led, in 1857, to a revisal of the harsh sentence passed on one whom
the most formidable of his censors, Lord Macaulay, has declared to be
not less decidedly the first of biographers, than Homer is the first
of heroic poets, Shakspeare the first of dramatists, or Demosthenes
the first of orators. The result was favourable to Boswell, although
the vulnerable points of his character were still more glaringly
displayed. The appeal about to be hazarded on behalf of Mrs. Piozzi,
will involve little or no risk of this kind. Her ill-wishers made the
most of the event which so injuriously affected her reputation at the
time of its occurrence; and the marked tendency of every additional
disclosure of the circumstances has been to elevate her. No candid
person will read her Autobiography, or her Letters, without arriving
at the conclusion that her long life was morally, if not
conventionally, irreproachable; and that her talents were sufficient
to confer on her writings a value and attraction of their own, apart
from what they possess as illustrations of a period or a school. When
the papers which form the basis of this work were laid before Lord
Macaulay, he gave it as his opinion that they afforded materials for
a "most interesting and durably popular volume."[1]

[Footnote 1: His letter, dated August 22, 1859, was addressed to Mr.
T. Longman. The editorship of the papers was not proposed to me till
after his death, and I had never any personal communication with him
on the subject; although in the Edinburgh Review for July 1857, I
ventured, with the same freedom which I have used in vindicating Mrs.
Piozzi, to dispute the paradoxical judgment he had passed on Boswell.
The materials which reached me after I had undertaken the work, and
of which he was not aware, would nearly fill a volume.]

They comprise:--