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
w