Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 by Various

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All the world of readers know the main incidents of Mrs. Thrale's life.
Her own books, Boswell, Madame d'Arblay, have made us almost as familiar
with her as with Dr. Johnson himself. Not yet have people got tired of
wondering at her marriage with Piozzi, or of amusing themselves with
the gossip of the old lady who remained a wit at eighty years old, and,
having outlived her great contemporaries, was happy in not outliving
her own faculties. Few characters not more remarkable have been more
discussed than hers. Macaulay, with characteristic unfairness, gave
a view of her conduct which Mr. Hayward, in his recently published
entertaining volumes,[A] shows to have been in great part the invention
of the great essayist's lively and unprincipled imagination. In the
autobiographical memorials of Mrs. Piozzi, now for the first time
printed, there is much that throws light on her life, and her relations
with her contemporaries. They do not so much raise one's respect for
her, as present her to us as a very natural and generally likable sort
of woman, even in those acts of her life which have been the most
blamed.

[Footnote A: _Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs.
Piozzi (Thrale)_. Edited, with Notes and an Introductory Account of her
Life and Writings, by A. Hayward, Esq., Q.C. In Two Volumes. London,
1861. Reprinted by Ticknor & Fields.]

If she had but died while she was mistress of Streatham, we should have
only delightful recollections of her. She would have been one of the
most agreeable famous women on record. But the last forty years of her
life were not as charming as the first. Her weaknesses gained mastery
over her, her vanity led her into follies, and she who had once been the
favorite correspondent of Dr. Johnson now appears as the correspondent
of such inferior persona that no association is connected with their
names. Mrs. Thrale and Mrs. Piozzi are two different persons. One
belongs to Streatham, the other to Bath; one is "always young and always
pretty," the other a rouged old woman. But it is unfair to push the
contrast too far. Mrs. Piozzi at seventy or eighty was as sprightly,
as good-natured, as Mrs. Thrale at thirty or forty. She never lost her
vivacity, never her desire to please. But it is a sadly different thing
to please Dr. Johnson, Burke, or Sir Joshua, and to please

Those real genuine no-mistake Tom Thumbs,
The little people fed on great men's crumbs.

One of the most marked and least satisfactory expressions of Mrs.
Piozzi's character during her later years was a fancy that she took to
Conway, a young and handsome actor, who appeared in Bath, where she was
then living, in the year 1819. From the time of her first acquaintance
with him, till her death, in 1821, she treated him with the most
flattering regard,--with an affection, indeed, that might be called
motherly, had there not been in it an element of excitement which was
neither maternal nor dignified. Conway was a gentleman in feeling, and
seems to have had not only a grateful sense of the old lady's partiality
for him, but a sincere interest also in hearing from her of the days and
the friends of her youth. So she wrote letters to him, gave him books
filled with annotations, (it was a favorite habit of hers to write notes
on the margins of books,) wrote for him the story of her life, and drew
on the resources of her marvellous memory for his amusement. The old
woman's kindness was one of the few bright things in poor Conway's
unhappy life. His temperament was morbidly sensitive; and when, in 1821,
while acting in London, Theodore Hook attacked him in the most cruel
and offensive manner in the columns of the "John Bull," he threw up his
engagement, determined to act no more in London, and for a time left the
stage. A year or two afterwards he came to this country, and met with a
very considerable success. But he fancied himself underrated, and, after
performing in Philadelphia in the winter of 1826, he took passage for
Charleston, and on the voyage threw himself overboard and was lost. His
effects were afterwards sold by auction in New York. Among them were
many interesting relics and memorials of Mrs. Piozzi. Mr. Hayward
mentions "a copy of the folio edition of Young's 'Night Thoughts,' in
which he had made a note of its having been presented to him by his
'dearly attached friend, the celebrated Mrs. Piozzi.'" But there were
other books of far greater interest and value than this. There was, as
we have been informed, a copy of Malone's Shakspeare, with numerous
notes in the handwriting of Dr. Johnson,--and a copy of "Prayers and
Meditations by Samuel Johnson," with several additional manuscript
prayers, and Mrs. Piozzi's name upon one of the fly-leaves. But more
curious still was a copy of Mrs. Piozzi's "Journey through France,
Italy, and Germany," both volumes of which are full of marginal notes,
while, inserted at the beginning and the end, are many pages of Mrs.
Piozzi's beautifully written manuscript, containing a narrative and
anecdotes of portions of her life. These volumes now lie before us,[B]
and their unpublished contents are as lively, as entertaining, and as
rich in autobiographic illustration, as any of the material of which Mr.
Hayward's recent book is composed.

[Footnote B: This unique copy of the _Journey through France_, etc., is
in the possession of Mr. Duncan C. Pell, of Newport, R.I. It is to his
liberality that we are indebted for the privilege of laying before
the readers of the Atlantic the following portions of Mrs. Piozzi's
manuscript.]

On the first fly-leaf is the following inscription:--

"These Books do not in any wise belong to me; they are the property of
William Augustus Conway, Esq., who left them to my care, for purpose of
putting notes, when he quitted Bath, May 14, 1819.

"Hester Lynch Piozzi writes this for fear lest her death happening
before his return, these books might be confounded among the others in
her study."

On the next page the narrative begins, and with a truly astonishing
spirit for the writing of a woman in her eightieth year. Her old
vivacity is still natural to her; there is nothing forced in the
pleasantry of this introduction.

"A Lady once--'t was many years ago--asked me to lend her a book out
of my library at Streatham Park. 'A book of entertainment,' said J, 'of
course.' 'That I don't know or rightly comprehend;' was her odd answer;
'I wish for an _Abridgment_.' 'An Abridgment of what?' '_That_,' she
replied, 'you must tell _me_, my Dear; for I am no reader, like you and
Dr. Johnson; I only remember that the last book I read was very pretty,
and my husband called it an Abridgment.'.... And if I give some account
of myself here in these few little sheets prefixed to my 'Journey thro'
Italy,' you must kindly accept

"The Abridgment."

The first pages of the manuscript are occupied by Mrs. Piozzi with an
account of her family and of her own early life. They contain in brief
the same narrative that she gave in her "Autobiographical Memoirs,"
printed by Mr. Hayward, in his first volume. Here is a story, however,
which we do not remember to have seen before.

"My heart was free, my head full of Authors, Actors, Literature in every
shape; and I had a dear, dear friend, an old Dr. Collier, who said he
was sixty-six years old, I remember, the day I was sixteen, and whose
instructions I prized beyond all the gayeties of early life: nor have I
ever passed a day since we parted in which I have not recollected with
gratitude the boundless obligations that I owe him. He was intimate with
the famous James Harris of Salisbury, Lord Malmesbury's father, of whom
you have heard how Charles Townshend said, when he took his seat in the
House of Commons,--'Who is this man?'--to his next neighbour;
'I never saw him before.' 'Who? Why, Harris the author, that wrote one
book about Grammar [so he did] and one about Virtue.' 'What does he come
here for?' replies Spanish Charles; 'he will find neither Grammar nor
Virtue _here_.' Well, my dear old Dr. Collier had much of both, and
delighted to shake the superflux of his full mind over mine, ready to
receive instruction conveyed with so much tender assiduity."

In both her autobiographies, the printed as well as the manuscript, Mrs.
Piozzi speaks in very cold and disparaging terms of her first husband,
Mr. Thrale. Her marriage with him had not been a love-match; but we
suspect that the long course of years had been unfavorable to his memory
in her recollection, and that the blame with which his friends visited
her second marriage, which was in all respects an affair of the heart,
produced in her a certain bitterness of feeling toward Mr. Thrale, as if
he had been the author of these reproaches. It is impossible to believe
that he was as indifferent to her as she represents, and that her
marriage with him was not moderately happy. Had it been otherwise,
however well appearances might have been kept up, Dr. Johnson could
hardly have been deceived concerning the truth, and would hardly have
ventured to write to her in his letter of consolation upon Mr. Thrale's
death in 1781,--

"He that has given you happiness in marriage, to a degree of which,
without personal knowledge, I should have thought the description
fabulous, can give you another mode of happiness as a mother."

One of her most decided intellectual characteristics was her
versatility, or, to give it a harder name, what Johnson called her
"instability of attention." Dulness was, in her code, the unpardonable
sin. Variety was the charm of life, and of books. She never dwelt long
on one idea. Her letters and her books are pieces of mosaic-work, the
bits of material being put together without any regular pattern, but
often with a pretty effect. Here is an illustration of her style.

"In a few years (our Letters tell the date) Johnson was introduced; and
now I must laugh at a ridiculous _Retrospection_. When I was a very
young wench, scarce twelve years old I trust, my notice was strongly
attracted by a Mountebank in some town we were passing through. 'What a
fine fellow!' said I; 'dear Papa, do ask him to dinner with us at our
inn!--or, at least, Merry Andrew, because he could tell us such _clever
stories of his master_.' My Father laughed sans intermission an hour by
the dial, as Jacques once at Motley.--Yet did dear Mr. Conway's fancy
for H.L.P.'s conversation grow up, at first, out of something not unlike
this, when, his high-polished mind and fervid imagination taking fire
from the tall Beacon bearing Dr. Johnson's fame above the clouds, he
thought some information might perhaps be gained by talk with the old
female who so long _carried coals to it_. She has told all, or nearly
all, she knew,--

'And like poor Andrew must advance,
Mean mimic of her master's dance;--
But similes, like songs in love,
Describing much, too little prove.'

"So now, leaving Prior's pretty verses, and leaving Dr. Johnson too, who
was himself severely censured for his rough criticism on a writer who
had pleased all in our Augustan age of Literature, poor H.L.P. turns
egotist at eighty, and tells her own adventures."

But the octogenarian egotist has something to tell about beside herself.
Here is a passage of interest to the student of Shakspearian localities,
and bearing on a matter in dispute from the days of Malone and Chalmers.

"For a long time, then,--or I thought it such,--my fate was bound up
with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark; the alley it
had occupied having been purchased and thrown down by Mr. Thrale to
make an opening before the windows of our dwelling-house. When it lay
desolate in a black heap of rubbish, my Mother, one day, in joke,
called it the Ruins of Palmyra; and after they had laid it down in a
grass-plot, Palmyra was the name it went by, I suppose, among the clerks
and servants of the brew-house; for when the Quaker Barclay bought the
whole, I read that name with wonder in the Writings."--"But there
were really curious remains of the old Globe Playhouse, which, though
hexagonal in form without, was round within, as circles contain more
space than other shapes, and Bees make their cells in hexagons only
because that figure best admits of junction. Before I quitted the
premises, however, I learned that Tarleton, the actor of those times,
was not buried at St. Saviour's, Southwark, as he wished, near Massinger
and Cower, but at Shoreditch Church. _He_ was the first of the
profession whose fame was high enough to have his portrait solicited for
to be set up as a Sign; and none but he and Garrick, I believe, ever
obtained that honour. Mr. Dance's picture of our friend David lives in a
copy now in Oxford St.,--the character, King Richard."

Somewhat more than three years after her first husband's death, Mrs.
Thrale, in spite of the opposition of her friends, the repugnance of
her daughters, and the sneers of society, married Piozzi. He was a poor
Italian gentleman, whose only fortune was in his voice and his musical
talent. He had been for some time an admired public singer in London and
Paris. There was nothing against him but the opinion of society. Mrs.
Thrale set this opinion at defiance: a rash thing for a woman to do, and
hardly an excusable one in her case; for she was aware that she would
thus alienate her daughters, and offend her best friends. But she was in
love with him; and though for a time she tried to struggle against her
passion, it finally prevailed over her prudence, her pride, and such
affections as she had for others. Her health suffered during
the struggle, the termination of which she thus narrates in her
"Abridgment." The account differs in some slight particulars from that
in her "Autobiographical Memoirs"; but a comparison between the two
serves rather to confirm than to impugn her general accuracy.

"I hoped," she says, "in defiance of probability, to live my sorrows
out, and marry the man of my choice. Health, however, began to give
way, as my Letters to Dr. Johnson testify; and when my kind physician,
Dobson, from Liverpool, found it in actual and positive danger,--'Now,'
said he, 'I have respected your delicacy long enough; tell me at once
who he is that holds _such_ a life in his power: for write to him I must
and will; it is my sacred duty.' 'Dear Sir,' said I, 'the difficulty
is to keep him at a distance. Speak to these cruel girls, if you will
speak.' 'One of whose lives your assiduous tenderness,' cried he,
'saved, with my little help, only a month ago!'--and ran up-stairs to
the ladies. 'We know,' was their reply, 'that she is fretting after a
fellow; but where he is--you may ask her--we know not.' 'He is at Milan,
with his friend the Marquis of Aracieli,' said I,--'from whom I had a
letter last week, requesting Piozzi's recall from banishment, as he
gallantly terms it, little conscious of what I suffer.' So we wrote; and
he returned on the eleventh day after receiving the letter. Meanwhile
my health mended, and I waited on the lasses to their own house at
Brighthelmstone, leaving Miss Nicholson, a favorite friend of theirs,
and all their intolerably insolent servants, with them. Piozzi's return
accelerated the recovery of your poor friend, and we married in both
Churches,--at St. James', Bath, on St. James' Day, 1784,--thirty-five
years ago now that I write this Abridgment. When we came to examine
Papers, however, our attorney, Greenland, discovered a _suppression_
of fifteen hundred pounds, which helped pay our debts, discharge the
mortgage, etc., as Piozzi, like Portia, permitted me not to sleep by his
side with an unquiet soul. He settled everything with his own money,
depended on God and my good constitution for our living long and happily
together,--and so we did, twenty-five years,--said change of scenery
would complete the cure, and carried me off in triumph, as he called
it, to shew his friends in Italy the foreign wife he had so long been
sighing for. 'Ah, Madam!' said the Marquis, when he first saluted me,
'we used to blame dear Piozzi;--now we envy him!'"

Of Mrs. Piozzi's journey on the Continent we shall speak in another
article. After a residence abroad of two years and a half, she and her
husband returned to London in March, 1787. Mrs. Piozzi had come home
determined to resume, if it were possible, her old place in society, and
to assert herself against the attacks of wits and newspapers, and the
coldness of old friends. She had been hardly and unfairly dealt with
by the public, in regard to her marriage. The appearance, during
her absence, of her volume of "Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson" had given
unfriendly critics an opportunity to pass harsh judgment upon her
literary merits, and had excited the jealousy of rival biographers
of the dead lion. Boswell, Hawkins, Baretti, Chalmers, Peter Pindar,
Gifford, Horace Walpole, all had their fling at her. Never was an
innocent woman in private life more unfeelingly abused, or her name
dragged before the public more wantonly, in squibs and satires, jests
and innuendoes. The women who transgress social conventionalities are
often treated as if they had violated the rules of morals. But she was
not to be put down in this way. Her temperament enabled her to escape
much of the pain which a more sensitive person would have suffered. She
hardened herself against the malice of her satirists; and in doing so,
her character underwent an essential change. She was truly happy with
Piozzi, and she preserved, by strength of will, an inexhaustible fund of
good spirits.

On first reaching London, "we drove," she writes in the Conway MSS., "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, etc. 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, etc., on, I think, the 22 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-humored, 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."

Poor old woman, who could thus write of her own daughters!--poor old
woman, who had not heart enough either to keep the love of her children
or to grieve for its loss! Cecilia was her fourth and youngest child,
and her story, as her mother tells it, may as well be finished here.
After speaking in her manuscript of a claim on some Oxfordshire
property, disputed by her daughters, she says, in words hard and cold
as steel,--"We threw it up, therefore, and contented ourselves with the
plague Cecilia gave us, who, by dint of intriguing lovers, teazed my
soul out before she was fifteen,--when she fortunately ran away,
jumping out of the window at Streatham Park, with Mr. Mostyn of
Segraid,--a young man to whom Sir Thomas Mostyn's title will go, if he
does not marry, but whose property, being much encumbered, made him no
match for Cecy and her forty thousand pounds; and we were censured
for not taking better care, and suffering her to wed a _Welsh_
gentleman,--object of ineffable contempt to the daughters of Mr. Thrale,
with whom she always held correspondence while living with us, who
indulged her in every expense and every folly,--although allowed only
one hundred and forty pounds per ann. on her account."

After two or three years spent in London, the Piozzis resided for some
time at Streatham,--how changed in mistress and in guests from the
Streatham of which Mrs. Thrale had been the presiding genius! But after
a while they removed to Wales, where, on an old family estate belonging
to Mrs. Piozzi, they built a house, and christened the place with the
queer Welsh-Italian compound name of Brynbella. "Mr. Piozzi built the
house for me, he said; my own old chateau, Bachygraig by name, tho' very
curious, was wholly uninhabitable; and we called the Italian villa he
set up as mine in the Vale of Cluid, North Wales, Brynbella, or the
beautiful brow, making the name half Welsh and half Italian, as we
were." Here they lived, with occasional visits to other places, during
the remainder of Piozzi's life. "Our head quarters were in Wales, where
dear Piozzi repaired my church, built a new vault for my old ancestors,
chose the place in it where he and I are to repose together..... He
lived some twenty-five years with me, however, but so punished with
Gout that we found Bath the best wintering-place for many, many
seasons.--Mrs. Siddons' last appearance there he witnessed, when she
played Calista to Dimond's Lothario, in which he looked _so_ like
Garrick it shocked us _all three_, I believe; for Garrick adored Mr.
Piozzi, and Siddons hated the little great man to her heart. Poor
Dimond! he was a well-bred, pleasing, worthy creature, and did the
honours of his own house and table with peculiar grace indeed. No
likeness in private life or manner,--none at all; no wit, no fun, no
frolic humour had Mr. Dimond:--no grace, no dignity, no real unaffected
elegance of mien or behaviour had his predecessor, David,--whose
partiality to my fastidious husband was for that reason never returned.
Merriment, difficult for _him_ to comprehend, made no amends for the
want of that which no one understood better;--so he hated all the wits
but Murphy."

And now that we are on anecdotes of the Theatre, here is another good
story, which belongs to a somewhat earlier time, but of which Mrs.
Piozzi does not mention the exact date. "The Richmond Theatre at that
time attracted all literary people's attention, while a Coterie of
Gentlemen and Noblemen and Ladies entertained themselves with getting up
Plays, and acting them at the Duke of Richmond's house, Whitehall. Lee's
'Theodosius' was the favorite. Lord Henry Fitzgerald played Varanus very
well,--for a Dilettante; and Lord Derby did his part surprisingly. But
there was a song to be sung to Athenais, while she, resolving to take
poison, sits in a musing attitude. Jane Holman--then Hamilton--_would_
sing an air of Sacchini, and the manager _would not_ hear Italian words.
The ballad appointed by the author was disapproved by all, and I pleased
everybody by my fortunate fancy of adapting some English verses to the
notes of Sacchini's song; and Jane Hamilton sung them enchantingly:--

'Vain's the breath of Adulation,
Vain the tears of tenderest Passion,
Whilst a strong Imagination
Holds the wandering Mind away;
Art in vain attempts to borrow
Notes to soothe a rooted sorrow;
Fixed to die, and die to-morrow,
What can touch her soul to-day?'

"The lines were printed, but I lost them. 'What a wild Tragedy is this!'
said I to Hannah More, who was one of the audience. 'Wild enough,' was
her reply; 'but there's good Poetry in it, and good Passion, _and they
will always do_.'

"Hannah More never goes now to a Theatre. How long is H.L. Piozzi likely
to be seen there? How long will Mr. Conway keep the stage?"

In the year 1798, the family of Mr. Piozzi having suffered greatly from
the French invasion of Lombardy, he sent for the son of his youngest
brother, a "little boy just turned of five years old." "We have got him
here," wrote Mrs. Piozzi in a letter from Bath, dated January, 1799,
published by Mr. Hayward, "and his uncle will take him to school next
week." "As he was by a lucky chance baptized, in compliment to me, John
Salusbury, [Salusbury was her family name,] he will be known in England
by no other, and it will be forgotten he is a foreigner." "My poor
little boy from Lombardy said, as I walked with him across our market,
'These are sheeps' heads, are they not, aunt? I saw a hasket of men's
heads at Brescia.'" Little John, though he went to school, was often at
home. After writing of the troubles with her own daughters, Mrs. Piozzi
says in the manuscript before us,--"Had we vexations enough? We had
certainly many pleasures. The house in Wales was beautiful, and the Boy
was beautiful too. Mr. Piozzi said I had spoiled my own children and was
spoiling his. My reply was, that I loved spoiling people, and hated any
one I could not spoil. Am I not now trying to spoil dear Mr. Conway?"

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