A very distinguished friend, whose masterly works are the result of a consummate study of the passions, after dwelling on the “impertinence” of the hostility her marriage provoked, writes:  “She was evidently a very vain woman, but her vanity was sensitive, and very much allied to that exactingness of heart which gives charm and character to woman.  I suspect it was this sensitiveness which made her misunderstood by her children.”  The justness of this theory of her conduct is demonstrated by the self-communings in “Thraliana;” and she misunderstood them as much as they misunderstood her.  By her own showing she had little reason to complain of what they did in the matter of the marriage; it was what they said, or rather did not say, that irritated her.  She yearned for sympathy, which was sternly, chillingly, almost insultingly withheld.

In 1800, she wrote thus to Dr. Gray:  “What a good example have you set them (his children)! going to visit dear mama at Twickenham—­long may they keep their parents, pretty creatures! and long may they have sense to know and feel that no love is like parental affection,—­the only good perhaps which cannot be flung away."[1]

[Footnote 1:  “We may have many friends in life, but we can only have one mother:  a discovery, says Gray, which I never made till it was too late.”—­ROGERS.]

Madame D’Arblay states that her father was not disinclined to admit Mrs. Piozzi’s right to consult her own notions of happiness in the choice of a second husband, had not the paramount duty of watching over her unmarried daughters interfered.  But they might have accompanied her to Italy as was once contemplated; and had they done so, they would have seen everything and everybody in it under the most favourable auspices.  The course chosen for them by the eldest was the most perilous of the two submitted for their choice.  The lady, Miss Nicholson, whom their mother had so carefully selected as their companion, soon left them; or according to another version was summarily dismissed by Miss Thrale (afterwards Viscountess Keith), who fortunately was endowed with high principle, firmness, and energy.  She could not take up her abode with either of her guardians, one a bachelor under forty, the other the prototype of Briggs, the old miser in “Caecilia.”  She could not accept Johnson’s hospitality in Bolt Court, still tenanted by the survivors of his menagerie; where, a few months later, she sate by his death-bed and received his blessing.  She therefore called to her aid an old nurse-maid, named Tib, who had been much trusted by her father, and with this homely but respectable duenna, she shut herself up in the house at Brighton, limited her expenses to her allowance of 200_l._ a-year, and resolutely set about the course of study which seemed best adapted to absorb attention and prevent her thoughts from wandering.  Hebrew, Mathematics, Fortification, and Perspective have been named to me by one of trusted friends as specimens of her acquirements and her pursuits.