Chapter XII: Part 12

Her taste for reading never left her or abated to the last. In reference to a remark (in Boswell) on the irksomeness of books to people of advanced age, she writes: "Not to me at eighty years old: being grieved that year (1819) particularly, I was forced upon study to relieve my mind, and it had the due effect. I wrote this note in 1820."

She sometimes gives anecdotes of authors. Thus, in the letter just quoted, she says: "Lord Byron protests his wife was a fortune without money, a belle without beauty, and a blue-stocking without either wit or learning." But her literary information grew scanty as she grew old: "The literary world (she writes in 1821) is to me terra incognita, far more deserving of the name, now Parry and Ross are returned, than any part of the polar regions:" and her opinions of the rising authors are principally valuable as indications of the obstacles which budding reputations must overcome. "Pindar's fine remark respecting the different effects of music on different characters, holds equally true of genius: so many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognises it as a projected form of his own being, that moves before him with a glory round its head, or recoils from it as a spectre."[1] The octogenarian critic of the Johnsonian school recoils from "Frankenstein" as from an incarnation of the Evil Spirit: she does not know what to make of the "Tales of my Landlord"; and she inquires of an Irish acquaintance whether she retained recollection enough of her own country to be entertained with "that strange caricature, Castle Rack Rent." Contemporary judgments such as these (not more extravagant than Horace Walpole's) are to the historian of literature what fossil remains are to the geologist.

[Footnote 1: Coleridge, "Aids to Reflection."]

Although perhaps no biographical sketch was ever executed, as a labour of love, without an occasional attack of what Lord Macaulay calls the _Lues Boswelliana_ or fever of admiration, I hope it is unnecessary for me to say that I am not setting up Mrs. Piozzi as a model letter-writer, or an eminent author, or a pattern of the domestic virtues, or a fitting object of hero or heroine worship in any capacity. All I venture to maintain is, that her life and character, if only for the sake of the "associate forms," deserve to be vindicated against unjust reproach, and that she has written many things which are worth snatching from oblivion or preserving from decay.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

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