[Footnote 1:  In reference to the late Lord Campbell’s “Lives of the Lord Chancellors,” it was remarked, that, as regards persons who had attained the dignity, the threatened continuation of the work had added a new pang to death.  I am assured by the Ex-Chancellor to whom I attributed this joke, that it was made by Sir Charles Wetherell at a dinner at Lincoln’s-Inn.]

Miss Seward writes to Mrs. Knowles, April, 1788: 

“And now what say you to the last publication of your sister wit, Mrs. Piozzi?  It is well that she has had the good nature to extract almost all the corrosive particles from the old growler’s letters.  By means of her benevolent chemistry, these effusions of that expansive but gloomy spirit taste more oily and sweet than one could have imagined possible.”

The letters contained two or three passages relating to Baretti, which exasperated him to the highest pitch.  One was in a letter from Johnson, dated July 15th, 1775: 

“The doctor says, that if Mr. Thrale comes so near as Derby without seeing us, it will be a sorry trick.  I wish, for my part, that he may return soon, and rescue the fair captives from the tyranny of B——­i.  Poor B——­i! do not quarrel with him; to neglect him a little will be sufficient.  He means only to be frank, and manly, and independent, and perhaps, as you say, a little wise.  To be frank, he thinks is to be cynical, and to be independent, is to be rude.  Forgive him, dearest lady, the rather, because of his misbehaviour, I am afraid he learned part of me.  I hope to set him hereafter a better example.”

The most galling was in a letter of hers to Dr. Johnson: 

“How does Dr. Taylor do?  He was very kind I remember when my thunder-storm came first on, so was Count Manucci, so was Mrs. Montagu, so was everybody.  The world is not guilty of much general harshness, nor inclined I believe to increase pain which they do not perceive to be deserved.—­Baretti alone tried to irritate a wound so very deeply inflicted, and he will find few to approve his cruelty.  Your friendship is our best cordial; continue it to us, dear Sir, and write very soon.”

In the margin of the printed copy is written, “Cruel, cruel Baretti.”  He had twitted her, whilst mourning over a dead child, with having killed it by administering a quack medicine instead of attending to the physician’s prescriptions; a charge which he acknowledged and repeated in print.  He published three successive papers in “The European Magazine” for 1788, assailing her with the coarsest ribaldry.  “I have just read for the first time,” writes Miss Seward in June, 1788, “the base, ungentleman-like, unmanly abuse of Mrs. Piozzi by that Italian assassin, Baretti.  The whole literary world should unite in publicly reprobating such venomed and foul-mouthed railing.”  He died soon afterwards, May 5th, 1789, and the notice of him in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” begins:  “Mrs. Piozzi has reason to rejoice in the death of Mr. Baretti, for he had a very long memory and malice to relate all he knew.”  And a good deal that he did not know, into the bargain; as when he prints a pretended conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Thrale about Piozzi, which he afterwards admits to be a gratuitous invention and rhetorical figure of his own, for conveying what is a foolish falsehood on the face of it.