must be made for some degree of exaggerated praise.  In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.”  Is he upon oath in narrating an anecdote? or could he do more than swear to the best of his recollection and belief, if he was.  Boswell’s notes of conversations are wonderful results of a peculiar faculty, or combination of faculties, but the utmost they can be supposed to convey is the substance of what took place, in an exceedingly condensed shape, lighted up at intervals by the ipsissima verba, of the speaker.

“Whilst he went on talking triumphantly,” says Boswell, “I was fixed in admiration, and said to Mrs. Thrale, ’O for short-hand to take this down!’ ‘You’ll carry it all in your head,’ said she; ’a long head is as good as short-hand.’” On his boasting of the efficiency of his own system of short-hand to Johnson, he was put to the test and failed.

Mrs. Piozzi at once admits and accounts for the inferiority of her own collection of anecdotes, when she denounces “a trick which I have seen played on common occasions, of sitting steadily down at the other end of the room, to write at the moment what should be said in company, either by Dr. Johnson or to him, I never practised myself, nor approved of in another.  There is something so ill-bred, and so inclining to treachery in this conduct, that were it commonly adopted, all confidence would soon be exiled from society, and a conversation assembly room would become tremendous as a court of justice.”  This is a hit at Boswell, who (as regards Johnson himself) had full licence to take notes the best way he could.  Madame D’Arblay’s are much fuller, and bear a suspicious resemblance to the dialogues in her novels.

In a reply to Boswell, dated December 14th, 1793, Miss Seward pointedly remarks: 

“Dr. Johnson’s frequently-expressed contempt for Mrs. Thrale on account of that want of veracity which he imputes to her, at least as Mr. Boswell has recorded, either convicts him of narrating what Johnson never said, or Johnson himself of that insincerity of which there are too many instances, amidst all the recorded proofs of his unprovoked personal rudeness, to those with whom he conversed; for, this repeated contempt was coeval with his published letters, which express such high and perfect esteem for that lady, which declare that ’to hear her, was to hear Wisdom, that to see her, was to see Virtue.’”

Lord Macaulay and his advocate in the “Edinburgh Review,” who speak of Mrs. Piozzi’s “white lies,” have not convicted her of one; and Mr. Croker bears strong testimony to her accuracy.