biography, written on separate sheets of paper and pasted into the volumes opposite to the passages which they expand or explain. They would create an inconvenient break in the narrative if introduced here, and they are reserved for a separate section.

In 1789 she published "Observations and Reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany," in two volumes octavo of about 400 pages each. As happened to almost everything she did or wrote, this book was by turns assailed with inveterate hostility and praised with animated zeal. Walpole writes to Mrs. Carter, June 13, 1789:

"I do not mean to misemploy much of your time, which I know is always passed in good works, and usefully. You have, therefore, probably not looked into Piozzi's Travels. I who have been almost six weeks lying on a couch have gone through them. It was said that Addison might have written his without going out of England. By the excessive vulgarisms so plentiful in these volumes, one might suppose the writer had never stirred out of the parish of St. Giles. Her Latin, French, and Italian, too, are so miserably spelt, that she had better have studied her own language before she floundered into other tongues. Her friends plead that she piques herself on writing as she talks: methinks, then, she should talk as she would write. There are many indiscretions too in her work, of which she will perhaps be told though Baretti is dead."

Miss Seward, much to her credit, repeated to Mrs. Piozzi both the praise and the blame she had expressed to others. On December 21st, 1789, she writes:

"Suffer me now to speak to you of your highly ingenious, instructive, and entertaining publication; yet shall it be with the sincerity of friendship, rather than with the flourish of compliment. No work of the sort I ever read possesses, in an equal degree, the power of placing the reader in the scenes, and amongst the people it describes. Wit, knowledge, and imagination illuminate its pages - but the infinite inequality of the style!-Permit me to acknowledge to you, what I have acknowledged to others, that it excites my exhaustless wonder, that Mrs. Piozzi, the child of genius, the pupil of Johnson, should pollute, with the vulgarisms of unpolished conversation, her animated pages!

that, while she frequently displays her power of commanding the most chaste and beautiful style imaginable, she should generally use those inelegant, those strange dids, and does, and thoughs, and toos, which produce jerking angles, and stop-short abruptness, fatal at once to the grace and ease of the sentence; which are, in language, what the rusty black silk handkerchief and the brass ring are upon the beautiful form of the Italian countess she mentions, arrayed in embroidery, and blazing in jewels."

Mrs. Piozzi's theory was that books should be written in the same colloquial and idiomatic language which is employed by cultivated persons in conversation. "Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;" and vulgar she certainly was not, although she sometimes indulged her fondness for familiarity too far. The period was unluckily chosen for carrying such a theory into practice; for Johnson's authority had discountenanced idiomatic writing, whilst many phrases and forms of speech, which would not be endured now, were tolerated in polite society.

The laws of spelling, too, were unfixed or vague, and those of pronunciation, which more or less affected spelling, still more so. "When," said Johnson, "I published the plan of my dictionary, Lord Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to seat, and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it grait. Now here were two men of the highest rank, one the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely." Mrs. Piozzi has written on the margin: "Sir William was in the right." Two well-known couplets of Pope's imply similar changes: —

"Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging that he ne'er obliged.

Imperial Anna, whom three realms obey.

Here sometimes counsel takes, and sometimes tea."

Within living memory, elderly people of quality, both in writing and conversation, stuck to Lunnun, Brummagem, and Cheyny (China). Lord Byron wrote redde (for read, in the past tense), and Lord Dudley declined being helped to apple tart. When,

therefore, we find Mrs. Piozzi using words or idioms rejected by modern taste or fastidiousness, we must not be too ready to accuse her of ignorance or vulgarity. I have commonly retained her original syntax and her spelling, which frequently varies within a page.

1

Two days afterwards, Walpole returns to the charge in a letter to Miss Berry, which were alone sufficient to prove the worthlessness of his literary judgments :

"Read Sinbad the Sailor's Voyages,' and you will be sick of Eneas's. What woful invention were the nasty poultry that dunged on his dinner, and ships on fire turned into Nereids! A barn metamorphosed into a cascade in a pantomime is full as sublime an effort of genius. . . . . . I do not think the Sultaness's narratives very natural or very probable, but there is a wildness in them that captivates. However, if you could wade through two octavos of Dame Piozzi's though's and so's and I trows, and cannot listen to seven volumes of Scheherezade's narratives, I will sue for a divorce in foro Parnassi, and Boccalini shall be my proctor."

A single couplet of Gifford's was more damaging than all Walpole's petulance :

"See Thrale's gray widow with a satchel roam,
And bring in pomp laborious nothings home."

This condemnatory verse is every way unjust. The nothings, or somethings, which form the staple of the book, are not labored; and they are presented without the semblance of pomp or pretension. The Preface commences thus:—

"I was made to observe at Rome some vestiges of an ancient

* "She, one evening, asked me abruptly if I did not remember the scurrilous lines in which she had been depicted by Gifford in his 'Baviad and Moviad.' And, not waiting for my answer, for I was indeed too much embarrassed to give one quickly, she recited the verses in question, and added, 'How do you think "Thrale's gray widow" revenged herself? I contrived to get myself invited to meet him at supper at a friend's house (I think she said in Pall Mall), soon after the publication of his poem, sat opposite to him, saw that he was "perplexed in the extreme;" and smiling, proposed a glass of wine as a libation to our future good fellowship. Gifford was sufficiently a man of the world to understand me, and nothing could be more courteous and entertaining than he was while we remained together.'" - Piozziana.

custom very proper in those days. It was the parading of the street by a set of people called Precia, who went some minutes before the Flamen Dialis, to bid the inhabitants leave work or play, and attend wholly to the procession; but if ill-omens prevented the pageants from passing, or if the occasion of the show was deemed scarce worthy its celebration, these Preciæ stood a chance of being ill-treated by the spectators. A prefatory introduction to a work like this can hope little better from the public than they had. It proclaims the approach of what has often passed by before; adorned most certainly with greater splendor, perhaps conducted with greater regularity and skill. Yet will I not despair of giving at least a momentary amusement to my countrymen in general; while their entertainment shall serve as a vehicle for conveying expressions of particular kindness to those foreign individuals, whose tenderness softened the sorrows of absence, and who eagerly endeavored by unmerited attentions to supply the loss of their company, on whom nature and habit had given me stronger claims."

The Preface concludes with the happy remark that, “the labors of the press resemble those of the toilette; both should be attended to and finished with care; but once completed, should take up no more of our attention, unless we are disposed at evening to destroy all effect of our morning's study."

It would be difficult to name a book of travels in which anecdotes, observations, and reflections are more agreeably mingled, or one from which a clearer bird's-eye view of the external state of countries visited in rapid succession may be caught. Her sketch of the north of France, on her way to Paris, may be taken as an example:

I

"CHANTILLY. Our way to this place lay through Boulogne ; the situation of which is pleasing, and the fish there excellent. was glad to see Boulogne, though I can scarcely tell why; but one is always glad to see something new, and talk of something old: for example, the story I once heard of Miss Ashe, speaking of poor Dr. James, who loved profligate conversation dearly, That man should set up his quarters across the water,' said she; 'why, Boulogne would be a seraglio to him.'

"The country, as far as Montreuil, is a coarse one; thin herb

age in the plains and fruitless fields. The cattle too are miserably poor and lean; but where there is no grass, we can scarcely expect them to be fat: they must not feed on wheat, I suppose, and cannot digest tobacco. Herds of swine, not flocks of sheep, meet one's eye upon the hills; and the very few gentlemen's seats that we have passed by seem out of repair, and deserted. The French do not reside much in private houses, as the English do; but while those of narrower fortunes flock to the country towns within their reach, those of ampler purses repair to Paris, where the rent of their estate supplies them with pleasures at no very enormous expense. The road is magnificent, like our old-fashioned avenue in a nobleman's park, but wider, and paved in the middle this convenience continued on for many hundred miles, and all at the king's expense. Every man you meet politely pulls off his hat en passant; and the gentlemen have commonly a good horse under them, but certainly a dressed one.

"The sporting season is not come in yet, but I believe the idea of sporting seldom enters any head except an English one: here is prodigious plenty of game, but the familiarity with which they walk about and sit by our road-side, shows they feel no apprehensions.

"The pert vivacity of La Fille at Montreuil was all we could find there worth remarking: it filled up my notions of French flippancy agreeably enough; as no English wench would so have answered one to be sure. She had complained of our avant coureur's behavior. Il parle sur le haut ton, mademoiselle' (said I), mais il a le cœur bon: Ouyda' (replied she, smartly), 'mais c'est le ton qui fait le chanson."

She ends her notice of Chantilly thus:

"The theatre belonging to the house is a lovely one; and the truly princely possessor, when he heard once that an English gentleman, travelling for amusement, had called at Chantilly too late to enjoy the diversion, instantly, though past twelve o'clock at night, ordered a new representation, that his curiosity might be gratified. This is the same Prince of Condé, who going from Paris to his country seat here for a month or two, when his eldest son was nine years old, left him fifty louis d'ors as an allowance during his absence. At his return to town, the boy produced his