[Footnote 1:  M. Acton, as Madame Campan calls him, was a member of the ancient English family of that name.  He succeeded to the baronetcy in 1791, and was the grandfather of Sir John E.E.  Dalberg Acton, Bart., M.P., &c.]

Others were simultaneously accusing her of marrying a young man to indulge a sensual inclination.  The truth is, Piozzi was a few months older than herself, and was neither ugly nor disagreeable.  Madame D’Arblay has been already quoted as to his personal appearance, and Miss Seward (October, 1787) writes: 

“I am become acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi.  Her conversation is that bright wine of the intellects which has no lees.  Dr. Johnson told me truth when he said she had more colloquial wit than most of our literary women; it is indeed a fountain of perpetual flow.  But he did not tell me truth when he asserted that Piozzi was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession.  Mr. Piozzi is a handsome man, in middle life, with gentle, pleasing, unaffected manners, and with very eminent skill in his profession.  Though he has not a powerful or fine-toned voice, he sings with transcending grace and expression.  I am charmed with his perfect expression on his instrument.  Surely the finest sensibilities must vibrate through his frame, since they breathe so sweetly through his song.”

The concluding sentence contains what Partridge would call a non sequitur, for the finest musical sensibility may coexist with the most commonplace qualities.  But the lady’s evidence is clear on the essential point; and another passage from her letters may assist us in determining the precise nature of Johnson’s feelings towards Mrs. Piozzi, and the extent to which his later language and conduct regarding her were influenced by pique: 

“Love is the great softener of savage dispositions.  Johnson had always a metaphysic passion for one princess or another:  first, the rustic Lucy Porter, before he married her nauseous mother; next the handsome, but haughty, Molly Aston; next the sublimated, methodistic Hill Boothby, who read her bible in Hebrew; and lastly, the more charming Mrs. Thrale, with the beauty of the first, the learning of the second, and with more worth than a bushel of such sinners and such saints.  It is ridiculously diverting to see the old elephant forsaking his nature before these princesses: 

  “’To make them mirth, use all his might, and writhe,
  His mighty form disporting.’

“This last and long-enduring passion for Mrs. Thrale was, however, composed perhaps of cupboard love, Platonic love, and vanity tickled and gratified, from morn to night, by incessant homage.  The two first ingredients are certainly oddly heterogeneous; but Johnson, in religion and politics, in love and in hatred, was composed of such opposite and contradictory materials, as never before met in the human mind.  This is the reason why folk are never weary of talking, reading, and writing about a man—­