[1] Daughter of Sir Watkyn Wynn (the fourth baronet) and granddaughter of George Grenville, the Minister. She was distinguished by her literary taste and acquirements, as well as highly esteemed for the uprightness of her character, the excellence of her understanding, and the kindness of her heart. Her journals and note-books, carefully kept during a long life passed in the best society, are full of interesting anecdotes and curious extracts from rare books and manuscripts. They are now in the possession of her niece, the Honourable Mrs. Rowley.
"London, March, 1825.—I have had an opportunity of talking to old Sir William Pepys on the subject of his old friend, Mrs. Piozzi, and from his conversation am more than ever impressed with the idea that she was one of the most inconsistent characters that ever existed. Sir William says he never met with any human being who possessed the talent of conversation in such a degree. I naturally felt anxious to know whether Piozzi could in any degree add to this pleasure, and found, as I expected, that he could not even understand her.
"Her infatuation for him seems perfectly unaccountable. Johnson in his rough (I may here call it brutal) manner said to her, 'Why Ma'am, he is not only a stupid, ugly dog, but he is an old dog too.' Sir William says he really believes that she combated her inclination for him as long as possible; so long, that her senses would have failed her if she had attempted to resist any longer. She was perfectly aware of her degradation. One day, speaking to Sir William of some persons whom he had been in the habit of meeting continually at Streatham during the lifetime of Mr. Thrale, she said, not one of them has taken the smallest notice of me ever since: they dropped me before I had done anything wrong. Piozzi was literally at her elbow when she said this."
The reviewer quotes the remark, "She was perfectly aware of her degradation," as resting on the personal responsibility of Miss Wynn, "who knew her in later life in Wales." The context shews that Miss Wynn (who did not know her) was simply repeating the impressions of Sir William Pepys, one of the bitterest opponents of the marriage, to whom she certainly never said anything derogatory to her second husband. The uniform tenor of her letters and her conduct shew that she never regarded her second marriage as discreditable, and always took a high and independent, instead of a subdued or deprecating, tone with her alienated friends. A bare statement of the treatment she received from them is surely no proof of conscious degradation.
In a letter to a Welsh neighbour, near the end of her life, some time in 1818, she says:
"Mrs. Mostyn (her youngest daughter) has written again on the road back to Italy, where she likes the Piozzis above all people, she says, if they were not so proud of their family. Would not that make one laugh two hours before one's own death? But I remember when Lady Egremont raised the whole nation's ill will here, while the Saxons were wondering how Count Bruhle could think of marrying a lady born Miss Carpenter. The Lombards doubted in the meantime of my being a gentlewoman by birth, because my first husband was a brewer. A pretty world, is it not? A Ship of Fooles, according to the old poem; and they will upset the vessel by and by."
This is not the language of one who wished to apologise for a misalliance.
As to Piozzi's assumed want of youth and good looks, Johnson's knowledge of womankind, to say nothing of his self-love, should have prevented him from urging this as an insuperable objection. He might have recollected the Roman matron in Juvenal, who considers the world well lost for an old and disfigured prize-fighter; or he might have quoted Spenser's description of one—
"Who rough and rude and filthy did appear,
Unseemly man to please fair lady's eye,