SOURCE: An introduction to Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the last twenty years of his Life, by Hesther Lynch Piozzi, edited by S. C. Roberts, Cambridge at the University Press, 1925, pp. xxxvii-1.

In the excerpt below, Roberts provides an overview of Piozzi's writings.

At an early age, Hester Salusbury had an itch for writing:

It was then, too, when I was about thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old, that I took a fancy to write in the "St James's Chronicle," unknown to my parents and my tutor too: it was my sport to see them reading, studying, blaming or praising their own little whimsical girl's performance. . . . The little poetical trash I did write in earnest, is preserved somewhere, perhaps in Thraliana, which I promised to Mrs Mostyn: perhaps in a small repository I prepared for dear Salusbury. There is a little poem called "Offley...