In both her autobiographies, the printed as well as the manuscript, Mrs. Piozzi speaks in very cold and disparaging terms of her first husband, Mr. Thrale.  Her marriage with him had not been a love-match; but we suspect that the long course of years had been unfavorable to his memory in her recollection, and that the blame with which his friends visited her second marriage, which was in all respects an affair of the heart, produced in her a certain bitterness of feeling toward Mr. Thrale, as if he had been the author of these reproaches.  It is impossible to believe that he was as indifferent to her as she represents, and that her marriage with him was not moderately happy.  Had it been otherwise, however well appearances might have been kept up, Dr. Johnson could hardly have been deceived concerning the truth, and would hardly have ventured to write to her in his letter of consolation upon Mr. Thrale’s death in 1781,—­

“He that has given you happiness in marriage, to a degree of which, without personal knowledge, I should have thought the description fabulous, can give you another mode of happiness as a mother.”

One of her most decided intellectual characteristics was her versatility, or, to give it a harder name, what Johnson called her “instability of attention.”  Dulness was, in her code, the unpardonable sin.  Variety was the charm of life, and of books.  She never dwelt long on one idea.  Her letters and her books are pieces of mosaic-work, the bits of material being put together without any regular pattern, but often with a pretty effect.  Here is an illustration of her style.

“In a few years (our Letters tell the date) Johnson was introduced; and now I must laugh at a ridiculous Retrospection.  When I was a very young wench, scarce twelve years old I trust, my notice was strongly attracted by a Mountebank in some town we were passing through.  ’What a fine fellow!’ said I; ’dear Papa, do ask him to dinner with us at our inn!—­or, at least, Merry Andrew, because he could tell us such clever stories of his master.’  My Father laughed sans intermission an hour by the dial, as Jacques once at Motley.—­Yet did dear Mr. Conway’s fancy for H.L.P.’s conversation grow up, at first, out of something not unlike this, when, his high-polished mind and fervid imagination taking fire from the tall Beacon bearing Dr. Johnson’s fame above the clouds, he thought some information might perhaps be gained by talk with the old female who so long carried coals to it.  She has told all, or nearly all, she knew,—­

  ’And like poor Andrew must advance,
  Mean mimic of her master’s dance;—­
  But similes, like songs in love,
  Describing much, too little prove.’

“So now, leaving Prior’s pretty verses, and leaving Dr. Johnson too, who was himself severely censured for his rough criticism on a writer who had pleased all in our Augustan age of Literature, poor H.L.P. turns egotist at eighty, and tells her own adventures.”