of the first edition of this work,
it has been stated on the authority of a distinguished man of letters
that Conway shewed the late Charles Mathews a letter from Mrs.
Piozzi, offering marriage.--_New Monthly Magazine_ (edited by Mr.
Harrison Ainsworth) for April, 1861.]

Conway threw himself overboard and was drowned in a voyage from New
York to Charleston in 1828. His effects were sold at New York, and
amongst them 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." In the
preface to "Love Letters of Mrs. Piozzi, Written when she was Eighty,
to William Augustus Conway," published in London in 1842, it is
stated that the originals, seven in number, were purchased by an
American "lady," who permitted a "gentleman" to take copies and use
them as he might think fit. What this "gentleman" thought fit, was to
publish them with a catchpenny title and an alleged extract by way of
motto to sanction it. The genuineness of the letters is doubtful, and
the interpolation of three or four sentences would alter their entire
tenor. But taken as they stand, their language is not warmer than an
old woman of vivid fancy and sensibility might have deemed warranted
by her age. "Tell Mr. Johnson I love him exceedingly," is the mission
given by the old Countess of Eglinton to Boswell in 1778. _L'age n'a
point de sexe_; and no one thought the worse of Madame Du Deffand for
the impassioned tone in which she addressed Horace Walpole, whose
dread of ridicule induced him to make a most ungrateful return to her
fondness.[1] Years before the formation of this acquaintance, Mrs.
Piozzi had acquired the difficult art of growing old; _je sais
vieillir_: she dwells frequently but naturally on her age: she
contemplates the approach of death with firmness and without
self-deception: and her elasticity of spirit never for a moment
suggests the image of an antiquated coquette. Of the seven letters in
question, the one cited as most compromising is the sixth, in which
Conway is exhorted to bear patiently a rebuff he had just received
from some younger beauty:

[Footnote 1: "The old woman's fancy for Mr. Conway represents a
relation of warm friendship that is of every-day occurrence between
youth and age that is not crabbed."--_The Examiner_, Feb. 16, 1861.]

"'Tis not a year and a quarter since, dear Conway, accepting of my