“I hoped,” she says, “in defiance of probability, to live my sorrows out, and marry the man of my choice.  Health, however, began to give way, as my Letters to Dr. Johnson testify; and when my kind physician, Dobson, from Liverpool, found it in actual and positive danger,—­’Now,’ said he, ’I have respected your delicacy long enough; tell me at once who he is that holds such a life in his power:  for write to him I must and will; it is my sacred duty.’  ‘Dear Sir,’ said I, ’the difficulty is to keep him at a distance.  Speak to these cruel girls, if you will speak.’  ‘One of whose lives your assiduous tenderness,’ cried he, ’saved, with my little help, only a month ago!’—­and ran up-stairs to the ladies.  ‘We know,’ was their reply, ’that she is fretting after a fellow; but where he is—­you may ask her—­we know not.’  ’He is at Milan, with his friend the Marquis of Aracieli,’ said I,—­’from whom I had a letter last week, requesting Piozzi’s recall from banishment, as he gallantly terms it, little conscious of what I suffer.’  So we wrote; and he returned on the eleventh day after receiving the letter.  Meanwhile my health mended, and I waited on the lasses to their own house at Brighthelmstone, leaving Miss Nicholson, a favorite friend of theirs, and all their intolerably insolent servants, with them.  Piozzi’s return accelerated the recovery of your poor friend, and we married in both Churches,—­at St. James’, Bath, on St. James’ Day, 1784,—­thirty-five years ago now that I write this Abridgment.  When we came to examine Papers, however, our attorney, Greenland, discovered a suppression of fifteen hundred pounds, which helped pay our debts, discharge the mortgage, etc., as Piozzi, like Portia, permitted me not to sleep by his side with an unquiet soul.  He settled everything with his own money, depended on God and my good constitution for our living long and happily together,—­and so we did, twenty-five years,—­said change of scenery would complete the cure, and carried me off in triumph, as he called it, to shew his friends in Italy the foreign wife he had so long been sighing for.  ‘Ah, Madam!’ said the Marquis, when he first saluted me, ‘we used to blame dear Piozzi;—­now we envy him!’”

Of Mrs. Piozzi’s journey on the Continent we shall speak in another article.  After a residence abroad of two years and a half, she and her husband returned to London in March, 1787.  Mrs. Piozzi had come home determined to resume, if it were possible, her old place in society, and to assert herself against the attacks of wits and newspapers, and the coldness of old friends.  She had been hardly and unfairly dealt with by the public, in regard to her marriage.  The appearance, during her absence, of her volume of “Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson” had given unfriendly critics an opportunity to pass harsh judgment upon her literary merits, and had excited the jealousy of rival biographers of the dead lion.  Boswell, Hawkins, Baretti, Chalmers, Peter Pindar, Gifford,