| [50] | Book iv. ch. 2. |
| [51] | Diary and Letters, 1892, i. 454. |
| [52] | The verses from which these quotations are taken appeared in the Morning Herald for 12 March, 1782. Long attributed to Sir W. W. Pepys, they are now given to Dr. Burney. But, as regards his daughter, they only express a general feeling. |
| [53] | Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1832, ii. 323. |
| [54] | Autobiography, etc. of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale), 1861 (2nd ed.), i. 147 et seq. |
| [55] | This was the bitterness of the sick bed; and it is wholly irreconcilable with the regard expressed in Johnson’s last communication to Mrs. Piozzi and his gratitude “for that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched.” Luckily for her, he did not burn all her letters, for her not-undignified answer to his first rough remonstrance was found by Miss Hawkins amongst his papers, and returned to its writer. As already stated, it is printed by Hayward (Autobiography, etc., 1861 (2nd ed.), i. 240-1, No. 4). |
| [56] | Other people think so still. Mr. Bryce (Studies in Contemporary Biography, 1903, i. 127), speaks of Briggs and Miss Larolles as “so exaggerated, as to approach the grotesque.” Nevertheless, as is often the case, Briggs has been more satisfactorily identified with a living model than any other of Miss Burney’s characters. In Mrs. Ellis’s “Preface” and Notes to Cecilia, she shows conclusively that, designedly or undesignedly, Briggs reproduces many of the traits of a personage already mentioned in these pages, Nollekens the sculptor. (See ante, p. 51, and J. T. Smith’s Nollekens and his Times, 2 vols. 1828.) |
| [57] | 6th December, 1785. |