PIOZZFS ANECDOTES
��[MRS. PlOZZl writing in 1815, says: 'At Rome we received letters saying the book was bought with such avidity, that Cadell hadnot one copy left when the King sent for it at ten o'clock at night, and he was forced to beg one from a friend to supply his Majesty's impatience, who sate up all night reading it. I received 300, a sum unexampled in those days for so small a volume.' Hayward's Piozzi, ed. 1861, ii. 305.
Horace Walpole wrote on March 28, 1786 (Letters, ix. 46) : 'Two days ago appeared Madame Piozzi's Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson. I am lamentably disappointed in her, I mean ; not in him. I had conceived a favourable opinion of her capacity. But this new book is wretched ; a high-varnished preface to a heap of rubbish, in a very vulgar style, and too void of method even for such a farrago.' On April 30 he wrote: 'As she must have heard that the whole first impression was sold the first day, no doubt she expects, on her landing, to be received like the Governor of Gibraltar [after the siege], and to find the road strewed with branches of palm. She, and Boswell, and their Hero are the joke of the public.' Ib. p. 49.
According to the Gentleman s Magazine for March, 1786, p. 244 : ' On the third morning after the book was published not a copy of it could be obtained.' At least four editions were issued in the first year of publication.
Hannah More wrote in April, 1786 : ' The Bozzi &c. subjects are not yet exhausted though everybody seems heartily sick of them. Everybody, however, conspires not to let them drop. That, and the Cagliostro and the Cardinal's Necklace spoil all conversation ; and destroyed a very good evening at Mr. Pepys's last night.' H. More's Memoirs, ii. 16. For the Cagliostro and the Cardinal's Necklace see Carlyle's Essays.
Malone says of these Anecdotes : ' On the whole the public is indebted to her for her lively, though very inaccurate and artful account of Dr. Johnson.' Prior's Malone, p. 364.]
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