The reviewer quotes the remark, “She was perfectly aware of her degradation,” as resting on the personal responsibility of Miss Wynn, “who knew her in later life in Wales.”  The context shews that Miss Wynn (who did not know her) was simply repeating the impressions of Sir William Pepys, one of the bitterest opponents of the marriage, to whom she certainly never said anything derogatory to her second husband.  The uniform tenor of her letters and her conduct shew that she never regarded her second marriage as discreditable, and always took a high and independent, instead of a subdued or deprecating, tone with her alienated friends.  A bare statement of the treatment she received from them is surely no proof of conscious degradation.

In a letter to a Welsh neighbour, near the end of her life, some time in 1818, she says: 

“Mrs. Mostyn (her youngest daughter) has written again on the road back to Italy, where she likes the Piozzis above all people, she says, if they were not so proud of their family.  Would not that make one laugh two hours before one’s own death?  But I remember when Lady Egremont raised the whole nation’s ill will here, while the Saxons were wondering how Count Bruhle could think of marrying a lady born Miss Carpenter.  The Lombards doubted in the meantime of my being a gentlewoman by birth, because my first husband was a brewer.  A pretty world, is it not?  A Ship of Fooles, according to the old poem; and they will upset the vessel by and by.”

This is not the language of one who wished to apologise for a misalliance.

As to Piozzi’s assumed want of youth and good looks, Johnson’s knowledge of womankind, to say nothing of his self-love, should have prevented him from urging this as an insuperable objection.  He might have recollected the Roman matron in Juvenal, who considers the world well lost for an old and disfigured prize-fighter; or he might have quoted Spenser’s description of one—­

  “Who rough and rude and filthy did appear,
  Unseemly man to please fair lady’s eye,
  Yet he of ladies oft was loved dear,
  When fairer faces were bid standen by: 
  Oh! who can tell the bent of woman’s phantasy?”

Madame Campan, speaking of Caroline of Naples, the sister of Marie Antoinette, says, she had great reason to complain of the insolence of a Spaniard named Las Casas, whom the king, her father-in-law, had sent to persuade her to remove M. Acton[1] from the conduct of affairs and from about her person.  She had told him, to convince him of the nature of her sentiments, that she would have Acton painted and sculptured by the most celebrated artists of Italy, and send his bust and his portrait to the King of Spain, to prove to him that the desire of fixing a man of superior capacity could alone have induced her to confer the favour he enjoyed.  Las Casas had dared to reply, that she would be taking useless trouble; that a man’s ugliness did not always prevent him from pleasing, and that the King of Spain had too much experience to be ignorant that the caprices of a woman were inexplicable.  Johnson may surely be allowed credit for as much knowledge of the sex as the King of Spain.