only just
before she expired, but with the satisfaction of seeing her breathe
her last in peace.

"Nothing could behave with more tenderness and propriety than these
ladies, whose conduct, I am convinced, has been much misrepresented
and calumniated by those who have only attended to _one_ side of the
history: but may all that is past be now buried in oblivion!
Retrospection seldom improves our view of any subject. Sir John
Salusbury was too distant, the close of her illness being so rapid,
for us to entertain any expectation of his arriving in time to see
the dear deceased. He only reached Clifton late _last_ night. I have
not yet seen him; my whole time has been devoted to the afflicted
ladies."

[Footnote 1: On hearing of their arrival she is reported to have
said, "Now, I shall die in state."]

Mrs. Pennington told a friend that Mrs. Piozzi's last words were: "I
die in the trust and the fear of God." When she was attended by Sir
George Gibbes, being unable to articulate, she traced a coffin in the
air with her hands and lay calm. Her will, dated the 29th March,
1816, makes Sir John Salusbury Piozzi Salusbury heir to all her real
and personal property with the exception of some small bequests, Sir
James Fellowes and Sir John Salusbury being appointed executors.

A Memorandum signed by Sir James Fellowes runs thus:--"After I had
read the Will, Lady Keith and her two sisters present, said they had
long been prepared for the contents and for such a disposition of the
property, and they acknowledged the validity of the Will."

* * * * *

In any endeavour to solve the difficult problem of Mrs. Piozzi's
conduct and character, it should be kept in view that the highest
testimony to her worth has been volunteered by those with whom she
passed the last years of her life in the closest intimacy. She had
become completely reconciled to Madame D'Arblay, with whom she was
actively corresponding when she died, and her mixed qualities of head
and heart are thus summed up in that lady's Diary, May, 1821:

"I have lost now, just lost, my once most dear, intimate, and admired
friend, Mrs. Thrale Piozzi, who preserved her fine faculties, her
imagination, her intelligence, her powers of allusion and citation,
her extraordinary memory, and her almost unexampled vivacity, to the
last of her existence. She was in her eighty-second year, and yet
owed not her death to age nor to natural decay, but to