Taylor, Adams, and Hector will furnish you with juvenile anecdotes, and Baretti will give you all the rest that you have not already, for I think Baretti is a lyar only when he speaks of himself.  Oh, said I, Baretti told me yesterday that you got by heart six pages of Machiavel’s History once, and repeated them thirty years afterwards word for word.  Why this is a gross lye, said Johnson, I never read the book at all.  Baretti too told me of you (said I) that you once kept sixteen cats in your chamber, and yet they scratched your legs to such a degree, you were forced to use mercurial plaisters for some time after.  Why this (replied Johnson) is an unprovoked lye indeed; I thought the fellow would not have broken through divine and human laws thus to make puss his heroine, but I see I was mistaken.”

[Footnote 1:  Sic in the MS. See ante, p. 202.]

On February 3rd, 1785, Horace Walpole writes from London to Sir Horace Mann at Florence:—­“I have lately been lent a volume of poems composed and printed at Florence, in which another of our exheroines, Mrs. Piozzi, has a considerable share; her associates three of the English bards who assisted in the little garland which Ramsay the painter sent me.  The present is a plump octavo; and if you have not sent me a copy by our nephew, I should be glad if you could get one for me:  not for the merit of the verses, which are moderate enough and faint imitations of our good poets; but for a short and sensible and genteel preface by La Piozzi, from whom I have just seen a very clever letter to Mrs. Montagu, to disavow a jackanapes who has lately made a noise here, one Boswell, by Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson.  In a day or two we expect another collection by the same Signora.”

Her associates were Greathead, Merry, and Parsons.  The volume in question was “The Florence Miscellany.”  “A copy,” says Mr. Lowndes, “having fallen into the hands of W. Grifford, gave rise to his admirable satire of the ‘Baviad and Moeviad.’”

In his Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides, Boswell makes Johnson say of Mrs. Montagu’s “Essay on Shakespeare”:  “Reynolds is fond of her book, and I wonder at it; for neither I, nor Beauclerc, nor Mrs. Thrale could get through it.”  This is what Mrs. Piozzi wrote to disavow, so far as she was personally concerned.  In a subsequent letter from Vienna, she says:  “Mrs. Montagu has written to me very sweetly.”  The other collection expected from her was her “Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, during the last Twenty Years of his Life.  Printed for T. Cadell in the Strand, 1786.”

She opened the matter to Mr. Cadell in the following terms: 

“Florence, 7th June, 1785.