"A Lady once—'t was many years ago—asked me to lend her a book out of my library at Streatham Park. 'A book of entertainment,' said J, 'of course.' 'That I don't know or rightly comprehend;' was her odd answer; 'I wish for an Abridgment.' 'An Abridgment of what?' 'That,' she replied, 'you must tell me, my Dear; for I am no reader, like you and Dr. Johnson; I only remember that the last book I read was very pretty, and my husband called it an Abridgment.'…. And if I give some account of myself here in these few little sheets prefixed to my 'Journey thro' Italy,' you must kindly accept
"The Abridgment."
The first pages of the manuscript are occupied by Mrs. Piozzi with an account of her family and of her own early life. They contain in brief the same narrative that she gave in her "Autobiographical Memoirs," printed by Mr. Hayward, in his first volume. Here is a story, however, which we do not remember to have seen before.
"My heart was free, my head full of Authors, Actors, Literature in every shape; and I had a dear, dear friend, an old Dr. Collier, who said he was sixty-six years old, I remember, the day I was sixteen, and whose instructions I prized beyond all the gayeties of early life: nor have I ever passed a day since we parted in which I have not recollected with gratitude the boundless obligations that I owe him. He was intimate with the famous James Harris of Salisbury, Lord Malmesbury's father, of whom you have heard how Charles Townshend said, when he took his seat in the House of Commons,—'Who is this man?'—to his next neighbour; 'I never saw him before.' 'Who? Why, Harris the author, that wrote one book about Grammar [so he did] and one about Virtue.' 'What does he come here for?' replies Spanish Charles; 'he will find neither Grammar nor Virtue here.' Well, my dear old Dr. Collier had much of both, and delighted to shake the superflux of his full mind over mine, ready to receive instruction conveyed with so much tender assiduity."
In both her autobiographies, the printed as well as the manuscript, Mrs. Piozzi speaks in very cold and disparaging terms of her first husband, Mr. Thrale. Her marriage with him had not been a love-match; but we suspect that the long course of years had been unfavorable to his memory in her recollection, and that the blame with which his friends visited her second marriage, which was in all respects an affair of the heart, produced in her a certain bitterness of feeling toward Mr. Thrale, as if he had been the author of these reproaches. It is impossible to believe that he was as indifferent to her as she represents, and that her marriage with him was not moderately happy. Had it been otherwise, however well appearances might have been kept up, Dr. Johnson could hardly have been deceived concerning the truth, and would hardly have ventured to write to her in his letter of consolation upon Mr. Thrale's death in 1781,—
"He that has given you happiness in marriage, to a degree of which, without personal knowledge, I should have thought the description fabulous, can give you another mode of happiness as a mother."
One of her most decided intellectual characteristics was her versatility, or, to give it a harder name, what Johnson called her "instability of attention." Dulness was, in her code, the unpardonable sin. Variety was the charm of life, and of books. She never dwelt long on one idea. Her letters and her books are pieces of mosaic-work, the bits of material being put together without any regular pattern, but often with a pretty effect. Here is an illustration of her style.
"In a few years (our Letters tell the date) Johnson was introduced; and now I must laugh at a ridiculous Retrospection. When I was a very young wench, scarce twelve years old I trust, my notice was strongly attracted by a Mountebank in some town we were passing through. 'What a fine fellow!' said I; 'dear Papa, do ask him to dinner with us at our inn!—or, at least, Merry Andrew, because he could tell us such clever stories of his master.' My Father laughed sans intermission an hour by the dial, as Jacques once at Motley.—Yet did dear Mr. Conway's fancy for H.L.P.'s conversation grow up, at first, out of something not unlike this, when, his high-polished mind and fervid imagination taking fire from the tall Beacon bearing Dr. Johnson's fame above the clouds, he thought some information might perhaps be gained by talk with the old female who so long carried coals to it. She has told all, or nearly all, she knew,—
'And like poor Andrew must advance,
Mean mimic of her master's dance;—
But similes, like songs in love,
Describing much, too little prove.'
"So now, leaving Prior's pretty verses, and leaving Dr. Johnson too, who was himself severely censured for his rough criticism on a writer who had pleased all in our Augustan age of Literature, poor H.L.P. turns egotist at eighty, and tells her own adventures."