at liberty? Would I go to Mrs. Aston and Mrs. Porter, and all the old places, and sigh to find that my old friends are gone? Would I recall plans of life which I never brought into practice, and hopes of excellence which I once presumed and never have attained? Would I compare what I now am with what I once expected to have been?" And he adds: "If you please, madam, we will have an end of this, and contrive some other wishes. I wish I had you in an evening, and I wish I had you in a morning; and I wish I could have a little talk, and see a little frolick. For all this I must stay; but life will not stay." Miss Burney was also in London, drinking tea in Bolt Court, calling upon Sophy, and picking up gossip among her high friends about Lord George Gordon, who was now safe in the Tower. The prim little worldling would, in spite of her airs, be fine company now at Brighton. "My master," Mrs. Thrale writes to her, "is gone out riding, and we are to drink tea with Lady Rothes; after which the Steyne hours begin, and we cluster round Thomas's shop and contend for the attention of Lord John Clinton, a man who could, I think, be of consequence in no other place upon earth, though a very well-informed and modest-mannered boy. Dr. Pepys is resolutely and profoundly silent; and Lady Shelley, having heard wits commended, has taken up a new character, and says not only the severest, but the crudest things you ever heard in your life. Here is a Mrs. K———, too, sister to the Duchess of M———, who is very uncompanionable indeed, and talks of Tumbridge. These, however, are all the people we ever speak to—oh, yes, the Drummonds, but they are scarce blest with utterance." But, while she complains of mere tedium, her heart is heavy with a sense of coming evil. Another Parliamentary election is pending, while her husband's health causes her hourly anxiety for his life; her letters to Johnson are few and far between, and with but little "frolick" in them. The philosopher grows captious. "I hope," he wrote, "you have no design of stealing away to Italy before the election, nor of leaving me behind you, though I am not only seventy, but seventy-one. Could you not let me lose a year in round numbers? Sweetly, sweetly sings Dr. Swift:
Some dire misfortune to portend,
No enemy can match a friend.
But what if I am seventy-two? I remember Sulpitius says of Saint Martin (now that's above your reading), 'Est animus victor annorum et senectuti cedere nescius.' Match me this among your young folks! If you try to plague me, I shall tell you that, according to Galen, life begins to decline from thirty-five." And again, in still more irritable mood: "You write of late very seldom. I wish you would write upon subjects; anything to keep me alive. You have your beaux and your flatterers, and here am poor I, forced to flatter myself; and any good of myself I am not very easy to believe, so that I really live but a sorry life. What shall I do with Lyttelton's life? I can make a short life and conclude. Why did not you like Collins, and Gay, and Blackmore, as well as Akenside?" The lady takes up her pen at last, and can write brilliantly enough when she chooses, and whet his appetite for more. She has been reading his last "Lives," and has some piquant criticism for each of them. Then:—"And now, if you call this flattery, I can leave off in a minute without bidding; for, since you lions have no skill in dandling the kid, we kids can expect but rough returns for caresses bestowed upon our haughty monarch. So be diligent, dear sir, and have done with these men that have been buried these hundred years, and don't sit making verses that never will be written; but sit down steadily and finish their lives who did do something. And then, think a little about mine, which has not been a happy one, for all you tease me so concerning the pleasures I enjoy, and the flattery I receive, all which has nothing to do with comfort for the present distress; and sometimes I am angry when I read such stuff."
It was about the time when these letters were travelling to and fro between Johnson and Mrs. Thrale that, walking with Queeney early one morning on the cliff at Brighton, Mrs. Thrale saw Piozzi standing at the library door, and accosted him in Italian. Her impromptu proposal that he should give Miss Thrale a lesson or two was on that occasion coldly declined. He had come to Brighton for his health, was composing some music, and lived in great retirement. He did not remember her, in fact; and the ladies continued their walk, disappointedly. On their way homey passing again the library door, Piozzi, no doubt instructed in the mean time by the gossiping librarian, started out of the shop, apologized for not knowing Mrs. Thrale before, and protested his readiness to obey her commands. And so their acquaintance began. In her diary occur the fol-
