Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/625

Rh rejoiced in her self-imposed poverty. When bills were thronging in upon her every hour, she told a friend that a certain heavy account for expenses concerning her nephew's marriage had just been sent in from a solicitor, and added, "I call that the felicity bill." Her devotion to Piozzi's nephew was not ill rewarded. He was made sheriff of his county, and knighted in 1817; and he and his wife were uniformly dutiful and kind to their benefactress, and at least added no one pang to those she had previously suffered.

In 1819 Tom Moore visited Mrs. Piozzi, and found her "a wonderful old lady." "Faces of other times," he wrote, "seemed to crowd over her as she sat,—the Johnsons, Reynoldses, etc. etc. Though turned eighty, she has all the quickness and intelligence of a gay young woman." It was about this time that she became acquainted with the young actor Conway, and interested herself so enthusiastically in his fortunes that people laughed at her, and said she was in love again. Her eightieth birthday, Jan. 27, 1820, was made the occasion of a brilliant fête at Bath, to which the Salusburys from Wales, and friends from all parts of the island, gladly flocked. A concert and supper to between six and seven hundred guests, in the public rooms of Bath, commenced the proceedings; and she led off the ball herself at two in the morning with her adopted son Sir John Salusbury, dancing, said those who were present, with astonishing elasticity and true dignity.

The autumn and winter of that year were spent quietly at Penzance, where she had been told the blasts of winter never came. There she whiled away what she called "six months of exile," looking out over the sea, observing Cornish human nature, with its adjuncts vegetable and mineral, writing witty anecdotic letters to her absent friends, and longing to return with the swallows to her own beloved Bath. But that Cornish winter of 1820-1 was exceptionally severe, and the poor little lady found it hard to maintain her cheerful mood. "Conway," she wrote to a friend, "is in high favour at Bath, the papers say; so indeed do private letters. That young man's value will be one day properly appreciated; and then you and I will be found to have been quite right all along."

On her wav homewards to Bath in the spring of 1821, Mrs. Piozzi met with an accident. Recovered from this, she reached Clifton, where an attack of illness overtook her; and she died there, after very little suffering, on May 2nd, 1821. To her nephew, Sir John Salusbury-Piozzi Salusbury, she left her Welsh estates, and all that she possessed, with the request to her executors that they would be careful to transmit her body, wheresoever she might die, to the vault constructed for their remains by her second husband, Gabriel Piozzi, in Dymerchion Church, Flintshire. And accordingly this last act completed the story of a long and not too happy life. Her three daughters, Lady Keith, Mrs. Hoare, and Miss Thrale, summoned at the last, were round her dying bed. By her written wish the portrait of her mother by Zoffany was given to Lady Keith, who alone of her family could remember her; and that of Mr. Thrale was given to the one daughter who still bore his name. Two days before her death, she had sent the actor Conway a draught for 100l.; which he, like an honest man, returned to her executors. The act speaks warmly in his favour, and one is sorry that he was not quite so great a genius as his warm-hearted patroness believed him to be. He drowned himself in 1828. Among his books was found a copy of the folio edition of Young's "Night Thoughts," in which he had made a note that it was presented to him by his "dearly attached friend, the celebrated Mrs. Piozzi."

Of Dr. Johnson it may be said that his personality and talk were more memorable than anything he ever wrote, and the same is true of his friend Mrs. Piozzi. Her "Anecdotes" were popular, but they scarcely deserve to be mentioned in the same category with Boswell's splendidly full and compactly arranged "Life." Her "British Synonymy; or, An Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation," published in 1794, was a compendium of bright table-talk and anecdote; but its pretentious name put the critics and Gifford out of temper. "The Retrospection; or, A Review of the most Striking and Important Events, Characters, Situations and their Consequences, which the last Eighteen Hundred Years have Presented to the View of Mankind," was published in two quarto volumes, in 1801, and consists of rather more than a thousand pages. "It would," says Mr. Hayward, in his interesting account of her life and writings, "have required the united powers and acquirements of Raleigh, Burke, Gibbon, and Voltaire, to fill so vast a canvas with appropriate groups and figures." She was indeed too ambitious; and we have to fall back on her letters and what we know of