at 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. Pioz