s, then, she should talk as she would write. There are
many indiscretions too in her work of which she will perhaps be told
though Baretti is dead."

Miss Seward, much to her credit, repeated to Mrs. Piozzi both the
praise and the blame she had expressed to others. On December 21st,
1789, she writes:

"Suffer me now to speak to you of your highly ingenious, instructive,
and entertaining publication; yet shall it be with the sincerity of
friendship, rather than with the flourish of compliment. No work of
the sort I ever read possesses, in an equal degree, the power of
placing the reader in the scenes and amongst the people it describes.
Wit, knowledge, and imagination illuminate its pages--but the
infinite inequality of the style!--Permit me to acknowledge to you
what I have acknowledged to others, that it excites my exhaustless
wonder, that Mrs. Piozzi, the child of genius, the pupil of Johnson,
should pollute, with the vulgarisms of unpolished conversation, her
animated pages!--that, while she frequently displays her power of
commanding the most chaste and beautiful style imaginable, she should
generally use those inelegant, those strange _dids_, and _does_, and
_thoughs_, and _toos_, which produce jerking angles, and stop-short
abruptness, fatal at once to the grace and ease of the
sentence;--which are, in language, what the rusty black silk
handkerchief and the brass ring are upon the beautiful form of the
Italian countess she mentions, arrayed in embroidery, and blazing in
jewels."

Mrs. Piozzi's theory was that books should he written in the same
colloquial and idiomatic language which is employed by cultivated
persons in conversation, "Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;"
and vulgar she certainly was not, although she sometimes indulged her
fondness for familiarity too far. The period was unluckily chosen for
carrying such a theory into practice; for Johnson's authority had
discountenanced idiomatic writing, whilst many phrases and forms of
speech, which would not be endured now, were tolerated in polite
society.

The laws of spelling, too, were unfixed or vague, and those of
pronunciation, which more or less affect spelling, still more so.
"When," said Johnson, "I published the plan of my dictionary, Lord
Chesterfield told me that the word _great_ should be pronounced so as
to rhyme to _state_; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it
should be pronounced so as to rhyme to _seat_, and that none but