“Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,
  And so obliging that he ne’er obliged.”

* * * * *

  “Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
  Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.”

Within living memory, elderly people of quality, both in writing and conversation, stuck to Lunnun, Brummagem, and Cheyny (China).  Charles Fox would not give up “Bour_dux_.”  Johnson pronounced “heard” heerd.  In 1800 “flirtation” was deemed a vulgar word.[1] Lord Byron wrote redde (for read, in the past tense), and Lord Dudley declined being helped to apple tart.  When, therefore, we find Mrs. Piozzi using words or idioms rejected by modern taste or fastidiousness, we must not be too ready to accuse her of ignorance or vulgarity.  I have commonly retained her original syntax, and her spelling, which frequently varies within a page.

[Footnote 1:  “Those abstractions of different pairs from the rest of the society, which I must call ‘flirtation,’ spite of the vulgarity of the term.”—­Journal kept during a Visit to Germany in 1799 and 1800.  Edited by the Dean of Westminster (not published), p. 38.]

Two days afterwards, Walpole returns to the charge in a letter to Miss Berry, which is alone sufficient to prove the worthlessness of his literary judgments:—­

“Read ‘Sindbad the Sailor’s Voyages,’ and you will be sick of AEneas’s.  What woful invention were the nasty poultry that dunged on his dinner, and ships on fire turned into Nereids!  A barn metamorphosed into a cascade in a pantomime is full as sublime an effort of genius....  I do not think the Sultaness’s narratives very natural or very probable, but there is a wildness in them that captivates.  However, if you could wade through two octavos of Dame Piozzi’s though’s and so’s and I trows, and cannot listen to seven volumes of Scheherezade’s narratives, I will sue for a divorce in foro Parnassi, and Boccalini shall be my proctor.”

A single couplet of Gifford’s was more damaging than all Walpole’s petulance: 

  “See Thrale’s grey widow with a satchel roam,
  And bring in pomp laborious nothings home."[1]

[Footnote 1:  “She, one evening, asked me abruptly if I did not remember the scurrilous lines in which she had been depicted by Gifford in his ‘Baviad and Moeviad.’  And, not waiting for my answer, for I was indeed too much embarrassed to give one quickly, she recited the verses in question, and added, ’how do you think “Thrale’s grey widow” revenged herself?  I contrived to get myself invited to meet him at supper at a friend’s house, (I think she said in Pall Mall), soon after the publication of his poem, sate opposite to him, saw that he was “perplexed in the extreme;” and smiling, proposed a glass of wine as a libation to our future good fellowship.  Gifford was sufficiently a man of the world to understand me, and nothing could be more courteous and entertaining than he was while we remained together.’”—­Piozziana.]