visit from your Streatham friend, of whom I had lost. sight for more than ten years. She still looks very well, but is graver, and candour itself; though she still says good things, and writes admirable notes and letters, I am told, to my granddaughters C. and M., of whom she is very fond. We shook hands very cordially, and avoided any allusion to our long separation and its cause. The caro sposo still lives, but is such an object from the gout, that the account of his sufferings made me pity him sincerely; he wished, she told me, 'to see his old and worthy friend, and un beau matin I could not refuse compliance with his wish. She nurses him with great affection and tenderness, never goes out or has company when he is in pain." In the Conway Notes she says: "Piozzi's fine hand upon the organ and pianoforte deserted him. Gout, such as I never knew, fastened on his fingers, distorting them into every dreadful shape. A little girl, shown to him as a musical wonder of five years old, said, 'Pray, Sir, why are your fingers wrapped up in black silk so?' My dear,' replied he, they are in mourning for my voice.' 'Oh, me!' cries the child, is she dead?' He sung an easy song, and the baby exclaimed, Ah, Sir! you are very naughty — you tell fibs!' Poor dears! and both gone now!" 6 6 6 6 "When life was gradually, but perceptibly, closing round him at Bath, in 1808, I asked him if he would wish to converse with a Romish priest, full opportunity there. we had By no means,' said he. 'Call Mr. Leman of the Crescent.' We did so, poor Bessy ran and fetched him. Mr. Piozzi received the blessed Sacrament at his hands; but recovered sufficiently to go home and die in his own house." He died of gout at Brynbella in March 1809, and was buried in a vault constructed by her desire in Dymerchion Church. There is a portrait of him (period and painter unknown) still preserved amongst the family portraits at Brynbella. It is that of a good-looking man of about forty, in a straight-cut brown coat with metal buttons, lace frill and ruffles, and some leaves of music in his hand. There are also two likenesses of Mrs. Piozzi: one a three-quarter length (kit-kat), taken apparently when she was about forty; the other a miniature of her at an advanced age. Both confirm her description of herself as too strong-featured to be pretty. The hands in the three-quarter length are gloved. Brynbella continued her headquarters till 1814, when she gave it up to Sir John Salusbury. From that period she resided principally at Bath and Clifton, occasionally visiting Streatham or making summer trips to the seaside. That she and her eldest daughter should ever be again (if they ever were) on a perfect footing of confidence and affection, was a moral impossibility. Estrangements are commonly durable in proportion to the closeness of the tie that has been severed; and it is no more than natural that each party, yearning for a reconciliation and not knowing that the wish is re ciprocated, should persevere in casting the blame of the prolonged coldness on the other. Occasional sarcasms no more prove disregard or indifference, than Swift's "only a woman's hair" implies contempt for the sex. Miss Thrale's marriage with Lord Keith in 1808 is thus mentioned in "Thraliana": "The Thraliana' is coming to an end; so are the Thrales. The eldest is married now. Admiral Lord Keith the man; a good man for ought I hear: a rich man for ought I am told: a brave man we have always heard: and a wise man I trow by his choice. name no new one, and excellent for a charade, e.g. "A Faery my first, who to fame makes pretence; In my third when combined will too quickly be shown The Her way of life after Piozzi's death may be collected from the Letters, with the exception of one strange episode towards the end. When nearly eighty, she took a fancy for an actor named Conway, who came out on the London boards in 1813, and had the honour of acting Romeo and Jaffier to the Juliet and Belvidera of Miss O'Neill (Lady Becher). He also acted with her in Dean Milman's fine play, "Fazio." But it was his ill fate to reverse Churchill's famous lines: “Before such merits all objections fly, Pritchard's genteel, and Garrick's six feet high." Conway was six feet high, and a very handsome man to boot; but his advantages were purely physical; not a spark of genius animated his fine features and commanding figure, and he was battling for a moderate share of provincial celebrity, when Mrs. Piozzi fell in with him at Bath. It has been rumoured in Flintshire that she wished to marry him, and offered Sir John Salusbury a large sum in ready money (which she never possessed) to give up Brynbella (which he could not give up), that she might settle it on the new object of her affections. But none of the letters or documents that have fallen in my way afford even plausibility to the rumour, and some of the testamentary papers in which his name occurs, go far towards discrediting the belief that her attachment ever went beyond admiration and friendship expressed in exaggerated terms.* 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 * Since the appearance 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. 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.* 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: * "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, |