writer had never stirred out of the parish of St. Giles.  Her Latin, French, and Italian, too, are so miserably spelt, that she had better have studied her own language before she floundered into other tongues.  Her friends plead that she piques herself on writing as she talks:  methinks, then, she should talk as she would write.  There are many indiscretions too in her work of which she will perhaps be told though Baretti is dead.”

Miss Seward, much to her credit, repeated to Mrs. Piozzi both the praise and the blame she had expressed to others.  On December 21st, 1789, she writes: 

“Suffer me now to speak to you of your highly ingenious, instructive, and entertaining publication; yet shall it be with the sincerity of friendship, rather than with the flourish of compliment.  No work of the sort I ever read possesses, in an equal degree, the power of placing the reader in the scenes and amongst the people it describes.  Wit, knowledge, and imagination illuminate its pages—­but the infinite inequality of the style!—­Permit me to acknowledge to you what I have acknowledged to others, that it excites my exhaustless wonder, that Mrs. Piozzi, the child of genius, the pupil of Johnson, should pollute, with the vulgarisms of unpolished conversation, her animated pages!—­that, while she frequently displays her power of commanding the most chaste and beautiful style imaginable, she should generally use those inelegant, those strange dids, and does, and thoughs, and toos, which produce jerking angles, and stop-short abruptness, fatal at once to the grace and ease of the sentence;—­which are, in language, what the rusty black silk handkerchief and the brass ring are upon the beautiful form of the Italian countess she mentions, arrayed in embroidery, and blazing in jewels.”

Mrs. Piozzi’s theory was that books should he written in the same colloquial and idiomatic language which is employed by cultivated persons in conversation, “Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;” and vulgar she certainly was not, although she sometimes indulged her fondness for familiarity too far.  The period was unluckily chosen for carrying such a theory into practice; for Johnson’s authority had discountenanced idiomatic writing, whilst many phrases and forms of speech, which would not be endured now, were tolerated in polite society.

The laws of spelling, too, were unfixed or vague, and those of pronunciation, which more or less affect spelling, still more so.  “When,” said Johnson, “I published the plan of my dictionary, Lord Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to seat, and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it grait.  Now here were two men of the highest rank, one the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely.”  Mrs. Piozzi has written on the margin:—­“Sir William was in the right.”  Two well-known couplets of Pope imply similar changes:—­