336 LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 



notes is often minute, but always very neat and clear, with a careful 

 punctuation. She was, I should suppose, an admirer of a fine hand. 

 Her appreciation of this accomplishment suggested to her a lesson in 

 regard to self-management, in a letter to the Sir J. Feliowes already 

 named. "Our longest life," she says, "is but a little parenthesis in 

 the broad page of time, which is itself a mere preface or prologue to 

 Eternity. Let us, however," she exhorts, "write the brief period 

 neatly, and leave our visiting ticket to the world such as may not 

 disgrace us." Sir J. Feliowes' library has been dispersed under the 

 hammer, and Mrs. Piozzi's annotated volumes have got abroad. 

 Occasionally, on a book-stall, one of them may be picked up. The 

 one which has chanced to come into my possession is a volume con- 

 sisting of two works bound up together: Galloway's "Brief Commen- 

 taries on the Book of Revelation," and Witherby's "Observations on 

 the Restoration of the Jews." From the margins of each of these I 

 select a characteristic note or two. — Galloway in a certain place shows 

 that LuDOVicus, the name in Latin of sixteen of the French kings, 

 could be made to represent the mystic number 666; and this, he says, 

 he had shown seven years before, in another work. Galloway then 

 refers to a writer who "within the last three years has asserted the 

 same thing, without assigning any reason for his opinion. If he 

 has unfau-ly ploughed with either of my heifers," Galloway then 

 remarks, "all that I have to say to him is, what Virgil said on a 

 similar occasion — 'Hoc ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores,'" &c. 

 On this Mrs. Piozzi notes in the margin: "No need to plough with his: 

 heifer, surely. Comenius, author of our Babies' "Orbis Pictus," made 

 this very calculation, and showed it to Louis Quatorze, who thence 

 imbibed his notion of founding a Universal Monarchy." In another 

 place Galloway says of a certain interpretation which he advances, . 

 that it is "a demonsti-ation irresistible, because as evident to human 

 perception as that of there being a sun in the firmanent or an earth 

 in which we live." Mrs. Piozzi is inclined to be more cautious, and 

 writes: "I am not so confident; but the conjecture is a good one, and 

 very likely indeed to be true." Again : at the beginning of Witherby's 

 "Observations" — where that writer solemnly counsels the Jews of 

 England not to be influenced by a late pamphlet addressed to them 

 by one Bicheno — Mrs. Piozzi remarks: "This writer is a little 

 wilder and foolisher than the man he censures, writing to the Jews, 

 to beg of them not to set out for the Holy Land at the call of Mr. 



