In 1787, Anna Seward tells us, she became acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi (formerly Mrs. Thrale), and on the latter’s publication of Johnson’s letters, she writes:—“Greatly as I admired Johnson’s talents and revered his knowledge, and formidable as I felt the powers to be of his witty sophistry, yet did a certain quickness of spirit, and zeal for the reputation of my favourite authors, irresistibly urge me to defend them against his spleenful injustice—a temerity, which I was well aware made him dislike me, notwithstanding the coaxing regard he always expressed for me on his first salutations on returning to Lichfield.” Again, in other letters, she says:—. . . “I have had frequent opportunities of conversing with that wonderful man (Dr. Johnson). Seldom did I listen to him without admiring the great powers of his mind, and feeling concern and pain at the malignance of his disposition. He would sometimes be just to the virtues and literary fame of others, if they had not been praised in the conversation before his opinion was asked—if they had been previously praised, never.” . . . “What right had a man who wrote a play for the stage, to avow contempt for the theatric profession”? she wrote, when referring to Johnson’s envy of David Garrick. Boswell admitted, when he visited Anna Seward, in 1785, at Lichfield, that Johnson was “galled by Garrick’s prosperity.” . . . “Who can think Johnson’s heart a good one? In the course of many years’ personal acquaintance with him, I never knew a single instance in which the praise (from another’s lip) of any human being, excepting that of Mrs. Thrale, was not a caustic on his spirit; and this, whether their virtues or abilities were the subject of encomium.” His opinions of poetry were, she thought, “so absurd and inconsistent with each other, that, though almost any of his dogmas may be clearly and easily confronted, yet the attempt is but combating an hydra-headed monster . . . Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets,’ and all the records of his own life and conversation, prove that envy did deeply stain his spirit. To your question, ‘Whom could Johnson envy’? I answer, all his superiors in genius, all his equals; in short, at times, every celebrated author, living or dead . . . I cannot help feeling that he has superiors, and that in a very large degree, though they will not be found amongst our essayists, where I acknowledge his pre-eminence. Johnson was a very bright star, yet to Shakespeare and Milton, he was but as a star to the sun . . . Gray was indolent, and wrote but little; yet that little proves him the first genius of the period in which he lived. I have been assured that he had more learning than Johnson, and he certainly was a very superior poet. Johnson felt the superiority, and for that he hated him. . . . Johnson’s first ambition was to be distinguished as a poet, and as a poet he was first celebrated. His fine satire, ‘London,’ had