Her piety was genuine; and old-fashioned politicians, whose watchword is Church and King, will be delighted with her politics.  Literary men, considering how many curious inquiries depend upon her accuracy, will be more anxious about her truthfulness, and I have had ample opportunities of testing it; having not only been led to compare her narratives with those of others, but to collate her own statements of the same transactions or circumstances at distant intervals or to different persons.  It is difficult to keep up a large correspondence without frequent repetition.  Sir Walter Scott used to write precisely the same things to three or four fine-lady friends, and Mrs. Piozzi could no more be expected to find a fresh budget of news or gossip for each epistle than the author of “Waverley.”  Thus, in 1815, she writes to a Welsh baronet from Bath: 

“We have had a fine Dr. Holland here.[1] He has seen and written about the Ionian Islands; and means now to practise as a physician, exchanging the Cyclades, say we wits and wags, for the Sick Ladies.  We made quite a lion of the man.  I was invited to every house he visited at for the last three days; so I got the Queue du lion despairing of le Coeur.”

[Footnote 1:  Sir Henry Holland, Bart., who, with many other titles to distinction, is one of the most active and enterprising of modern travellers.]

Two other letters written about the same time contain the same piece of intelligence and the same joke.  She was very fond of writing marginal notes; and after annotating one copy of a book, would take up another and do the same.  I have never detected a substantial variation in her narratives, even in those which were more or less dictated by pique; and as she generally drew upon the “Thraliana” for her materials, this, having been carefully and calmly compiled, affords an additional guarantee for her accuracy.

Her taste for reading never left her or abated to the last.  In reference to a remark (in Boswell) on the irksomeness of books to people of advanced age, she writes:  “Not to me at eighty years old:  being grieved that year (1819) particularly, I was forced upon study to relieve my mind, and it had the due effect.  I wrote this note in 1820.”

She sometimes gives anecdotes of authors.  Thus, in the letter just quoted, she says:  “Lord Byron protests his wife was a fortune without money, a belle without beauty, and a blue-stocking without either wit or learning.”  But her literary information grew scanty as she grew old:  “The literary world (she writes in 1821) is to me terra incognita, far more deserving of the name, now Parry and Ross are returned, than any part of the polar regions:”  and her opinions of the rising authors are principally valuable as indications of the obstacles which budding reputations must overcome.  “Pindar’s fine remark respecting the different effects of music on different characters, holds equally