SOURCE: "Mrs. Piozzi's Letters," in Essays on the Eighteenth Century: Presented to David Nichol Smith in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1945, pp. 155-67.

In the following essay, Clifford discusses the content and style of Piozzi's letters, concluding that "few can read her letters without gaining an intimate knowledge of the woman herself."

Ί have for this week past been employing my Mind in the recollection of all the civil Things that ever were said in Praise of my Merit as a Letter writer.' So wrote Hester Lynch Salusbury, a young lady of 22, in 1763. Nearly two hundred years later we are still interested in this same lady and her correspondence—not that of Miss Salusbury, to be sure, but that of her later years as Mrs. Thrale and Mrs. Piozzi. We still find pleasure in reading the letters that her contemporaries thought so delightful...