But if he were asked to choose between the golden age of Bath, of Norwich, or of Lichfield, I am sure that any man who knew his books would give the palm to Lichfield, and would recall that period in the life of Lichfield when Dr. Seward resided in the Bishop’s Palace, with his two daughters, and when they were there entertaining so many famous friends. I saw the other day the statement that Anna Seward’s name was unknown to the present generation. Now I have her works in nine volumes [6]; I have read them, and I doubt not but that there are many more who have done the same. Sir Walter Scott’s friendship would alone preserve her memory if every line she wrote
deserved to be forgotten as is too readily assumed. Scott, indeed, professed admiration for her verse, and a yet greater poet, Wordsworth, wrote in praise of two fine lines at the close of one of her sonnets, that entitled ‘Invitation to a Friend,’ lines which I believe present the first appearance in English poetry of the form of blank verse immortalized by Tennyson.
Come, that I may not hear the winds of night,
Nor count the heavy eave-drops as they fall.
“You have well criticized the poetic powers of this lady,” says Wordsworth, “but, after all, her verses please me, with all their faults, better than those of Mrs. Barbauld, who, with much higher powers of mind, was spoiled as a poetess by being a dissenter.”
Less, however, can be said for her poetry to-day than for her capacity as a letter writer. A letter writing faculty has immortalized more than one English author, Horace Walpole for example, who had this in common with Anna Seward, that he had the bad taste not to like Dr. Johnson.
Sooner or later there will be a reprint of a selection of Anna Seward’s correspondence; you will find in it a picture of country life in the
middle of the eighteenth century—and by that I mean Lichfield life—that is quite unsurpassed. Anna Seward, her friends and her enemies, stand before us in very marked outline. As with Walpole also, she must have written with an eye to publication. Veracity was not her strong point, but her literary faculty was very marked indeed. Those who have read the letters that treat of her sister’s betrothal and death, for example, will not easily forget them. The accepted lover, you remember, was a Mr. Porter, a son of the widow whom Johnson married; and Sarah Seward, aged only eighteen, died soon after her betrothal to him. That is but one of a thousand episodes in the world into which we are introduced in these pages. [8]
The Bishop’s Palace was the scene of brilliant symposiums. There one might have met Erasmus Darwin of the Botanic Garden, whose fame has been somewhat dulled by the extraordinary genius of his grandson. There also came Richard Edgeworth, the father of Maria, whose Castle Rackrent and The Absentee are still among the most delightful books that we read; and there were the two young girls, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd, who were destined in succession to become Richard Edgeworth’s wives. There, above all, was Thomas Day, the author of Sanford and Merton, a book which delighted many of us when we were
young, and which I imagine with all its priggishness will always survive as a classic for children. There, for a short time, came Major André, betrothed to Honora Sneyd, but destined to die so tragically in the American War of Independence. It is to Miss Seward’s malicious talent as a letter writer that we owe the exceedingly picturesque account of Day’s efforts to obtain a wife upon a particular pattern, his selection of Sabrina Sidney, whom he prepared for that high destiny by sending her to a boarding school until she was of the right age—his lessons in stoicism—his disappointment because she screamed when he fired pistols at her petticoats, and yelled when he dropped melted sealing-wax on her bare arms; it is a tragi-comic picture, and one is glad that Sabrina married some other man than her exacting guardian. But we would not miss Miss Seward’s racy stories for anything, nor ignore her many letters with their revelation of the glories of old-time Lichfield, and of those ‘lunar meetings’ at which the wise ones foregathered. Now and again these worthies burst into sarcasm at one another’s expense, as when Darwin satirizes the publication
of Mr. Seward’s edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Dr. Johnson’s edition of Shakspere