“I returned when I could, and the subject was over.  When all were gone, Mrs. Schwellenberg said, ’I have told it Mr. Fisher, that he drove you out from the room, and he says he won’t do it no more.’

“She told me next, that in the second volume I also, was mentioned.  Where she may have heard this I cannot gather, but it has given me a sickness at heart, inexpressible.  It is not that I expect severity; for at the time of that correspondence, at all times indeed previous to the marriage with Piozzi, if Mrs. Thrale loved not F. B., where shall we find faith in words, or give credit to actions.  But her present resentment, however unjustly incurred, of my constant disapprobation of her conduct, may prompt some note, or other mark, to point out her change of sentiment.  But let me try to avoid such painful expectations; at least not to dwell upon them.  O, little does she know how tenderly at this moment I could run into her arms, so often opened to receive me with a cordiality I believed inalienable.  And it was sincere then, I am satisfied; pride, resentment of disapprobation, and consciousness if unjustifiable proceedings—­these have now changed her; but if we met, and she saw and believed my faithful regard, how would she again feel all her own return!  Well, what a dream I am making!”

The ingrained worldliness of the diarist is ill-concealed by the mask of sensibility.  The correspondence that passed between the ladies during their temporary rupture (ante, p. 230) shews that there was nothing to prevent her from flying into her friend’s arms, could she have made up her mind to be seen on open terms of affectionate intimacy with one who was repudiated by the Court.  In a subsequent conversation with which the Queen honoured her on the subject, she did her best to impress her Majesty with the belief that Mrs. Piozzi’s conduct had rendered it impossible for her former friends to allude to her without regret, and she ended by thanking her royal mistress for her forbearance.

“Indeed,” cried she, with eyes strongly expressive of the complacency with which she heard me, “I have always spoken as little as possible upon this affair.  I remember but twice that I have named it:  once I said to the Bishop of Carlisle that I thought most of these letters had better have been spared the printing; and once to Mr. Langton, at the drawing-room I said, ’Your friend Dr. Johnson, Sir, has had many friends busy to publish his books, and his memoirs, and his meditations, and his thoughts; but I think he wanted one friend more.’  ‘What for, Ma’am?’ cried he.  ‘A friend to suppress them,’ I answered.  And, indeed, this is all I ever said about the business.”

Hannah More’s opinion of the Letters is thus expressed in her Memoirs: 

“They are such as ought to have been written but ought not to have been printed:  a few of them are very good:  sometimes he is moral, and sometimes he is kind.  The imprudence of editors and executors is an additional reason why men of parts should be afraid to die.[1] Burke said to me the other day, in allusion to the innumerable lives, anecdotes, remains, &c. of this great man, ’How many maggots have crawled out of that great body!’”