Lady Morgan’s Memoirs
Cecilia Thrale Mostyn to Lady Morgan, [June? 1856]
Sillwood Lodge,
Tuesday.
Would that I were near you, dearest Lady Morgan, to accept your agreeable invitation
of a chat between four and six: but there is always a reaction in our society
at Brighton. After our winter season is ![]()
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ended, we begin
again with fresh friends, who stay till Easter; and I have not the moral
courage to leave them to an empty house.
The Athenæum confirms one’s opinion of the
editor of Rogers’s Table Talk. As far as I am concerned,
they are all wrong. Being but a child of nine years old on my mother’s return to England, I was taken
home to Streatham, and brought up an opposition child, living with her and dear
Piozzi until I was married, in 1795.
On that occasion the reconciliation took place, and I
then saw my three sisters for the first time; my mother must have been about
sixty, and she always called them “the ladies.”
These are not important events to bring before the
public; and Rogers appears to have
talked very little of Streatham, considering he lived there so much in my time;
but he never was a talker. I have many letters, or had,
and now possess his proposal of marriage to me at thirteen, with my impertinent caricature of him, and old
Murphy calling me a saucy girl.
Excuse an abrupt conclusion to this family gossip, dear
Lady Morgan, for I have a long dinner
table today, and my head full of domestic cares.
Very sincerely yours,
Dear Lady Morgan,
Alexander Dyce (1798-1869)
Editor and antiquary, educated at Edinburgh High School and Exeter College, Oxford; he
published
Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers
(1856).
Cecilia Mostyn [née Thrale] (1777-1857)
The youngest daughter of the brewer Henry Thrale and his wife Hester Thrale [Piozzi]; in
1795 she eloped with John Meredith Mostyn (1775-1807) from whom she later separated.
Gabriel Mario Piozzi (1740-1809)
Italian musician who in 1784 became the second husband of Hester Lynch Thrale over the
strenuous objections of Samuel Johnson and her daughter Queenie.
Hester Piozzi [née Lynch] (1741-1821)
Poet, diarist, and friend of Doctor Johnson; in 1763 married 1) Henry Thrale (1728-1781)
and in 1784 2) Gabriel Mario Piozzi (1740-1809). She contributed to the Della Cruscan
volume,
The Florence Miscellany (1785).
Samuel Rogers (1763-1855)
English poet, banker, and aesthete, author of the ever-popular
Pleasures of Memory (1792),
Columbus (1810),
Jaqueline (1814), and
Italy (1822-28).
The Athenaeum. London Literary and Critical
Journal. (1828-1921). The
Athenaeum was founded by James Silk Buckingham; editors
included Frederick Denison Maurice (July 1828-May 1829) John Sterling (May 1829-June 1830),
Charles Wentworth Dilke (June 1830-1846), and Thomas Kibble Hervey (1846-1853).
