The Florence Miscellany

Abstract

It was the custom until very recently to dismiss The Florence Miscellany as v rs de société, of no particular merit, an attitude brought about by Mrs. Piozzi herself. It was she, who as a known figure in the literary world, was asked to take the work under her wing by writing the Preface; but she had only a superficial interest in what she regarded as elegant trifles, as her own contributions are, and seems to have had no idea of what lay behind the attractive exteriors of her personable young friends and literary admirers. Thus while her colleagues saw tyranny in such acts of the Grand Duke Leopold as the closing of the three old Tuscan Academies, or his Burial Decree, by which all, high and low, were to be committed to the same communal graves, so that their anger ran out into their verses, her lines trickled gaily on.