Thrale Piozzi, who preserved her fine faculties, her
imagination, her intelligence, her powers of allusion and citation,
her extraordinary memory, and her almost unexampled vivacity, to the
last of her existence. She was in her eighty-second year, and yet
owed not her death to age nor to natural decay, but to the effects of
a fall in a journey from Penzance to Clifton. On her eightieth
birthday she gave a great ball, concert, and supper, in the public
rooms at Bath, to upwards of two hundred persons, and the ball she
opened herself. She was, in truth, a most wonderful character for
talents and eccentricity, for wit, genius, generosity, spirit, and
powers of entertainment.
"She had a great deal both of good and not good, in common with
Madame de Stael Holstein. They had the same sort of highly superior
intellect, the same depth of learning, the same general acquaintance
with science, the same ardent love of literature, the same thirst for
universal knowledge, and the same buoyant animal spirits, such as
neither sickness, sorrow, nor even terror, could subdue. Their
conversation was equally luminous, from the sources of their own
fertile minds, and from their splendid acquisitions from the works
and acquirements of others. Both were zealous to serve, liberal to
bestow, and graceful to oblige; and both were truly high-minded in
prizing and praising whatever was admirable that came in their way.
Neither of them was delicate nor polished, though each was flattering
and caressing; but both had a fund inexhaustible of good humour, and
of sportive gaiety, that made their intercourse with those they
wished to please attractive, instructive, and delightful; and though
not either of them had the smallest real malevolence in their
compositions, neither of them could ever withstand the pleasure of
uttering a repartee, let it wound whom it might, even though each
would serve the very person they goaded with all the means in their
power.
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