On the margin she has written: 

“Mrs. Greathead could scarcely be made to credit so hideous a fact, till I showed her the portrait (at a broker’s shop) of a woman suckling a cat.”

Cornelia Knight says:  “Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi passed the winter at Naples and gave little concerts.  He played with great taste on the pianoforte, and used to carry about a miniature one in his carriage.”

Whilst discussing the propriety of complying with the customs of the country, she relates: 

“Poor Dr. Goldsmith said once—­’I would advise every young fellow setting out in life to love gravy:’—­and added, that he had formerly seen a glutton’s eldest nephew disinherited, because his uncle never could persuade him to say he liked gravy.”

Mr. Forster thinks that the concluding anecdote conveys a false impression of one

  “Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll.”

“Mrs. Piozzi, in her travels, quite solemnly sets forth that poor Dr. Goldsmith said once, ’I would advise every young fellow setting forth in life to love gravy,’ alleging for it the serious reason that ’he had formerly seen a glutton’s eldest nephew disinherited because his uncle never could persuade him to say he liked gravy.’  Imagine the dullness that would convert a jocose saying of this kind into an unconscious utterance of grave absurdity."[1] In his index may be read:  “Mrs. Piozzi’s absurd instance of Goldsmith’s absurdity.”  Mrs. Piozzi does not quote the saying as an instance of absurdity; nor set it forth solemnly.  She repeats it, as an illustration of her argument, in the same semi-serious spirit in which it was originally hazarded.  Sydney Smith took a different view of this grave gravy question.  On a young lady’s declining gravy, he exclaimed:  “I have been looking all my life for a person who, on principle, rejected gravy:  let us vow eternal friendship.”

[Footnote 1:  Life of Goldsmith, vol. ii. p. 205.  Mr. Forster allows her the credit of discovering the lurking irony in Goldsmith’s verses on Cumberland, vol. ii. p. 203.]

The “British Synonymy” appeared in 1794.  It was thus assailed by Gifford: 

“Though ‘no one better knows his own house’ than I the vanity of this woman; yet the idea of her undertaking such a work had never entered my head; and I was thunderstruck when I first saw it announced.  To execute it with any tolerable degree of success, required a rare combination of talents, among the least of which may be numbered neatness of style, acuteness of perception, and a more than common accuracy of discrimination; and Mrs. Piozzi brought to the task, a jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter incapability of defining a single term in the language, and just as much Latin from a child’s Syntax, as sufficed to expose the ignorance she so anxiously labours to conceal.  ’If such a one be fit to write on Synonimes, speak.’  Pignotti himself laughs in his sleeve; and his countrymen, long since undeceived, prize the lady’s talents at their true worth,