Have you met Matilda Brown
        Since she brought her aunt to town?
        If you have, and saw her bonnet,
        Give us your ideas upon it.

But it would have been better if those old-
fashioned newspapers had contented themselves
with scratching their pens over the ladies' noses,
and with getting trimming for their columns
from the ladies' bonnets. Nothing was too
sacred for the most public gossip. Mrs. Thrale's
first husband was hardly buried before the papers
began to consider with the public how long she
could remain a widow, and to appoint for her a
round dozen of second husbands. All this was
very bad for the papers, but it was worse, every
way, for the women who were topics of the
papers. They were flattered and talked out of
their domesticity, fooled into vain display, made
centres of a pretentious frivolity. Mrs.
Montague was, by personal right, chief of the Blue
Stockings; she was never crowned, says Mrs.
Thrale, but, justly conscious of supremacy. But
Mrs. Thrale was the elect of Doctor Johnson,
through whom, rather than through the weak
books she herself wrote, she has acquired a lasting
name in literature, and is for us, at any rate,
the rightful queen. Mr. A. Hayward, a pleasant
anecdotical writer, has published two volumes
of autobiography, Letters and Remains of Mrs.
Thrale, who, when she became Mrs. Piozzi, was
denounced by the whole press for disgracing
herself by giving up in second marriage with a
man who made nothing but music the illustrious
name of a first husband who had made strong
beer. Thrale neither loved her, nor obtained
her love; Piozzi did both. Thrale was not
faithful to her; Piozzi gave up country and
religion for her, and was hers till death. But
Thrale left a brewery behind him, which was
sold for one hundred and twenty thousand
pounds. The widow had three thousand pounds
a year, and the Italian singer had only, with a
small patrimony, what might be laid by from a
few years' enjoyment of a professional income of
twelve hundred pounds a year. The newspapers
compared moneys, and joined the widow's friends
in such attack on her that for a time she struggled
against her own sense of what was fit and
right. But we are beginning in the middle,
when, with the help of Mr. Hayward's memorials,
we intend to begin at the beginning, and
tell the whole story of the bewildered, half-
miscarried life of this most famous Queen of the
Blue Stockings.

We will begin with her as little Hester Lynch
Salusbury, and pass over her highly respectable
Welsh pedigree. "Will it amuse you," writes Mrs.
Piozzi in her Autobiographical Memoirs,
"to be told that Katherine de Berayne, after Sir
Richard Clough's death, married Maurice
Wynne, of Gwydir, whose family and fortune
merged in that of the Berlies." Certainly it
will not. And we don't care a penny for Sir
Robert Salusbury Cotton or for his wife Lady
Betty Tollemache. No doubt we should have
cared for them if we had known them. It is
part of the present story, however, that Hester's
mother had ten thousand pounds of her own, an
excellent fortune in those days, when she married
for love her rakish cousin, Hester's father, John
Salusbury of Bachycraig. He ran through her
money for her, and when Hester was born, father
and mother were rather poor folks in a cottage in
Carnarvonshire, waiting for the death of one of
their parents to enable them to "reinstate
themselves," as Mrs. Piozzi has it, "in a less
unbecoming situation." Hester was the first of their
children that did not perish in infancy. She was
played with, crammed with French, glorified by
an uncle Thomas on her father's side, who was
much given to glorifying also the dukes and lords
who were his friends, and half adopted by an
uncle Sir Robert on the mother's side, who
meant to bequeath poor Fiddle, as he called
Hester, ten thousand pounds. But he died of
apoplexy before he had altered the will, leaving
all to his brother. "Some traces yet remain
upon my mind,"  says Mrs. Piozzi in her old
age, "of poor mamma's anguish, and of my
father's violent expressions,"  not at the loss of
their relative, but of his money.

Then while John Salusbury was in Wales
trying to find a lead mine in Bachycraig to fill his
pocket with, mamma and little Hester were in
town, patronised by papa's brother's great friend
the Duke of Leeds. There Mr. Quin taught
Hester to recite, she being six years old, Satan's
address to the Sun, out of Milton, for which
she curtseyed to him, as a friend, from the stage-
box, when she was taken to see him act in Cato.
She met Garrick too, who took her on his knee
and gave her cakes for displaying her French
scholarship. After that, the rollicking John
Salusbury was sent out by his patron Lord Halifax
to see to the colonisation of Nova Scotia,
and the mother was left, with her own slender
means, to maintain and teach the precocious
little girl. Admiral Sir Peter Dennis finding
that, at eight years old, Hester knew all about
"the use of the globes," taught her the
rudiments of navigation. Then she went, after her
measles and small-pox, to stay with a rich
grandmother Cotton at East Hyde, where she made
friends with the horses and the old coachman,
her next tutor, who taught her to drive. There
were "four great ramping war-horses" for the
family coach. Two of them learnt to lick the
little girl's hand for bread and sugar, and she
amazed her grandmother one day by tooling
them round the court-yard in the break.

Here, in Hertfordshire, one neighbour was
Sir Henry Penrice, with an only daughter, Anna
Maria, great heiress, who fell in love with John
Salusbury's brother, Doctor Thomas, left in
charge of Hester and her mother. Doctor
Thomas let his sister-in-law's affairs go to wreck
while he courted the heiress, whose money would
make amends for all. Those lovers married, Sir
Henry Penrice died, Doctor Thomas succeeded
to the estates, title, and much wealth. Lady
Anna Maria, who was all kindness to Hester
and mamma, and was immensely learned herself,
caused Hester to be taught Latin, Italian, and
Spanish. But the dear aunt Anna Maria could