ly and calmly compiled,
affords an additional guarantee for her accuracy.

Her taste for reading never left her or abated to the last. In
reference to a remark (in Boswell) on the irksomeness of books to
people of advanced age, she writes: "Not to me at eighty years old:
being grieved that year (1819) particularly, I was forced upon study
to relieve my mind, and it had the due effect. I wrote this note in
1820."

She sometimes gives anecdotes of authors. Thus, in the letter just
quoted, she says: "Lord Byron protests his wife was a fortune without
money, a belle without beauty, and a blue-stocking without either wit
or learning." But her literary information grew scanty as she grew
old: "The literary world (she writes in 1821) is to me terra
incognita, far more deserving of the name, now Parry and Ross are
returned, than any part of the polar regions:" and her opinions of
the rising authors are principally valuable as indications of the
obstacles which budding reputations must overcome. "Pindar's fine
remark respecting the different effects of music on different
characters, holds equally true of genius: so many as are not
delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder
either recognises it as a projected form of his own being, that moves
before him with a glory round its head, or recoils from it as a
spectre."[1] The octogenarian critic of the Johnsonian school recoils
from "Frankenstein" as from an incarnation of the Evil Spirit: she
does not know what to make of the "Tales of my Landlord"; and she
inquires of an Irish acquaintance whether she retained recollection
enough of her own country to be entertained with "that strange
caricature, Castle Rack Rent." Contemporary judgments such as these
(not more extravagant than Horace Walpole's) are to the historian of
literature what fossil remains are to the geologist.

[Footnote 1: Coleridge, "Aids to Reflection."]

Although perhaps no biographical sketch was ever executed, as a
labour of love, without an occasional attack of what Lord Macaulay
calls the _Lues Boswelliana_ or fever of admiration, I hope it is
unnecessary for me to say that I am not setting up Mrs. Piozzi as a
model letter-writer, or an eminent author, or a pattern of the
domestic virtues, or a fitting object of hero or heroine worship in
any capacity. All I venture to maintain is, that her life and
character, if only for the sake of the "associate forms," deserve to
be vindicated aga