to Bath with Piozzi, and there was married.’  Now Baretti was a libeller, and not to be believed except upon compulsion; but if he does speak the truth, then the date, ‘Bath, June 30,’ of her circular letter, is a mystification; so is the passage in her letter to Johnson of July 4, about ‘sending it by the coach to prevent his coming.’  Of course she was mortally afraid of the Doctor’s coming, for if he had come he would have found her flown.  According to this supposition, she did not return to Bath at all, but remained perdue in London, with her lover, during the whole ‘Correspondence.’  Is it the true one?

“We cannot but suspect that it is, and that the solution of the whole of this little domestic mystery is to be found in a passage in the ‘Autobiographical Memoir,’ vol. i. p. 277.  There were two marriages:—­

“’Miss Nicholson went with us to Stonehenge, Wilton, &c., whence I returned to Bath to wait for Piozzi.  He was here on the eleventh day after he got Dobson’s letter.  In twenty-six more we were married in London by the Spanish ambassador’s chaplain, and returned hither to be married by Mr. Morgan, of Bath, at St. James’s Church, July 25, 1784.’

“Now in order to make this account tally with Baretti’s we must allow for a slight exertion of that talent for ‘white lies’ on the lady’s part, of which her friends, Johnson included, used half playfully and half in earnest to accuse her.  And we are afraid Baretti’s story does appear, on the face of it, the more probable of the two.  It does seem more likely, since they were to be married in London (of which Baretti knew nothing), that she met Piozzi secretly in London on his arrival, than that she performed the awkward evolutions of returning from Salisbury to Bath to wait for him there, then going to London in company with him to be married, and then back to Bath to be married over again.  But if this be so, then the London marriage most likely took place almost immediately on the meeting of the enamoured couple, and while the ‘Correspondence’ was going on.  In which case the words in the ‘Memoir’ ‘in twenty-six days,’ &c., were apparently intended, by a little bit of feminine adroitness, to appear to apply to this first marriage,—­of the suddenness of which she may have been ashamed,—­while they really apply to the conclusion of the whole affair by the second.  Will any one have the Croker-like curiosity to inquire whether any record remains of the dates of marriages celebrated by the Spanish ambassador’s chaplain?"[2]

[Footnote 1:  These words, italicised by the reviewer, contain the pith of the charge, which has no reference to her visit to London six weeks before.]

[Footnote 2:  Edinb.  Review, No. 230, p. 522.]