sake, Madam, let me rest,
No longer vex your _quondam_ guest,
I'll pay you for your ale."

When a prize was offered for the best address on the rebuilding of Drury Lane, Sheridan proposed an additional reward for one without a phoenix. Equally acceptable for its rarity would be a squib on Mrs. Piozzi without a reference to the brewery.

Her manuscript notes on the two volumes of Letters are numerous and important, comprising some curious fragments of autobiography, written on separate sheets of paper and pasted into the volumes opposite to the passages which they expand or explain. They would create an inconvenient break in the narrative if introduced here, and they are reserved for a separate section.

Her next literary labour is thus mentioned in "Thraliana":

"While Piozzi was gone to London I worked at my Travel Book, and wrote it in two months complete--but 'tis all to correct and copy over again. While my husband was away I wrote him these lines: he staid just a fortnight:

"I think I've worked exceeding hard
To finish five score pages.
I write you this upon a card,
In hopes you'll pay my wages.
The servants all get drunk or mad,
This heat their blood enrages,
But your return will make me glad,--
That hope one pain assuages.

"To shew more kindness, we defy
All nations and all ages,
And quite prefer your company
To all the seven sages.
Then hasten home, oh, haste away!
And lengthen not your stages;
We then will sing, and dance and play,
And quit awhile our cages."

She had now taken rank as a popular writer, and thought herself entitled to use corresponding language to her publisher:

"MR. CADELL,--Sir, this is a letter of business. I have finished the book of observations and reflections made in the course of my journey thro' France, Italy, and Germany, and if you have a mind to purchase the MS. I make you the first offer of it. Here, if complaints had any connection with business, I would invent a thousand, and they should be very kind ones too; but it is better to tell you the size and price of the book. My calculations bring it to a thousand pages of letter-press like Dr. Moore's; or you might print it in three small volumes, to go with the 'Anecdotes.' Be that as it will, the price, at a word (as the advertisers say of their horse), is 500 guineas and twelve copies to give away, though I will not, like them, warrant it free from blemishes. No creature has looked over the papers but Lord Huntingdon, and he likes them exceedingly. Direct your answer here, if you write immediately; if not, send the letter under cover to Mrs. Lewis, London Street, Reading, Berks; and believe me, dear Sir, your faithful humble servant,

"H. L. PIOZZI.

"Bennet Street, Bath,
Friday, Nov. 14th, 1788."

Whether these terms were accepted, does not appear; but in Dec. 1789 she published (Cadell and Strahan) "Observations and Reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany," in two volumes octavo of about 400 pages each. As happened to almost everything she did or wrote, this book, which she calls the "Travel-book," was by turns assailed with inveterate hostility and praised with animated zeal. It would seem that sustained calumny had seasoned her against the malevolence of criticism. On the passage in Johnson's letter to T. Warton, "I am little afraid for myself," her comment is: "That is just what I feel when insulted, not about literary though, but social quarrels. The others are not worth a thought." In "Thraliana," Dec. 30th, 1789, she writes: "I think my Observations and Reflexions in Italy, &c., have been, upon the whole, exceedingly well liked, and much read."

Walpole writes to Mrs. Carter, June 13th, 1789:

"I do not mean to misemploy much of your time, which I know is always passed in good works, and usefully. You have, therefore, probably not looked into Piozzi's Travels. I, who have been almost six weeks lying on a couch, have gone through them. It was said that Addison might have written his without going out of England. By the excessive vulgarisms so plentiful in these volumes, one might suppose the writer had never stirred out of the parish of St. Giles. Her Latin, French, and Italian, too, are so miserably spelt, that she had better have studied her own language before she floundered into other tongues. Her friends plead that she piques herself on writing as she talks: methinks, then, she should talk as she would write. There are many indiscretions too in her work of which she will perhaps be told though Baretti is dead."

Miss Seward, much to her credit, repeated to Mrs. Piozzi both the praise and the blame she had expressed to others. On December 21st, 1789, she writes:

"Suffer me now to speak to you of your highly ingenious, instructive, and entertaining publication; yet shall it be with the sincerity of friendship, rather than with the flourish of compliment. No work of the sort I ever read possesses, in an equal degree, the power of placing the reader in the scenes and amongst the people it describes. Wit, knowledge, and imagination illuminate its pages--but the infinite inequality of the style!--Permit me to acknowledge to you what I have acknowledged to others, that it excites my exhaustless wonder, that Mrs. Piozzi, the child of genius, the pupil of Johnson, should pollute, with the vulgarisms of unpolished conversation, her animated pages!--that, while she frequently displays her power of commanding the most chaste and beautiful style imaginable, she should generally use those inelegant, those strange _dids_, and _does_, and _thoughs_, and _toos_, which produce jerking angles, and stop-short abruptness, fatal at once to the grace and ease of the sentence;--which are, in language, what the rusty black silk handkerchief and the brass ring are upon the beautiful form of the Italian countess she mentions, arrayed in embroidery, and blazing in jewels."

Mrs. Piozzi's theory was that books should he written in the same colloquial and idiomatic language which is employed by cultivated persons in conversation, "Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;" and vulgar she certainly was not, although she sometimes indulged her fondness for familiarity too far. The period was unluckily chosen for carrying such a theory into practice; for Johnson's authority had discountenanced idiomatic writing, whilst many phrases and forms of speech, which would not be endured now, were tolerated in polite society.

The laws of spelling, too, were unfixed or vague, and those of pronunciation, which more or less affect spelling, still more so. "When," said Johnson, "I published the plan of my dictionary, Lord Chesterfield told me that the word _great_ should be pronounced so as to rhyme to _state_; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to _seat_, and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it _grait_. Now here were two men of the highest rank, one the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely." Mrs. Piozzi has written on the margin:--"Sir William was in the right." Two well-known couplets of Pope imply similar changes:--

"Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging that he ne'er obliged."

* * * * *

"Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea."

Within living memory, elderly people of quality, both in writing and conversation, stuck to Lunnun, Brummagem, and Cheyny (China). Charles Fox would not give up "Bour_dux_." Johnson pronounced "heard" _heerd_. In 1800 "flirtation" was deemed a vulgar word.[1] Lord Byron wrote _redde_ (for _read_, in the past tense), and Lord Dudley declined being helped to apple _tart_. When, therefore, we find Mrs. Piozzi using words or idioms rejected by modern taste or fastidiousness, we must not be too ready to accuse her of ignorance or vulgarity. I have commonly retained her original syntax, and her spelling, which frequently varies within a page.

[Footnote 1: "Those abstractions of different pairs from the rest of the society, which I must call 'flirtation,' spite of the vulgarity of the term."--_Journal kept during a Visit to Germany_ in 1799 and 1800. Edited by the Dean of Westminster (not published), p. 38.]

Two days afterwards, Walpole returns to the charge in a letter to Miss Berry, which is alone sufficient to prove the worthlessness of his literary judgments:--

"Read 'Sindbad the Sailor's Voyages,' and you will be sick of AEneas's. What woful invention were the nasty poultry that dunged on his dinner, and ships on fire turned into Nereids! A barn metamorphosed into a cascade in a pantomime is full as sublime an effort of genius.... I do not think the Sultaness's narratives very natural or very probable, but there is a wildness in them that captivates. However, if you could wade through two octavos of Dame Piozzi's _though's_ and _so's_ and _I trows_, and cannot listen to seven volumes of Scheherezade's narratives, I will sue for a divorce in foro Parnassi, and Boccalini shall be my proctor."

A single couplet of Gifford's was more damaging than all Walpole's petulance:

"See Thrale's grey widow with a satchel roam,
And bring in pomp laborious nothings home."[1]

[Footnote 1: "She, one evening, asked me abruptly if I did not remember the scurrilous lines in which she had been depicted by Gifford in his 'Baviad and Moeviad.' And, not waiting for my answer, for I was indeed too much embarrassed to give one quickly, she recited the verses in question, and added, 'how do you think "Thrale's grey widow" revenged herself? I contrived to get myself invited to meet him at supper at a friend's house, (I think she said in Pall Mall), soon after the publication of his poem, sate opposite to him, saw that he was "perplexed in the extreme;" and smiling, proposed a glass of wine as a libation to our future good fellowship. Gifford was sufficiently a man of the world to understand me, and nothing could be more courteous and entertaining than he was while we remained together.'"--_Piozziana_.]

This condemnatory verse is every way unjust. The nothings, or somethings, which form the staple of the book, are not laboured; and they are presented without the semblance of pomp or pretension. The Preface commences thus:

"I was made to observe at Rome some vestiges of an ancient custom very proper in those days. It was the parading of the street by a set of people called Preciae, who went some minutes before the Flamen Dialis, to bid the inhabitants leave work or play, and attend wholly to the procession; but if ill-omens prevented the pageants from passing, or if the occasion of the show was scarce deemed worthy its celebration, these Precise stood a chance of being ill-treated by the spectators. A prefatory introduction to a work like this can hope little better usage from the public than they had. It proclaims the approach of what has often passed by before; adorned most certainly with greater splendour, perhaps conducted with greater regularity and skill. Yet will I not despair of giving at least a momentary amusement to my countrymen in general; while their entertainment shall serve as a vehicle for conveying expressions of particular kindness to those foreign individuals, whose tenderness softened the sorrows of absence, and who eagerly endeavoured by unmerited attentions to supply the loss of their company, on whom nature and habit had given me stronger claims."

The Preface concludes with the happy remark that--"the labours of the press resemble those of the toilette: both should be attended to and finished with care; but once completed, should take up no more of our attention, unless we are disposed at evening to destroy all effect of our morning's study."

It would be difficult to name a book of travels in which anecdotes, observations, and reflections are more agreeably mingled, or one from which a clearer bird's-eye view of the external state of countries visited in rapid succession may be caught. I can only spare room for a few short extracts:

"The contradictions one meets with every moment at Paris likewise strike even a cursory observer,--a countess in a morning, her hair dressed, with diamonds too perhaps, a dirty black handkerchief about her neck, and a flat silver ring on her finger, like our ale-wives; a _femme publique_, dressed avowedly for the purposes of alluring the men, with a not very small crucifix hanging at her bosom;--and the Virgin Mary's sign at an ale-house door, with these words,

"'Je suis la mere de mon Dieu,
Et la gardienne de ce lieu.'"

"I have stolen a day to visit my old acquaintance the English Austin Nuns at the Foffee, and found the whole community alive and cheerful; they are many of them agreeable women, and having seen Dr. Johnson with me when I was last abroad, inquired much for him: Mrs, Fermor, the Prioress, niece to Belinda in the Rape of the Lock, taking occasion to tell me, comically enough, 'that she believed there was but little comfort to be found in a house that harboured _poets_; for that she remembered Mr. Pope's praise made her aunt very troublesome and conceited, while his numberless caprices would have employed ten servants to wait on him; and he gave one,' (said she) 'no amends by his talk neither, for he only sate dozing all day, when the sweet wine was out, and made his verses chiefly in the night; during which season he kept himself awake by drinking coffee, which it was one of the maids' business to make for him, and they took it by turns.'"

At Milan she institutes a delicate inquiry: "The women are not behind-hand in openness of confidence and comical sincerity. We have all heard much of Italian cicisbeism; I had a mind to know how matters really stood; and took the nearest way to information by asking a mighty beautiful and apparently artless young creature, _not noble_, how that affair was managed, for there is no harm done _I am sure_, said I: 'Why no,' replied she, 'no great _harm_ to be sure: except wearisome attentions from a man one cares little about; for my own part,' continued she, 'I detest the custom, as I happen to love my husband excessively, and desire nobody's company in the world but his. We are not _people of fashion_ though you know, nor at all rich; so how should we set fashions for our betters? They would only say, see how jealous he is! if _Mr. Such-a-one_ sat much with me at home, or went with me to the Corso; and I _must_ go with some gentleman you know: and the men are such ungenerous creatures, and have such ways with them: I want money often, and this _cavaliere servente_ pays the bills, and so the connection draws closer--_that's all_.' And your husband! said I--'Oh, why he likes to see me well dressed; he is very good-natured, and very charming; I love him to my heart.' And your confessor! cried I.--'Oh! why he is _used to it_'--in the Milanese dialect--_e assuefaa."_

"An English lady asked of an Italian
What were the actual and official duties
Of the strange thing, some women set a value on,
Which hovers oft about some married beauties,
Called 'cavalier servente,' a Pygmalion
Whose statues warm, I fear! too true 't is
Beneath his art. The dame, press'd to disclose them,
Said, Lady, I beseech you to _suppose them_."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Don Juan," Canto ix. See also "Beppo," verses 36, 37:

"But Heaven preserve Old England from such courses!
Or what becomes of damage and divorces?"]

At Venice, the tone was somewhat different from what would be employed now by the finest lady on the Grand Canal:

"This firmly-fixed idea of subordination (which I once heard a Venetian say, he believed must exist in heaven from one angel to another), accounts immediately for a little conversation which I am now going to relate.

"Here were two men taken up last week, one for murdering his fellow-servant in cold blood, while the undefended creature had the lemonade tray in his hand going in to serve company; the other for breaking the new lamps lately set up with intention to light this town in the manner of the streets at Paris. 'I hope,' said I, 'that they will hang the murderer.' 'I rather hope,' replied a very sensible lady who sate near me, 'that they will hang the person who broke the lamps: for,' added she, 'the first committed his crime only out of revenge, poor fellow!! because the other had got his mistress from him by treachery; but this creature has had the impudence to break our fine new lamps, all for the sake of spiting _the Arch-duke!!_' The Arch-duke meantime hangs nobody at all; but sets his prisoners to work upon the roads, public buildings, &c., where they labour in their chains; and where, strange to tell! they often insult passengers who refuse them alms when asked as they go by; and, stranger still, they are not punished for it when they do." ...

The lover sacrificing his reputation, his liberty, or his life, to save the fair fame of his mistress, is not an unusual event in fiction, whatever it may be in real life. Balzac, Charles de Bernard, and M. de Jarnac have each made a self-sacrifice of this kind the basis of a romance. But neither of them has hit upon a better plot than might be formed out of the following Venetian story:

"Some years ago then, perhaps a hundred, one of the many spies who ply this town by night, ran to the state inquisitor, with information that such a nobleman (naming him) had connections with the French ambassador, and went privately to his house every night at a certain hour. The _messergrando_, as they call him, could not believe, nor would proceed, without better and stronger proof, against a man for whom he had an intimate personal friendship, and on whose virtue he counted with very particular reliance. Another spy was therefore set, and brought back the same intelligence, adding the description of his disguise: on which the worthy magistrate put on his mask and bauta, and went out himself; when his eyes confirming the report of his informants, and the reflection on his duty stifling all remorse, he sent publicly for _Foscarini_ in the morning, whom the populace attended all weeping to his door.

"Nothing but resolute denial of the crime alleged could however be forced from the firm-minded citizen, who, sensible of the discovery, prepared for that punishment he knew to be inevitable, and submitted to the fate his friend was obliged to inflict: no less than a dungeon for life, that dungeon so horrible that I have heard Mr. Howard was not permitted to see it.

"The people lamented, but their lamentations were vain. The magistrate who condemned him never recovered the shock: but Foscarini was heard of no more, till an old lady died forty years after in Paris, whose last confession declared she was visited with amorous intentions by a nobleman of Venice whose name she never knew, while she resided there as companion to the ambassadress. So was Foscarini lost! so died he a martyr to love, and tenderness for female reputation!"

The Mendicanti was a Venetian institution which deserves to be commemorated for its singularity:

"Apropos to singing;--we were this evening carried to a well-known conservatory called the Mendicanti, who performed an oratorio in the church with great, and I dare say deserved applause. It was difficult for me to persuade myself that all the performers were women, till, watching carefully, our eyes convinced us, as they were but slightly grated. The sight of girls, however, handling the double bass, and blowing into the bassoon, did not much please _me_; and the deep-toned voice of her who sung the part of Saul seemed an odd unnatural thing enough.

"Well! these pretty sirens were delighted to seize upon us, and pressed our visit to their parlour with a sweetness that I know not who would have resisted. We had no such intent; and amply did their performance repay my curiosity for visiting Venetian beauties, so justly celebrated for their seducing manners and soft address. They accompanied their voices with the forte-piano, and sung a thousand buffo songs, with all that gay voluptuousness for which their country is renowned.

"The school, however, is running to ruin apace; and perhaps the conduct of the married women here may contribute to make such _conservatorios_ useless and neglected. When the Duchess of Montespan asked the famous Louison D'Arquien, by way of insult, as she pressed too near her, '_Comment alloit le metier_?' '_Depuis que les dames s'en melent_,' (replied the courtesan with no improper spirit,) '_il ne vaut plus rien_.'"

Describing Florence, she says:--

"Sir Horace Mann is sick and old; but there are conversations at his house of a Saturday evening, and sometimes a dinner, to which we have been almost always asked."

So much for Walpole's assertion that "she had broken with his Horace, because he could not invite her husband with the Italian nobility." She held her own, if she did not take the lead, in whatever society she happened to be thrown, and no one could have objected to Piozzi without breaking with her. In point of fact, no one did object to him.

One of her notes on Naples is:

"Well, well! if the Neapolitans do bury Christians like dogs, they make some singular compensations we will confess, by nursing dogs like Christians. A very veracious man informed me yester morning, that his poor wife was half broken-hearted at hearing such a Countess's dog was run over; 'for,' said he, 'having suckled the pretty creature herself, she loved it like one of her children.' I bid him repeat the circumstance, that no mistake might be made: he did so; but seeing me look shocked, or ashamed, or something he did not like,--'Why, Madam,' said the fellow, 'it is a common thing enough for ordinary men's wives to suckle the lap-dogs of ladies of quality:' adding, that they were paid for their milk, and he saw no harm in gratifying one's _superiors_. As I was disposed to see nothing _but_ harm in disputing with such a competitor, our conference finished soon; but the fact is certain."

On the margin she has written:

"Mrs. Greathead could scarcely be made to credit so hideous a fact, till I showed her the portrait (at a broker's shop) of a woman _suckling a cat_."

Cornelia Knight says: "Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi passed the winter at Naples and gave little concerts. He played with great taste on the pianoforte, and used to carry about a miniature one in his carriage."

Whilst discussing the propriety of complying with the customs of the country, she relates:

"Poor Dr. Goldsmith said once--'I would advise every young fellow setting out in life _to love gravy_:'--and added, that he had formerly seen a glutton's eldest nephew disinherited, because his uncle never could persuade him to say he liked gravy."

Mr. Forster thinks that the concluding anecdote conveys a false impression of one

"Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll."

"Mrs. Piozzi, in her travels, quite solemnly sets forth that poor Dr. Goldsmith said once, 'I would advise every young fellow setting forth in life to love gravy,' alleging for it the serious reason that 'he had formerly seen a glutton's eldest nephew disinherited because his uncle never could persuade him to say he liked gravy.' Imagine the dullness that would convert a jocose saying of this kind into an unconscious utterance of grave absurdity."[1] In his index may be read: "Mrs. Piozzi's absurd instance of Goldsmith's absurdity." Mrs. Piozzi does not quote the saying as an instance of absurdity; nor set it forth solemnly. She repeats it, as an illustration of her argument, in the same semi-serious spirit in which it was originally hazarded. Sydney Smith took a different view of this grave gravy question. On a young lady's declining gravy, he exclaimed: "I have been looking all my life for a person who, on principle, rejected gravy: let us vow eternal friendship."

[Footnote 1: Life of Goldsmith, vol. ii. p. 205. Mr. Forster allows her the credit of discovering the lurking irony in Goldsmith's verses on Cumberland, vol. ii. p. 203.]

The "British Synonymy" appeared in 1794. It was thus assailed by Gifford:

"Though 'no one better knows his own house' than I the vanity of this woman; yet the idea of her undertaking such a work had never entered my head; and I was thunderstruck when I first saw it announced. To execute it with any tolerable degree of success, required a rare combination of talents, among the least of which may be numbered neatness of style, acuteness of perception, and a more than common accuracy of discrimination; and Mrs. Piozzi brought to the task, a jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter incapability of defining a single term in the language, and just as much Latin from a child's Syntax, as sufficed to expose the ignorance she so anxiously labours to conceal. 'If such a one be fit to write on Synonimes, speak.' Pignotti himself laughs in his sleeve; and his countrymen, long since undeceived, prize the lady's talents at their true worth,

"Et centum Tales[1] curto centusse licentur."

[Footnote 1: Quere Thrales?--_Printer's Devil_."]

Other critics have been more lenient or more just. Enough philosophical knowledge and acuteness were discovered in the work to originate a rumour that she had retained some of the great lexicographer's manuscripts, or derived a posthumous advantage, in some shape, from her former intimacy with him. In "Thraliana," Denbigh, 2nd January, 1795, she writes:

"My 'Synonimes' have been reviewed at last. The critics are all civil for aught I see, and nearly just, except when they say that Johnson left some fragments of a work upon Synonymy: of which God knows I never heard till now one syllable; never had he and I, in all the time we lived together, any conversation upon the subject."

Even Walpole admits that it has some marked and peculiar merits, although its value consists rather in the illustrative matter, than in the definitions and etymologies. Thus, in distinguishing between _lavish_, _profuse_ and _prodigal_, she relates:

"Two gentlemen were walking leisurely up the Hay-Market some time in the year 1749, lamenting the fate of the famous Cuzzona, an actress who some time before had been in high vogue, but was then as they heard in a very pitiable situation. 'Let us go and visit her,' said one of them, 'she lives but over the way.' The other consented; and calling at the door, they were shown up stairs, but found the faded beauty dull and spiritless, unable or unwilling to converse on any subject. 'How's this?' cried one of her consolers, 'are you ill? or is it but low spirits chains your tongue so?'--'Neither,' replied she: ''tis hunger I suppose. I ate nothing yesterday, and now 'tis past six o'clock, and not one penny have I in the world to buy me any food.'--'Come with us instantly to a tavern; we will treat you with the best roast fowls and Port wine that London can produce.'--'But I will have neither my dinner nor my place of eating it prescribed to _me_,' answered Cuzzona, in a sharper tone, 'else I need never have wanted.' 'Forgive me,' cries the friend; 'do your own way; but eat in the name of God, and restore fainting nature.'--She thanked him then; and, calling to her a friendly wretch who inhabited the same theatre of misery, gave _him_ the guinea the visitor accompanied his last words with; 'and run with this money,' said she, 'to such a wine-merchant,' (naming him); 'he is the only one keeps good Tokay by him. 'Tis a guinea a bottle, mind you,' to the boy; 'and bid the gentleman you buy it of give you a loaf into the bargain,--he won't refuse.' In half an hour or less the lad returned with the Tokay. 'But where,' cries Cuzzona, 'is the loaf I spoke for?' 'The merchant would give me no loaf,' replies her messenger; 'he drove me from the door, and asked if I took him for a baker.' 'Blockhead!' exclaims she; 'why I must have bread to my wine, you know, and I have not a penny to purchase any. Go beg me a loaf directly.' The fellow returns once more with one in his hand and a halfpenny, telling 'em the gentleman threw him three, and laughed at his impudence. She gave her Mercury the money, broke the bread into a wash-hand basin which stood near, poured the Tokay over it, and devoured the whole with eagerness. This was indeed a heroine in PROFUSION. Some active well-wishers procured her a benefit after this; she gained about 350_l_., 'tis said, and laid out two hundred of the money instantly in a _shell-cap_. They wore such things then."