eldest. Only the fourth daughter, the youngest, went with her mother and
her mother's new husband to Italy. Johnson, too, was grieved by the
marriage, and had shown it, but had written afterwards most kindly. Mrs.
Piozzi in Florence was playing at literature with the poetasters of "The
Florence Miscellany" and "The British Album" when she was working at these
"Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson." Her book of anecdotes was planned
at Florence in 1785, the year after her friend's death, finished at
Florence in October, 1785, and published in the year 1786. There is a
touch of bitterness in the book which she thought of softening, but her
"lovely, faithful Piozzi" wished it to remain.
H. M.



AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

I have somewhere heard or read that the preface before a book, like the
portico before a house, should be contrived so as to catch, but not detain,
the attention of those who desire admission to the family within, or leave
to look over the collection of pictures made by one whose opportunities of
obtaining them we know to have been not unfrequent. I wish not to keep my
readers long from such intimacy with the manners of Dr. Johnson, or such
knowledge of his sentiments as these pages can convey. To urge my distance
from England as an excuse for the book's being ill-written would be
ridiculous; it might indeed serve as a just reason for my having written it
at all; because, though others may print the same aphorisms and stories, I
cannot HERE be sure that they have done so. As the Duke says, however, to
the Weaver, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Never excuse; if your play be a
bad one, keep at least the excuses to yourself."