“A genteel young clergyman, in our Upper Crescent, told his mamma about ten days ago, that he had lost his heart to pretty Miss Prideaux, and that he must absolutely marry her or die. La chere mere of course replied gravely:  ’My dear, you have not been acquainted with the lady above a fortnight:  let me recommend you to see more of her.’  ‘More of her!’ exclaimed the lad, ’why I have seen down to the fifth rib on each side already.’  This story will serve to convince Captain T. Fellowes and yourself, that as you have always acknowledged the British Belles to exceed those of every other nation, you may now say with truth, that they outstrip them.”

On the 1st July, 1818: 

“The heat has certainly exhausted my faculties, and I have but just life enough left to laugh at the fourteen tailors who, united under a flag with ‘Liberty and Independence’ on it, went to vote for some of these gay fellows, I forget which, but the motto is ill chosen, said I, they should have written up, ‘Measures not Men’”

Her verses are advantageously distinguished amongst those of her blue-stocking contemporaries by happy turns of thought and expression, natural playfulness, and an abundant flow of idiomatic language.  But her facility was a fatal gift, as it has proved to most female aspirants to poetic fame, who rarely stoop to the labour of the file.  Although the first rule laid down by Goldsmith’s connoisseur[1] is far from universally applicable to productions of the pencil or the pen, all fruitful writers would do well to act upon it, and what Mrs. Piozzi could do when she took pains is decisively proved by her “Streatham Portraits.”

[Footnote 1:  “Upon my asking him how he had acquired the art of a conoscente so very suddenly, he assured me that nothing was more easy.  The whole secret consisted in an adherence to two rules:  the one always to observe that the picture might have been better if the painter had taken more pains; and the other to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.”—­The Vicar of Wakefield, ch. xx.]

She was wanting in refinement, which very few of the eighteenth century wits and authors possessed according to more modern notions; and she abounded in vanity, which, if not necessarily a baneful or unamiable quality, is a fruitful source of folly and peculiarly calculated to provoke censure or ridicule.  In her, fortunately, its effects were a good deal modified by the frankness of its avowal and display, by her habits of self-examination, by her impulsive generosity of character, and by her readiness to admit the claims and consult the feelings of others.  To seek out and appreciate merit as she appreciated it, is a high merit in itself.