According to the author of “Piozziana,” who became acquainted with her late in life, “She was short, and though well-proportioned, broad, and deep-chested.  Her hands were muscular and almost coarse, but her writing was, even in her eightieth year, exquisitely beautiful; and one day, while conversing with her on the subject of education, she observed that ’all Misses now-a-days, wrote so like each other, that it was provoking;’ adding, ’I love to see individuality of character, and abhor sameness, especially in what is feeble and flimsy.’  Then, spreading her hand, she said, ’I believe I owe what you are pleased to call my good writing, to the shape of this hand, for my uncle, Sir Robert Cotton, thought it was too manly to be employed in writing like a boarding-school girl; and so I came by my vigorous, black manuscript.’”

It was fortunate that the hand-writing compensated for the hands; and as she attached great importance to blood and race, that she did not live to read Byron’s “thoroughbred and tapering fingers,” or to be shocked by his theory that “the hand is almost the only sign of blood which aristocracy can generate.”  Her Bath friend appeals to a miniature (engraved for this work) by Roche, of Bath, taken when she was in her seventy-seventh year.  Like Cromwell, who told the painter that if he softened a harsh line or so much as omitted a wart, he should never be paid a sixpence,—­she desired the artist to paint her face deeply rouged, which it always was[1], and to introduce a trivial deformity of the jaw, produced by a horse treading on her as she lay on the ground after a fall.  In this respect she proved superior to Johnson; who, with all his love of truth, could not bear to be painted with his defects.  He was displeased at being drawn holding a pen close to his eye; and on its being suggested that Reynolds had painted himself holding his ear in his hand to catch the sound, he replied:  “He may paint himself as deaf as he pleases, but I will not be Blinking Sam.”

[Footnote 1:  “One day I called early at her house, and as I entered her drawing-room, she passed me, saying, ’Dear Sir, I will be with you in a few minutes; but, while I think of it, I must go to my dressing-closet and paint my face, which I forgot to do this morning.’  Accordingly she soon returned, wearing the requisite quantity of bloom; which, it must be noticed, was not in the least like that of youth and beauty.  I then said that I was surprised she should so far sacrifice to fashion, as to take that trouble.  Her answer was that, as I might conclude, her practice of painting did not proceed from any silly compliance with Bath fashion, or any fashion; still less, if possible, from the desire of appearing younger than she was, but from this circumstance, that in early life she had worn rouge, as other young persons did in her day, as a part of dress; and after continuing the habit for some years, discovered that it had introduced a dull yellow colour into her complexion, quite unlike that of her natural skin, and that she wished to conceal the deformity.”—­Piozziana.]