Mrs. Thrale had entered in her "Thraliana" under July, 1780, being then at Brighton, "I have picked up Piozzi here, the great Italian singer. He is amazingly like my father. He shall teach Hesther." On the 25th of July, 1784, being at Bath, her entry was, "I am returned from church the happy wife of my lovely, faithful Piozzi. . . . subject of my prayers, object of my wishes, my sighs, my reverence, my esteem." Her age then was forty-four, and on the 13th of December in the same year Johnson died. The newspapers of the day dealt hardly with her. They called her an amorous widow, and Piozzi a fortune-hunter. Her eldest daughter (afterwards Viscountess Keith) refused to recognise the new father, and shut herself up in a house at Brighton with a nurse, Tib, where she lived upon two hundred a year. Two younger sisters, who were at school, lived afterwards with the 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."