with their names.  Mrs. Thrale and Mrs. Piozzi are two different persons.  One belongs to Streatham, the other to Bath; one is “always young and always pretty,” the other a rouged old woman.  But it is unfair to push the contrast too far.  Mrs. Piozzi at seventy or eighty was as sprightly, as good-natured, as Mrs. Thrale at thirty or forty.  She never lost her vivacity, never her desire to please.  But it is a sadly different thing to please Dr. Johnson, Burke, or Sir Joshua, and to please

  Those real genuine no-mistake Tom Thumbs,
  The little people fed on great men’s crumbs.

One of the most marked and least satisfactory expressions of Mrs. Piozzi’s character during her later years was a fancy that she took to Conway, a young and handsome actor, who appeared in Bath, where she was then living, in the year 1819.  From the time of her first acquaintance with him, till her death, in 1821, she treated him with the most flattering regard,—­with an affection, indeed, that might be called motherly, had there not been in it an element of excitement which was neither maternal nor dignified.  Conway was a gentleman in feeling, and seems to have had not only a grateful sense of the old lady’s partiality for him, but a sincere interest also in hearing from her of the days and the friends of her youth.  So she wrote letters to him, gave him books filled with annotations, (it was a favorite habit of hers to write notes on the margins of books,) wrote for him the story of her life, and drew on the resources of her marvellous memory for his amusement.  The old woman’s kindness was one of the few bright things in poor Conway’s unhappy life.  His temperament was morbidly sensitive; and when, in 1821, while acting in London, Theodore Hook attacked him in the most cruel and offensive manner in the columns of the “John Bull,” he threw up his engagement, determined to act no more in London, and for a time left the stage.  A year or two afterwards he came to this country, and met with a very considerable success.  But he fancied himself underrated, and, after performing in Philadelphia in the winter of 1826, he took passage for Charleston, and on the voyage threw himself overboard and was lost.  His effects were afterwards sold by auction in New York.  Among them were many interesting relics and memorials of Mrs. Piozzi.  Mr. Hayward mentions “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.’” But there were other books of far greater interest and value than this.  There was, as we have been informed, a copy of Malone’s Shakspeare, with numerous notes in the handwriting of Dr. Johnson,—­and a copy of “Prayers and Meditations by Samuel Johnson,” with several additional manuscript prayers, and Mrs. Piozzi’s name upon one of the fly-leaves.  But more curious still was a copy of Mrs. Piozzi’s “Journey through France, Italy, and Germany,” both volumes of which are full of marginal notes, while, inserted at the beginning and the end, are many pages of Mrs. Piozzi’s beautifully written manuscript, containing a narrative and anecdotes of portions of her life.  These volumes now lie before us,[B] and their unpublished contents are as lively, as entertaining, and as rich in autobiographic illustration, as any of the material of which Mr. Hayward’s recent book is composed.