SOURCE: "Madame D'Arblay, in a letter to Madame de Staël in May, 1821," in Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (1778-1840), Volume VI, edited by Charlotte Barrett, Macmillan and Co., 1905, pp. 399-400.

In the following excerpt from a collection of her diaries and letters, Burney (Madame D'Arblay) comments on Piozzi's character and compares her to Madame de Staël Holstein.

I have lost now, just lost, my once most dear, intimate, and admired friend, Mrs. Thrale Piozzi,¹ 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 the effects of a fall in a journey from Penzance to Clifton.² On her eightieth birthday she gave a great ball, concert...