Horace Walpole, all had their fling at her.  Never was an innocent woman in private life more unfeelingly abused, or her name dragged before the public more wantonly, in squibs and satires, jests and innuendoes.  The women who transgress social conventionalities are often treated as if they had violated the rules of morals.  But she was not to be put down in this way.  Her temperament enabled her to escape much of the pain which a more sensitive person would have suffered.  She hardened herself against the malice of her satirists; and in doing so, her character underwent an essential change.  She was truly happy with Piozzi, and she preserved, by strength of will, an inexhaustible fund of good spirits.

On first reaching London, “we drove,” she writes in the Conway MSS., “to the Royal Hotel in Pall Mall, and, arriving early, I proposed going to the Play.  There was a small front box, in those days, which held only two; it made the division, or connexion, with the side boxes, and, being unoccupied, we sat in it, and saw Mrs. Siddons act Imogen, I well remember, and Mrs. Jordan, Priscilla Tomboy.  Mr. Piozzi was amused, and the next day was spent in looking at houses, counting the cards left by old acquaintances, etc.  The lady-daughters came, behaved with cold civility, and asked what I thought of their decision concerning Cecilia, then at school—­No reply was made, or a gentle one; but she was the first cause of contention among us.  The lawyers gave her into my care, and we took her home to our new habitation in Hanover Square, which we opened with Music, cards, etc., on, I think, the 22 March.  Miss Thrales refused their company; so we managed as well as we could.  Our affairs were in good order, and money ready for spending.  The World, as it is called, appeared good-humored, and we were soon followed, respected, and admired.  The summer months sent us about visiting and pleasuring, ... and after another gay London season, Streatham Park, unoccupied by tenants, called us as if really home.  Mr. Piozzi, with more generosity than prudence, spent two thousand pounds on repairing and furnishing it in 1790;—­and we had danced all night, I recollect, when the news came of Louis Seize’s escape from, and recapture by, his rebel subjects.”

Poor old woman, who could thus write of her own daughters!—­poor old woman, who had not heart enough either to keep the love of her children or to grieve for its loss!  Cecilia was her fourth and youngest child, and her story, as her mother tells it, may as well be finished here.  After speaking in her manuscript of a claim on some Oxfordshire property, disputed by her daughters, she says, in words hard and cold as steel,—­“We threw it up, therefore, and contented ourselves with the plague Cecilia gave us, who, by dint of intriguing lovers, teazed my soul out before she was fifteen,—­when she fortunately ran away, jumping out of the window at Streatham Park, with Mr. Mostyn of Segraid,—­a