be included under this title. As friends of free museums unimpaired. In America, however, the connexion between we are not about to complain of this, but of a certain the ideal and the actual is more intimate than in Europe; inquisitorial authority claimed by the chief librarian, under and it has been vouchsafed to the early champion of the the sanction of the trustees, to look over the work or study Afric-American slave to witness the growth of the grain of every reader. When a man has applied for a "library of mustard-seed which he planted into a mighty overticket" in the prescribed form, has given the usual pro- shadowing tree. A few words on the American Abolifessional or householder reference, and has obtained the tionists, and the relations they bear to the society in sacred privilege, he naturally imagines he can refer to any which they live, will not be inopportune at a moment of the national books for any purpose short of mutilation. when the fruits of their handiwork have suddenly become He is quite mistaken. The proprietors of two respect- so apparent on the face of public events. able trade journals have lately tried the question. We know that mere trade journals are very vulgar things, they are not "literature," they are not metaphysical, they are not even genteely topographical. It is difficult to sympathize with their objects; far more difficult to stand up as their champions. The conductors of these two journals wished to compile two trade directories,-a dreadfully utilitarian task, with nothing of poetry, obscurity, or mysticism about it. They went to the British Museum library to collect materials, because they found there the only complete set of trade directories in the whole kingdom. They complied with the Museum regulations, procured their tickets, began their work, were overlooked, and finally expelled, without appeal, by Mr. Panizzi and the trustees, because they did not come under the category of" studious persons." It was not pretended that their labour was of a nature to injure any existing copyrights; the managers of the great hotbed of "paste and scissors" authors could hardly say that; but they were not "studious persons." Utility had marked them for her own, and the chief librarian must cast them out. The managers of the British Museum library (under the compulsory provisions of the "Copyright Act," by which a copy of every work published in the United Kingdom must be deposited in the Museum library by the pub-tleman whose name heads this article. lisher before a copy can be legally sold), are determined to gather the only perfect collection of trade and general directories in the country, and then prevent English taxpayers from using them. The story is new, and perfectly true, and calculated to eclipse that of the "dog in the manger." The legislature sometimes condescends to speak of British Museum reform, when it can spare time from the squabbles and complications of universal government. Without going into the vexed questions of official salaries, and the sub-division of contents, there ought to be no rest on the part of domestic politicians, until a collection of untold value ceases to be shut up for half the year, and the library is no longer the gilded plaything of those who appear to have forgotten their real masters. JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD. Europe is familiar with that form of heroism which, stimulated and cheered by the strong sympathy of masses of one's fellow-countrymen, courts the dungeon or the scaffold, and all the punishment which despotic or oligarchic power can inflict. She is less familiar with that other and almost opposite phase of heroism which, in the name of justice and humanity, boldly opposes itself to the most deep-seated passions and prejudices, and the vested interests, of one's own fellow-citizens, in behalf of a degraded, and utterly alien race, who know nothing of what their champions are suffering in their cause. The first marks the patriot, the second the humanitarian. Kossuth and Garibaldi are illustrious examples furnished by the present generation to the long roll of historic patriots; William Lloyd Garrison, the chief of the American Abolitionists, is perhaps the most conspicuous living type of the humanitarian militant. Age is stealing over the intrepid old man now. He gradually retires into the background, while the vigorous form and sonorous voice of a younger but middle-aged man, Mr. Wendell Phillips, is seen and heard in the foreground of the Abolitionist phalanx. The honorary leadership remains, and, during his lifetime, will ever remain, with Mr. Garrison; but the acting leadership is now transferred to the gen Mr. Phillips is a scion of an old Boston family of puritan stock. He inherited from his father a sufficient amount of property to render him independent. He was educated at Harvard College, the foremost institution of the kind in America, and afterwards mastered the law. But he was not destined to give up to the management of private interests talents so admirably adapted for the discussion of public affairs. In 1837, some outrage on the right of free speech committed by the municipal authorities of Boston against an anti-slavery meeting, first brought the small and despised society of Abolitionists to the notice of the well-bred, easily-circumstanced, and orthodoxly-educated Mr. Phillips. Then, as it has been ever since, liberty was the idol of his soul. How dare any one offend against liberty on Boston soil, beneath the very shadow of Bunker-hill? Were the Declaration of Independence, and all the fine, high-sounding speeches which, as a schoolboy, he had declaimed as elocutionary exercises, simply so much sounding brass and tinkling THE present days are joyful times of triumph for American cymbals, or were they living realities? He was deterAbolitionists; a great revolution is accomplishing itself on mined to try the question in his own person. He threw the American continent. The cotton states have seceded himself into the breach, in defence of the unpopular from the great Republic, avowedly because the northern minority, and soon became a convert to their doctrines. people are at length leavened with a slight leaven of anti- Since then, twenty-four "years of public odium," to slavery principles. President Buchanan, in tracing the which he alludes with sardonic pride, have been his lot. cause of this revolution to its source, fixes it in that He has drunk deeply of the bitter cup which is ever obscure printing-office in a back attic of a house in some pressed to the lips of the advanced Reformer who will purlieu of the city of Boston, whence, thirty years ago, make no compromises. Many a time has he faced a William Lloyd Garrison issued the early numbers of the howling mob in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia. Liberator. It is not often that he who emits the ideas It is a fine sight to see him conduct an unbroken chain of which afterwards become the parents of revolutions, is argument in the face of a running fire of insults and permitted to witness their realization. The Rousseau, interruptions, hurled at him by half the audience. His the Montesquieu, the Voltaire, who produced the change eye never quails before the angry multitude. His powerin opinion which afterwards led to the re-organization of ful, penetrating, well-modulated voice never grows husky institutions, died while the old régime was still externally with emotion. Epigram follows epigram; never does WENDELL PHILLIPS, THE ABOLITIONIST his bright intellect shine more brilliantly. Stinging, markable man make amends for an occasional excessive trenchant, unsparing, defiant, scornful, Wendell Phillips virulence in dealing with his antagonists. Mr. Douglas, is the very orator for a storm. In fine weather you would representing the dominant sentiment of the American say he was not sufficiently soft, sunny, and genial. How people, lays it down as a cardinal article of faith that different his compressed and bitterly satirical sentences North America and the American Republic were made from the rounded periods of Mr. Seward, who obstinately for white men, for the European race only, and that the refuses to see anything but the bright side of things, or words of the Declaration of Independence, "all men are from the finished artistic rhetoric of the patriotic Mr. | born free and equal," were used with reference to white Everett. Yet Seward, Everett, and Phillips, are the men only; for, he argues, it is impossible that a convenmost highly esteemed public speakers in America; and of the three, in the opinion of many competent judges, the Abolitionist is entitled to the palm of superiority. He certainly has the finest voice. In the matter of his speeches there is something which reminds you of Disraeli, with much that recalls the bluff humour of the Latter Day Pamphlets. If you wish to see an iconoclast, here is one who has made image breaking a profession. "We are nothing if not critical," has been his motto. No sooner does a free soil politician acquire popularity with the people of New England and New York, than Wendell Phillips sets to work to expose the slender basis of anti-slavery principle on which the popular favourite stands. In this way, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, Horace Mann and Edward Everett, W. H. Seward and Governor Banks, Horace Greeley and Henry J. Raymond, Judge M'Lean and Abraham Lincoln, have in turn been publicly weighed in his balance of abstract principles, and, of course, found wanting. tion which numbered so many slaveowners could have intended to mean literally that all men are entitled to equal rights, when, after having made this declaration, they continued to hold numbers of their fellow-creatures in bondage. Wendell Phillips would be the last to dispute the logic of this reasoning, as a piece of historical criticism; but his theory of what is the true destiny of the American continent is very different from that of Judge Douglas. He welcomes all races to America; the African, the Asiatic, the Red man, the Polynesian, are to him all welcome contingents. He is willing to treat with all on a footing of equality, to give to one and all liberty of development, to allow each race to retain its individuality so long as it desires to do so; believing that in this way the temple of American civilization will be reared on a grander plan than if founded on the principle of the dominancy of the white race. This is the last dogma of American democracy, and to Mr. Phillips belongs the honour of having formularized it. The coloured and mixed races in whose behalf he speaks know nothing yet either of the cause or the advocate, but the time will come when this brave man's name will be imprinted on their hearts as that of the pioneer who laid the first foundations of their freedom. Although Mr. Phillips is best known as an Abolitionist leader, he has taken a part in other public movements. He is a warm friend of the cause of temperance, and is also a prominent champion of the Women's Rights movement, for sex with him is no more a good reason for civil disabili It was inevitable that, from his stand-point, these statesmen should be found wanting, since they are all Constitutionalists, while Mr. Phillips is a Revolutionist. He is opposed to the existence of slavery; they are opposed only to its extension. They desire to abide by the original constitution of the Union; he recognises the validity of no law which makes one man another's property, and hates the constitution because such laws are a part of it. Nay, he has struck even higher, and has uttered words which, in the ears of many of his country-ties than colour. Like a preux chevalier, he has waged men, must have sounded as "flat blasphemy." He told them that John Brown, -the negro liberator, or the Harper's Ferry pirate, whichever you choose,---was a greater man, and a truer hero, than George Washington, the slaveowner. It may be hoped that Mr. Phillips is not yet beyond the middle of his career. No one has yet collected his speeches and pamphlets, though they are certainly as well worth collecting as those of Webster, Clay, Channing, or Seward. They have one quality which grates harshly on European ears, and that is, the concentrated bitterness, the intense spirit of hatred, with which they are frequently suffused. In this respect they remind you of the orations of pagan antiquity. To combat a dominant democracy, year after year, is apt to make a man bitter and acrid, to turn his milk of human kindness into gall. It is perhaps as unreasonable to ask serenity and suave geniality of an athlete like Mr. Phillips, hot from the terrific combats of the arena, as to expect the address of a Chesterfield from an honest son of labour. We in Great Britain know nothing of the sort of public Mr. Phillips has to defy. The last time he spoke in Boston, for example,-it was since the commencement of the present troubles,-he had to be guarded on the platform by friends armed with revolvers. He was escorted home by the same friends and a strong posse of police, amidst the hootings of a mob literally eager to tear him to pieces, and it was found necessary to protect his house from attack for several days afterwards. many a battle in behalf of the ladies who head this move- MRS. PIOZZI.* WHEN Mrs. Piozzi drew out the brief sketch of her own life which forms part of the contents of the volumes before us, she began it with the observation that few men, of however good family, could recollect immediately, on being challenged, the maiden names of their four greatgrandmothers; and thereupon proceeded, with some pride, to state the names and titles of her own, setting forth how two were honourables, the third a great heiress, and the fourth a great-aunt to a great naturalist. are then told that her mother was a Miss Cotton, the daughter of a baronet of that name, who married her rakish cousin, John Salusbury; which cousin, having already run through his own fortune, very speedily spent so much of his wife's ten thousand pounds that barely sufficient was left to furnish the cottage in Carnarvonshire in which our heroine, Hester Salusbury, was born, some time in the year 1740. We Little Hester got into good society at a very early age. The impulsiveness which, at a later period, made her • Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piorsi (Thrale). Edited with Notes, and an Introductory Account of her Life and Writings, by A Let the Catholic liberality of the opinions of this re- HAYWARD, Esq., Q.C. Vol. I. London: Longmans. 1801. some enemies, at five years of age made her many friends. The Duke and Duchess of Leeds were eager for her society; her uncle, the baronet, promised to leave his "little Fiddle," as he called her, £10,000; Mr. Quin, the famous actor, taught her to recite Satan's speech to the sun, from Paradise Lost; and she witnessed the fireworks for the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle sitting on the knee of David Garrick. Garrick asked if any one in the company could tell him why some of the fireworks were called gerbes in the published list. Before any one else could answer, little miss cried out, "Because they are like wheatsheaves; you see; and gerbe is a wheatsheaf in French." At this time she was just six years old. her by any other man,-a preference which lasted through life, and which she describes as having been the result of a kind of fascination. From the time she was sixteen or seventeen till she was twenty-three, she reigned as undisputed mistress of her uncle's seat at Offley, gathering around her men of wit and learning, corresponding with grave philosophers, sitting to Hogarth for the principal figure in his famous picture, the Lady's Last Stake, and writing for the St. James's Chronicle poems and essays which were the theme of general admiration. When she was twentythree, her uncle, who was at this time a widower, fell in love with a beautiful widow neighbour, the Honourable Good society, however, is but a sorry cure for the Mrs. King, and determined to marry again. As by so heart-ache; and the little girl had to share many a heart- doing he would deprive his niece of the position which ache with her mother. Her ne'er-do-weel father went she had so long held in his house, and as he was unwilling out to Nova Scotia, in connexion with an ill-judged to do this until she should have an establishment of her colonization scheme, and after a period of duels, dissipa- own, he now became anxious to see Miss Hester married. tion, and low spirits, at length returned, rather poorer, if One evening, after having been in London for a day or possible, than when he went. Meanwhile, the uncle who two, he returned full of the praises of an incomparable had promised the £10,000 died without leaving it, and young man whom he had met there, and whom he another uncle, to whom the care of what remained of her represented as being "a model of perfection, ending his father's property had been entrusted, neglected it in a panegyric by saying that he was a real sportsman." The manner which resulted in the loss of her mother's jointure. young lady evincing a disposition to make merry with Amid all these troubles, however, the little girl was respect to this unknown Crichton, she was checked with gathering a famous stock of health. She and her mother a gravity which gave her some intimation of what was to were invited to East Hyde, near Luton, by her grand-follow. The next day Mr. Thrale arrived at his eulogist's mother, the dowager Lady Cotton, who had taken a fancy house; and in outward appearance he certainly justified to her, as every one else did, and there she used to spend long sunny days "learning to drive of the old coachman, who, like everybody else, small and great, delighted in taking me for a pupil. Grandmamma kept four great ramping war-horses, chevaux entiers, for her carriage, with immense long tails, which we buckled and combed; and when, after long practice, I showed her and my mother how two of them would lick my hand for a lump of sugar or fine white bread, much were they amazed; much more when my skill in guiding them round the court-yard on the break conld no longer be doubted or denied, though strictly prohibited for the future." all that had been said of him. He was one of those tall, manly-looking men, whom foreign writers, when they wish to flatter us, describe as the type of an English gentleman. His countenance was agreeable, without being attractive; his manners were civil and polished, without being conciliatory; and whilst his deep blue eyes were full of thought and intelligence, they were without that tenderness which alone was wanting to make them all powerful with women. was himself a brewer. The chaplain at Offley Place, who had long entertained hopes of obtaining Miss Hester for himself, cunningly fomented this feeling of pride, and the angry father swore that his daughter should not be exchanged for a barrel of beer. A violent quarrel between him and her uncle was the consequence, and the young lady left the house in which she had so long reigned as a queen, and proceeded with her parents to London. There were four persons who considered they had a right to control Miss Hester's destiny,-her uncle, her mother, Dr. Collier, and her father. The two former were anxious that she should marry Mr. Thrale, for the The little lady next became resident with her uncle, sake of an establishment; the two latter were eager to Sir Thomas Salusbury, at Offley Place. During the prevent her doing so. The old tutor feared the severance latter part of the last century, young ladies were con- of the sentimental friendship which bound him to his sidered marriageable at an age at which they would now pupil; and her father was indignant at the idea that his be confined to the nursery. Miss Hester had scarcely daughter, the child of an ancient race, should be united entered her teens when her uncle's house became to a man whose father had been a peasant boy, and who "haunted with young men" for her sake. "Every suitor," she says, was made to understand my extraordinary value. Those who could read were shown my verses; those who could not, were judges of my prowess in the field. It was my sport to mimic some, and drive others back, in order to make Dr. Collier laugh." This Dr. Collier was an intimate of her uncle's house, who took great pleasure in superintending her studies. He first made her acquaintance before she was thirteen years old, and she had at that time already picked up,with no assistance but from her mother,—a good know. ledge of French, Spanish, and Latin. Under Dr. Collier's superintendence she pursued her further studies very diligently; and a warm regard soon sprang up between the teacher and the taught. The nature of the feeling between them it would be difficult to define. From the disparity of their ages, it could scarcely have been what we call love. "On the day I was sixteen, he confessed to sixty-four," so that he was just four times as old as All that can be stated for certain is that the old man regarded his pupil with a jealous feeling, which could bear no rival in her affections, and that she entertained for him a preference which was never inspired in she was. With that cool pertinacity which was a chief element in his character, Mr. Thrale, having resolved to wed Miss Hetty Salusbury, continued to court her, in spite of her father's wrath, and her own undisguised indifference. Mr. Salusbury could not be persuaded that his daughter gave no encouragement to her suitor, and in one of the quarrels arising from this unfounded belief he so over excited himself, that, after the lapse of a few hours, he was brought home, from the house of a friend to whom he had gone for consolation, a corpse. After this had happened, almost every one seems to have regarded Miss Hester's marriage with Mr. Thale as a matter of course. Her uncle ran up from Offley Place, presented her with £5,000, gave her away at the altar, dined with her and her husband at the latter's mansion at Streatham Park, and then posted back to Hertfordshire with all possible which she attended to him, that it occasioned much good. speed to marry Mrs. King. natured raillery from friends, and many ill-natured sarcasms from enemies. A few slight hints are sufficient to indicate to us the kind of life which had now to be endured by the highspirited, lively girl who had hitherto been her own mistress and the mistress of all around her. Till the close of their wedding-day her husband had never spent, or endeavoured to spend, five minutes in her company, unwitnessed by other persons. After their marriage he went a good deal into society himself, but lost no time in intimating to his wife that he considered that the proper place for a married lady was either in her own drawingroom or her bed-room. A visitor to their house, to her association with whom she owes her fame, did not hesitate to tell her that she lived as if she were her husband's kept mistress, so entirely was she shut out from the world. ; The hospitality of Streatham Park was unquestionably of the greatest use to Johnson. He had turned his own house into a hospital for half-a-dozen old ladies as ill and irritable as himself, and there can be no doubt that his life was preserved by his removal thence to the quiet ease of Mr. Thrale's house, and the unwearied solicitude of his "lovely Hetty." To the direct influence of Mrs. Thrale we owe at least three of his productions, the Tour to the Western Isles, the Patriot, and Taxation no Tyranny. Rendered apathetic by disease, he required some outward pressure to stimulate his energies. Mrs. Thrale, as careful of his fame as of his comfort, did her best to supply it, in various ways. One of her expedients was to "stir him up by laying wagers," and it was by this means that she got him to write the compositions just specified. This visitor, of course, was Dr. Johnson. But for Dr. Johnson we should scarcely have heard of Mrs. Thrale but for Mrs. Thrale, the great moralist's life would have wanted many of those elements which make of its written record a book which humanity will never be weary of perusing. We fear we must decide that it was not as the disciple of a great teacher that the mistress of Streatham Park clung to his society. She courted him, to some extent she even loved him, as a protection against her husband. She cried in her heart for anything that would break the dull monotony of her life as the wife of one wholly unsuited to her. Chilled to death by the cold taqiturnity of Mr. Thrale, by his calm decorousness, and the stately demeanour of his handsome person, she welcomed, with a burst of relief, the volubility, the rough originality, and even the coarse manners and ungainly person, of Dr. Johnson. On the other hand, Mr. Thrale was quietly gratified at having as his habitual guest a man whose fame did his house so much credit, and whose principles of thought and action were at the same time so upright; and it thus happened that both husband and wife, although for widely different reasons, alike gladly, during sixteen years, welcomed Johnson to Streatham Park, The seclusion to which Mrs. Thrale was condemned during the earlier period of her first marriage did not endure after her husband entered parliament. Those were times in which politics, literature, and fashion were closely blended, and wisa Mr. Thrale became member for Southwark, he found it useful to allow his wife to take a place in fashionable society, and she soon became a prominent member of the most brilliant circles. But whilst the newspapers were full of verses to her praise, and fashionable magazines were courting the productions of her pen, and adorning their pages with her portrait, she was attacked by unexpected cares and sorrows. She had never supposed that she possessed her husband's heart, but it was none the less to her amazement and distress that she now found that it was possessed by another, and that other an old friend of her own, the beautiful Miss Streatfield. Soon after it was discovered that her husband had fallen into embarrassments, through unfortunate speculations into which he had been led by designing quacks, and the anxiety occasioned by loss and disappointment struck him down with that sudden and startling shock against which pride and coldness of temperament are no protection. He sank into a species of imbecility, and it was well for him and his family now that he had not succeeded in reducing his wife to the mere automaton he had wished her to be. With unwearied solicitude she attended to his personal comfort, and took upon herself the management of his enormous business. After a protracted illness he died, cut down by apoplexy on the morning of a day the evening of which half the fashion of London had been in vited to spend at his house. Dr. Johnson was one of the four executors appointed by his will. She and they carried on the brewery for some months. "On Mr. Thrale's death," she says, "I kept the counting-house from nine every morn ing till five o'clock every evening till June, when God Almighty sent us a knot of rich Quakers who bought the whole, and saved me and my coadjutors from brewing ourselves into another bankruptcy, which hardly could, I think, have been avoided, being as we were five in number, Cato, Crutchley, Johnson, myself, and Mr. Smith, all with equal power, yet all incapable of using it without help from Mr. Perkins, who wished to force himself into partnership, though hating the whole lot of us, save only The feeling which Dr. Johnson grew to entertain for Mrs. Thrale has been very fairly described as compounded of cupboard love, Platonic love, and the relish of vanity tickled from morning till night by incessant homage. After the lapse of a number of years, these various feelings merged in that species of jealous sentiment which we have already found in the heart of Dr. Collier. But we find no trace of reciprocity on the part of the lady. She made herself the great author's slave as a means of escaping the tacit tyranny of her husband. Her spirit was too high, and her mind too vivacious, to have allowed her to entertain that species of dog-like attachment which so often springs up in an inferior mind towards a superior one. But Dr. Johnson was not a man to be slighted, or played tricks with. If you took him for a master, you must be prepared to fulfil the duties of a servant; and Mrs. Thrale certainly did so, bravely. When he was under her roof she yielded to his imperative demand that she should be scarcely ever out of his society; she sat up with him during the greater part of the night, because he was averse to going early to bed; she suffered him to interfere with her domestic arrangements, and to alter them to his taste; she smothered the feelings with which she saw her best carpets spoiled by his holding the wax- Upon my promise, however, that if he would find lights end downwards when they did not burn brightly us a purchaser, I would present his wife with my enough for him; she forbore to take offence even at his dwelling-house in the Borough, and all its furniture, be constant violent quarrels with her mother. Nothing soon brought forward these Quaker Barclays, from Penutired her. Whatever provocation he might give her, she sylvania I believe they came, her own relations I have consulted his every taste, and scrupulously supplied his heard, and they obtained the brewhouse a prodigion slightest want. Indeed, so extreme was the care with bargain." They gave £150,000 for it, scarcely more that me. half its value. So originated the famous firm of Barclay sometimes condescended to be good-humouredly jealous and Perkins. of him. He was an Italian of good family, with one of At length, then, she had escaped from the yoke which the finest voices man ever possessed; but if Mario had she had endured for nearly eighteen years, the yoke of lived in those times he would have been regarded as an uncongenial marriage, a marriage of convenience Piozzi was,-simply as an amusing vagabond, who was arranged for her by her uncle, in order that he might admitted into society for society's pleasure, but was no himself form a love match. With two houses and two more to be regarded as a part of society than the veriest thousand a year, at an age at which she still possessed lacquey. Still, had Mrs. Thrale not been a literary lady, many attractions of person, she was now free. The first had she not freely opened her house to all the authors thing she did was to get rid of Dr. Johnson. Her conduct about the town, she would probably have been subjected in this respect has been much canvassed and greatly misre- to very little annoyance on the score of her second presented. In her " Anecdotes," she herself, after men- marriage. As it was, by making choice of a foreigner, she tioning an instance of Johnson's violence of temper, tells united against her in one solid phalanx the whole host of the story thus: "Such accidents, however, occurred too newspaper and magazine scribblers, who would have often, and I was forced to take advantage of my lost law-liked to have had two thousand a year themselves, and suit, and plead inability of purse to remain longer in London who could not bear to see any one else obtain it in so or its vicinage. I had been crossed in my intentions of easy and pleasant a way as by simply marrying an going abroad, and found it convenient, for every reason agreeable woman. When her intention to marry Mr. of health, peace, and pecuniary circumstances, to retire to Piozzi became rumoured abroad," the newspapers took Bath, where I knew Mr. Johnson would not follow me, up the subject, and rang the changes on the amorous and where I could for that reason command some little disposition of the widow and the adroit cupidity of the portion of time for my own use; a thing impossible while fortune-hunter. So pelting and pitiless was the storm of I remained at Streatham or at London, as my hours, taunts and reproaches, and so urgent were the remoncarriage, and servants, had long been at his command, strances, that a temporary reaction was effected; her who would not rise in the morning till twelve o'clock promise was withdrawn; her letters were returned; perhaps, and oblige me to make breakfast for him till the and Piozzi was persuaded to leave the country. But the bell rung for dinner, though much displeased if the toilet sustained effort imposed on her was beyond her strength; was neglected, and though much of the time we passed her health gave way under the resulting conflict of together was spent in blaming or deriding, very justly, emotions; and her daughters reluctantly connived at his my neglect of economy, and waste of that money which recall by her physician as a measure on which her life might make many families happy. The original reason of depended." our connexion, his particularly disordered health and spirits, had been long at an end, and he had no other ailments than old age and general infirmity, which every professor of medicine was ardently zealous and generally attentive to palliate, and to contribute all in their power for the prolongation of a life so valuable. Veneration for his virtue, reverence for his talents, delight in his conversation, and habitual endurance of a yoke my husband first put upon me, and of which he contentedly bore his share for sixteen or seventeen years, made me go on so long with Mr. Johnson; but the perpetual confinement I will own to have been terrifying in the first years of our friendship, and irksome in the last; nor could I pretend to support it without help, when my coadjutor was no more. To the assistance we gave him, the shelter our house afforded to his uneasy fancies, and to the pains we took to soothe or repress them, the world perhaps is indebted for the three political pamphlets, the new edition and correction of his Dictionary, and for the Poets' Lives, which he would scarce have lived, I think, and kept his faculties entire, to have written, had not incessant care been exerted at the time of his first coming to be our constant guest in the country; and several times after that, when he found himself particularly oppressed with diseases incident to the most vivid and fervent imaginations. I shall for ever consider it as the greatest honour which could be conferred on any one, to have been the confidential friend of Dr. Johnson's health, and to have in some measure, with Mr. Thrale's assistance, saved from distress at least, if not from worse, a mind greatly beyond the comprehension of common mortals, and good beyond all hope of imitation from perishable beings." And now Mrs. Thrale committed, three or four sins for which society resolved to hoot her beyond its pale. She married again; she married for love; she married a foreigner; she married a public singer. Mr. Piozzi, the fortunate object of her choice, had long been a friend both of herself and her late husband. Dr. Johnson had noticed his admiration for the "lovely Hetty," and had The strong point of those who attacked the marriage consisted in the fact that the lady had three daughters approaching womanhood. And this point was made the most of. Dark scandals were hinted at; and the eldest girl, a young woman of twenty, refused almost to speak to her mother after the marriage was consummated. But the fact was, that very little affection had ever existed between them. Miss Thrale appears to have inherited, with all her father's beauty, most of his personal qualities. She was naturally cold and haughty, and there is some slight evidence that her mother began, when she was still a mere child, to be jealous of her. Wherever the fault lay, it is certain that the younger girls sympathized with their sister as they grew up, and the last time we find any mention made of them by their mother, it is as “three sullen misses." As Mrs. Piozzi, the "lovely Hetty" seems to have been perfectly happy. No trace of exaggeration or forced gaiety is to be found in the almost exuberant descriptions she gives of her life during her second marriage. The faculties of her mind appear to have received a sudden expansion from the joy of her heart. From a writer of light trifles in magazines, she became a grave authoress. Her liveliness became wit, and her wit wisdom. After a The indignation of society soon died away. brief residence abroad, Mrs. Piozzi returned, to find her. self more popular than ever, and in a better position as the wife of a despised singer than that which she had held as the wife of the famous brewer. During fourteen years she now experienced a felicity which had been long deferred, but which did not come too late to be enjoyed with all the zest of a full, strong life. In 1809 her husband died, and left her once more alone in the world. And yet not quite alone, for although no children had been the fruit of her second marriage, the adoption by her husband of one of his nephews had given her an object of interest and affection which she clung to during a protracted old age. Partly as the representative of a bygone age, partly |