by paralysis on the early morning of June 17th, 1783. It was a strange impulse which made him, within a few hours of his visitation, write an elaborate and eloquent account of it to Mrs. Thrale; and this was followed up for some time by a regular diary of his disease addressed to her. Her replies amused him, and she, in her bitter solitude, accepted his lectures in a humbled spirit, and was "obliged, consoled, and delighted" by them. "You are now retired," Johnson tells her, "and have nothing to impede self-examination or self-improvement. Endeavor to reform that instability of attention which your last letter has happened to betray." Oh, soul of Quintilian! Here was stuff for your copybook headings, with a vengeance!

Mrs. Thrale's miserable life during the year 1783, at Bath, was varied by a visit to Weymouth in the autumn, illnesses of her children in the winter, and correspondences with Dr. Johnson and Miss Burney. The last was in some sort her confidante; to her she could speak of her sufferings and their cause, and the two ladies regretted that they lived so far apart. Mrs. Thrale's daughters were now growing up about her, a bevy of proud, handsome girls, with fortunes of their own, and no little ambition of a small kind. "I have read to them," she tells Miss Burney in March 1784, "the Bible from beginning to end; the Roman and English histories; Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, and Young's works, from head to heel; Warton and Johnson's criticisms on the poets; besides a complete system of dramatic writing; and the classics-I mean English classics they are most perfectly acquainted with. Such works of Voltaire, too, as were not dangerous, we have worked at; Rollin des Belles Lettres, and a hundred more. But my best powers are past; and I think I must look out a lady to supply my deficiency to attend them, if they should like a jaunt next summer or so; for I will not quit Bath!" Here at least she had her physicians about her, who knew how ill she was, and would do their best not to let her die; but of what other friends could she say as much? Her children's utter lack of sympathy with her, and Dr. Johnson's flagrant egotism, at length exasperated the poor lady into something like vigor of speech. "You

tell one of my daughters," she wrote to Johnson, "that you know not with distinctness the cause of my complaints. I believe she, who lives with me, knows it no better." The lady then scolds him roundly, and in English as eloquent as his own. "It is kind in you to quarrel no more," she says, "about expressions which were not meant to offend; but unjust to suppose I have not lately thought myself dying. thought myself dying. Let us, however, take the Prince of Abyssinia's advice, and not add to the other evils of life the bitterness of controversy. . . . All this," she continues, relenting again, "is not written by a person in high health and happiness, but by a fellowsufferer, who has more to endure than she can tell or you can guess; and now let us talk of the Severn salmons, which will be coming in soon: I shall send you one of the finest, and shall be glad to hear that your appetite is good." The lady did not forget her promise, and three weeks later Dr. Johnson wrote: "The Hooles, Miss Burney, and Mrs. Hull (Wesley's sister), feasted yesterday with me very cheerfully on your noble salmon. Mr. Allen could not come, but I sent him a piece, and a great tail is still left."

While Dr. Johnson was enjoying an interval of comparative good health among his London friends, Mrs. Thrale was becoming each day more ill and more unhappy; until at length her good physician, taking the matter into his own hands, informed her daughters that he must write to Signor Piozzi concerning their mother's health. Piozzi, who was living in Milan, received Dr. Dobson's welcome epistle; and in eleven days he was at her side. In the meantime Mrs. Thrale had made up her mind to be broken-hearted no more. The guardians whom Mr. Thrale had placed over her children were formally acquainted with the fact; and that the three eldest, having heard that Mr. Piozzi was coming back from Italy, had left Bath for their own house at "Brighthelmstone." But Dr. Johnson received, in addition to the "circular," the following letter :

concealing from you a connexion which you must have heard of by many, but I suppose never believed. Indeed, my dear sir, it was concealed only to save us both needless pain; I could not have borne to reject that counsel it would have killed me to take, and I only tell it you now because all is irrevocably settled and out of your power to prevent. I will say, however, that the dread of your disapprobation has given me some anxious moments; and, though perhaps I am become by many privations the most independent woman in the world, I feel as if acting without a parent's consent till you write kindly to

"Your faithful servant."

This was Dr. Johnson's reply :—

MADAM,-If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married: if it is yet undone, let us once more talk together. If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame and your country, may your folly do no further mischief. If the last act is yet to do, I who have loved you, esteemed you, reverenced you, and served you, I who long thought you the first of womankind, entreat that, before your fate is irrevocable, I may once more see you. I was, I once was, madam, most truly yours,

July 2, 1784.

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SAM. JOHNSON.

'I will come down if you permit it." Mrs. Thrale lost no time, but despatched a letter by the coach, "the more speedily and effectually to prevent " the Doctor's visit. She was very angry now, and bid him rather a fiery farewell. The next post brought to her a softer missive, one more sigh of tenderness, perhaps useless, but at least sincere." Her old irascible friend did not forget, he told her, in this moment of final separation, "the kindness which had soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched." His last advice was, however, that she should induce Mr. Piozzi to settle in England, "where her fortune would be more under her own eye;" his last peroration enforcing that advice was an eloquent allusion to the story of Queen Mary, who had crossed the fatal Solway in spite of a similar warning, and-suffered for it.

The marriage which all the world was execrating was solemnised at Bath on July 25, 1784, and in a few weeks the Piozzis were on their way to Italy. Here, among her husband's own people and friends, Mrs. Piozzi found him popular and respected, while the proud Lombardians were at first disposed to doubt whether his wife whom he had brought to visit them could be a gentlewoman by

birth, since her first husband was a brewer! The travellers were feasted When and honored wherever they went. dukes, duchesses, marquises d'Araciel, and princes of Sisterna showered kindness on her for Piozzi's sake, Mrs. Piozzi took good care to let her English friends hear of it. "Here's honor and glory for you!" she wrote home, in the joy of her heart. But it was not long before she had forgiven her enemies. To her children she lost no opportunity of sending presents and letters; and on December 7th, 1784, she wrote to a young law student Samuel Lysons, afterwards Keeper of the Tower Records: "Do not neglect Dr. Johnson; you will never see any other mortal so wise or so good. I keep his picture in my chamber, and his works on my chimney." A week later, and her old friend had breathed his last in his dingy home in Fleet Street, London. No sooner was the event known, and the old philosopher at rest under the stones of Westminster Abbey, than the printers were busy issuing "Anecdotes." Everybody who had a story of the dead. lion was in a hurry to tell it; and of course Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi were looked to by all the world for the largest and most interesting collections. Her Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, during the Last Twenty Years of his Life, were written in Italy immediately after the news of his death reached her, shipped off to England from Leghorn, and published in London in 1786, young Samuel Lysons making her bargain for her with Mr. Cadell the publisher. "Judge my transport and my husband's," she wrote nearly thirty years afterwards, "when at Rome we received letters saying the book was bought with such avidity that Cadell had not one copy left when the King sent for it at ten o'clock at night, and he was forced to beg one from a friend to supply his Majesty's impatience, who sate up all night reading it." Boswell, who was preparing his "pyramid,' as he called his Life of Johnson, was outraged at this sudden flare of feminine popularity, and strove to undermine his rival's position by accusing her of inaccuracy and untruth. His efforts were in vain. The whole of the first impression of her little book was sold on the first day it was published; 300l. were lying ready for her in her publisher's hands;

and her "Anecdotes" were the gossip of the whole town, although Walpole sneered at them, Hannah More yawned, and Peter Pindar grew funny.

During their residence in Italy, the Piozzis visited Salzburg in Bavaria, the ancient seat of the little Welshwoman's race; and the heralds there, examining her schedule," acknowledged her, "to the triumphant delight of dear Piozzi," a true descendant of their own Prince Adam. Mrs. Piozzi, though this was perhaps no great feather in her cap, shone with some éclat among the stars of the Della Crusca Academy in Florence, and wrote a preface to their "Miscellany" of verses, which Walpole called "short, sensible, and genteel." On their return to London in 1787, Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi lived first in Hanover Square, and afterwards at her old home at Streatham Park. In the meantime her children had become partially reconciled to their Italian stepfather; and Cecilia, the youngest, afterwards Mrs. Mostyn, remained constantly resident with her mother. Mrs. Piozzi's old friends discovered by degrees that her marriage was after all no very dire misfortune to her or to them. Her dinners were as good as formerly, and her drawing-room was as much as ever the resort of notables and eccentrics. After a few years, Piozzi, having become enraptured during a tour with the scenery of North Wales, built an Italian villa on the banks of the Clwydd, near to his wife's ruined mansion of Bachygraig, to which they gave the pretty hybrid name of Brynbella; and to this spot he and his wife retired in 1795. The French war in Italy in 1799 having involved Piozzi's relations in great difficulties, Mrs. Piozzi rescued from the general wreck a nephew of her husband, whom his parents had christened John Salusbury, after herself. The little Lombardian, with recollections in his baby head of bloody scenes in fighting cities, was brought to England; and Mrs. Piozzi adopted him as her heir. When he was old enough, she placed him at the school where her own son Henry Thrale had conned his Latin grammar some thirty years before; and the young Salusbury-Piozzi was reared by Henry's mother with exceptional tenderness and care.

Mr. Pozzi died at Brynbella in 1809,

and was buried at the little church there. Legends of the courteous Italian linger in the neighborhood-of his broken English, and gentle, kindly manners. A portrait of him is preserved among the family pictures at Brynbella, which represents him as good-looking, about forty years old, in a straight-cut brown coat, with frill and ruffles, and some leaves of music in his hand; and one wing of the Italian villa which he built is still said to be haunted by the sounds of his violin. During his life Mr. Piozzi had attended with much prudence and economy to the somewhat confused money-matters of his little wife. He had steered her safely through her debts; and at his death he left her mistress of everything he possessed, except a few thousands which he had saved before their narriage, and which he bequeathed to his relatives in Italy.

The loss of her husband left Mrs. Piozzi once more solitary in the world; but no sorrow, not even the greatest sorrow of remembering happier things, could quench now the sunshine which filled her life. During the twelve years which remained for her, we see her, in her letters, and in the records of her friends, still happy, still triumphant, still supremely satisfied. For her, old age was no uglier, no sadder, than a plucked flower that lies doomed and sweet in the sunlight. She had had her full share of earthly joy, and the brightest day in her calendar was ever the anniversary of her second marriage. “No, my dear sir," she wrote to a friend from Bath in 1817, "I will not stir from home till after the 25th of July, which day made me happy thirty-three years ago, after the suffering so many sorrows; and here will I keep its beloved anniversary, always remembering

"St. James's Church and St. James's Day, And good Mr. James that gave me away." Until 1814 she had continued to live at Brynbella, visiting occasionally both Bath and Streatham. But at this date young Salusbury left the university and married, and Mrs. Piozzi very generously relinquished to him and his young wife her little Welsh estate and its revenue. To compensate her daughters for their loss of it, she set to work to improve Streatham Park, which they would in

nish winter of 1820-1 was exceptionally severe, and the poor little lady found it hard to maintain her cheerful mood. "Conway," she wrote to a friend, " is in high favor at Bath, the papers say; so indeed do private letters. That young man's value will be one day properly appreciated; and then you and I will be found to have been quite right all along." On her way homewards to Bath in the spring of 1821, Mrs. Piozzi met with an accident. Recovered from this, she reached Clifton, where an attack of illness overtook her; and she died there, after very little suffering, on May 2nd, 1821. To her nephew, Sir John Salusbury-Piozzi Salusbury, she left her Welsh cstates, and all that she possessed, with the request to her executors that they would be careful to transmit her body, wheresoever she might die, to the vault constructed for their remains by her second husband, Gabriel Piozzi, in Dymerchion Church, Flintshire. And accordingly this last act completed the story of a long and not too happy life. Her three daughters, Lady Keith, Mrs. Hoare, and Miss Thrale, summoned at the last, were round her dying bed. By her written wish the portrait of her mother by Zoffany was given to Lady Keith, who alone of her family could remember her; and that of Mr. Thrale was given to the one daughter who still bore his name. Two days before her death she had sent the actor Conway a draught for 100.; which he, like an honest man, returned to her executors. The act speaks warmly in his favor, and one is sorry that he was not quite so great a genius as his warm-hearted patroness believed him to be.

herit at her death, and landed herself by this means in new and serious money difficulties. Nevertheless she jogged on, as light-hearted as ever, in her Bath lodging, with her two maids, and with a drawing of Brynbella over her chimneypiece-often, in spite of her 2,000l. a year, without 57. of ready money to spend on herself. She almost rejoiced in her self-imposed poverty. When bills were thronging in upon her every hour, she told a friend that a certain heavy account for expenses concerning her nephew's marriage had just been sent in from a solicitor, and added, "I call that the felicity bill." Her devotion to Piozzi's nephew was not ill rewarded. He was made sheriff of his county, and knighted in 1817; and he and his wife were uniformly dutiful and kind to their benefactress, and at least added no one pang to those she had previously suffered. In 1819 Tom Moore visited Mrs. Piozzi, and found her "a wonderful old lady." Faces of other times," he wrote, “seemed to crowd over her as she sat, the Johnsons, Reynoldses, &c., &c. Though turned eighty, she has all the quickness and intelligence of a gay young woman." It was about this time that she became acquainted with the young actor, Conway, and interested herself so enthusiastically in his fortunes that people laughed at her, and said she was in love again. Her eightieth birthday, Jan. 27, 1820, was made the occasion of a brilliant fête at Bath, to which the Salusburys from Wales, and friends from all parts of the island, gladly flocked. A concert and supper to between six and seven hundred guests, in the public rooms of Bath, commenced the proceedings; and she led off the ball herself at two in the morning with her adopted son Sir John Salusbury, dancing, said those who were present, with astonishing elasticity and true dignity.

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The autumn and winter of that year were spent quietly at Penzance, where she had been told the blasts of winter never came. There she whiled away what she called "six months of exile," looking out over the sea, observing Cornish human nature, with its adjuncts vegetable and mineral, writing witty anecdotic letters to her absent friends, and longing to return with the swallows to her own beloved Bath. But that Cor

He drowned himself in 1828. Among his books was found a copy of the folio edition of Young's Night Thoughts, in which he had made a note that it was presented to him by his " dearly attached friend, the celebrated Mrs. Piozzi."

Of Dr. Johnson it may be said that his personality and talk were more memorable than anything he ever wrote, and the same is true of his friend Mrs. Piozzi. Her "Anecdotes" were popular, but they scarcely deserve to be mentioned in the same category with Boswell's splendidly full and compactly arranged "Life." Her British Synonymy; or, An Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation, published in 1794, was a compendium of bright table-talk

and anecdote; but its pretentious name put the critics and Gifford out of temper. The Retrospection; or, A Review of the most Striking and Important Events, Characters, Situations and their Consequences, which the last Eighteen Hundred Years have Presented to the View of Mankind, was published, in two quarto volumes, in 1801, and consists of rather more than a thousand pages. "It would," says Mr. Hayward in his interesting account of her life and writings, "have required the united powers and acquirements of Raleigh, Burke, Gibbon, and Voltaire to fill so vast a canvas with appropriate groups and figures." She was indeed too ambitious; and we have to fall back on her letters and what we know of her life, that we may once more understand and believe in her genius and good sense.

Mrs. Piozzi's verdict concerning her own personal appearance was a severe one. "No," she used to say, "I never was handsome; I had always too many strong points in my face for beauty.' And she would boast that she owed her "vigorous black manuscript" to her large and too muscularly built hand. Boswell called her "short, plump, and brisk;" but Dr. Burney was more polite when in 1782 he included among his lady "wits,"

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"Thrale, in whose expressive eyes
Sits a soul above disguise."

The little half-length miniature of her painted in Bath in 1817, in a closely fitting dress and hat very nearly resembling the present fashion, represents her as small, well built, with features finely cut, and a clear brave glance in the eyes. It was impossible that she should have lived for so many of her best years in the society of Dr. Johnson without retaining through life many of the results of that companionship. Few women among her younger contemporaries could

vie with her in extensive reading and retentive memory, or in readiness of wit. Dr. Johnson had taught her to hate cant; and her honesty both in speech and action was among her most striking characteristics. But he failed utterly to hem her mind round with the prejudices and perversities which beset his own. Her "piety" was less sententious, less methodical; but her charity was undoubtedly of a better sort.

Her sweet temper, also, her vivacity and unselfishness, increased as she grew old; and her last years contrasted most remarkably in this particular with Dr. Johnson's gloomy and hypochondriacal decay. Some of our contemporaries can remember her as far back as 1813—a kind little old lady, who used to walk in her garden on Streatham Common and hand cakes through her park palings to fairhaired little boys. When the oft-recurring birthday reminded her how old she and the world were growing, she welcomed it with a good grace. "My jour de naissance is coming round in a few days now," she wrote in 1816, and quoted some pretty lines of Pope, adding, “ Yet I will not, like Dr. Johnson, quarrel with my birthday." On the seventy-sixth anniversary, she wrote gaily to her kind friend Sir James Fellowes, about the new fashions that were deforming the world, and added, "Do not suffer yourself to be too sorry that I am so near out of it." Three years before her death she was quoting in a letter to the same friend some verses of Cowley upon the old sad subject; and this was her brave comment:-" Meanwhile, let us die but once, and not double the pang by cowardice, or poison the dart by wilful sin, but meet the hour with at least as much deference to God's will as every Turk shows to that of the Grand Signior. 'It is the Sultan's pleasure,' says he, and so ends. the matter, here's my head.'”—Macmillan's Magazine.

THE philosophy which is set before young minds in copy-books is generally expressed with a stern absoluteness which gives it a special character of its own amongst the elements of teaching. The attention of the copier is rarely distracted

from the beauty of the writing by any competitive beauty in the form of the thought set forth in it: that thought is usually stripped stark naked, as if it were on the point of tubbing; not only are no clothes allowed to it, but it is, further