Varanus very well,—­for a Dilettante; and Lord Derby did his part surprisingly.  But there was a song to be sung to Athenais, while she, resolving to take poison, sits in a musing attitude.  Jane Holman—­then Hamilton—­would sing an air of Sacchini, and the manager would not hear Italian words.  The ballad appointed by the author was disapproved by all, and I pleased everybody by my fortunate fancy of adapting some English verses to the notes of Sacchini’s song; and Jane Hamilton sung them enchantingly:—­

  ’Vain’s the breath of Adulation,
  Vain the tears of tenderest Passion,
  Whilst a strong Imagination
  Holds the wandering Mind away;
  Art in vain attempts to borrow
  Notes to soothe a rooted sorrow;
  Fixed to die, and die to-morrow,
  What can touch her soul to-day?’

“The lines were printed, but I lost them.  ‘What a wild Tragedy is this!’ said I to Hannah More, who was one of the audience.  ‘Wild enough,’ was her reply; ’but there’s good Poetry in it, and good Passion, and they will always do.’

“Hannah More never goes now to a Theatre.  How long is H.L.  Piozzi likely to be seen there?  How long will Mr. Conway keep the stage?”

In the year 1798, the family of Mr. Piozzi having suffered greatly from the French invasion of Lombardy, he sent for the son of his youngest brother, a “little boy just turned of five years old.”  “We have got him here,” wrote Mrs. Piozzi in a letter from Bath, dated January, 1799, published by Mr. Hayward, “and his uncle will take him to school next week.”  “As he was by a lucky chance baptized, in compliment to me, John Salusbury, [Salusbury was her family name,] he will be known in England by no other, and it will be forgotten he is a foreigner.”  “My poor little boy from Lombardy said, as I walked with him across our market, ‘These are sheeps’ heads, are they not, aunt?  I saw a hasket of men’s heads at Brescia.’” Little John, though he went to school, was often at home.  After writing of the troubles with her own daughters, Mrs. Piozzi says in the manuscript before us,—­“Had we vexations enough?  We had certainly many pleasures.  The house in Wales was beautiful, and the Boy was beautiful too.  Mr. Piozzi said I had spoiled my own children and was spoiling his.  My reply was, that I loved spoiling people, and hated any one I could not spoil.  Am I not now trying to spoil dear Mr. Conway?”

Piozzi was not far from wrong in his judgment of her treatment of this boy, if we may trust to her complaints of his coldness and indifference to her.  In 1814, at the time of his marriage, five years after Piozzi’s death, she gave to him her Welsh estate; and it may have been a greater satisfaction to her than any gratification of the affections could have afforded, to see him, before she died, high sheriff of his county, and knighted as Sir John Salusbury Piozzi Salusbury.