“Before such merits all objections fly,
  Pritchard’s genteel, and Garrick’s six feet high.”

Conway was six feet high, and a very handsome man to boot; but his advantages were purely physical; not a spark of genius animated his fine features and commanding figure, and he was battling for a moderate share of provincial celebrity, when Mrs. Piozzi fell in with him at Bath.  It has been rumoured in Flintshire that she wished to marry him, and offered Sir John Salusbury a large sum in ready money (which she never possessed) to give up Brynbella (which he could not give up), that she might settle it on the new object of her affections.  But none of the letters or documents that have fallen in my way afford even plausibility to the rumour, and some of the testamentary papers in which his name occurs, go far towards discrediting the belief that her attachment ever went beyond admiration and friendship expressed in exaggerated terms.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Since the appearance of the first edition of this work, it has been stated on the authority of a distinguished man of letters that Conway shewed the late Charles Mathews a letter from Mrs. Piozzi, offering marriage.—­New Monthly Magazine (edited by Mr. Harrison Ainsworth) for April, 1861.]

Conway threw himself overboard and was drowned in a voyage from New York to Charleston in 1828.  His effects were sold at New York, and amongst them a copy of the folio edition of Young’s “Night Thoughts,” in which he had made a note of its having been presented to him by his “dearly attached friend, the celebrated Mrs. Piozzi.”  In the preface to “Love Letters of Mrs. Piozzi, Written when she was Eighty, to William Augustus Conway,” published in London in 1842, it is stated that the originals, seven in number, were purchased by an American “lady,” who permitted a “gentleman” to take copies and use them as he might think fit.  What this “gentleman” thought fit, was to publish them with a catchpenny title and an alleged extract by way of motto to sanction it.  The genuineness of the letters is doubtful, and the interpolation of three or four sentences would alter their entire tenor.  But taken as they stand, their language is not warmer than an old woman of vivid fancy and sensibility might have deemed warranted by her age.  “Tell Mr. Johnson I love him exceedingly,” is the mission given by the old Countess of Eglinton to Boswell in 1778. L’age n’a point de sexe; and no one thought the worse of Madame Du Deffand for the impassioned tone in which she addressed Horace Walpole, whose dread of ridicule induced him to make a most ungrateful return to her fondness.[1] Years before the formation of this acquaintance, Mrs. Piozzi had acquired the difficult art of growing old; je sais vieillir:  she dwells frequently but naturally on her age:  she contemplates the approach of death with firmness and without self-deception:  and her elasticity of spirit never for a moment suggests the image of an antiquated coquette.  Of the seven letters in question, the one cited as most compromising is the sixth, in which Conway is exhorted to bear patiently a rebuff he had just received from some younger beauty: