She did not care for “eternal card-parties,” and considered the card-table “an annihilator of ideas.” She had a passionate love for scenery, especially for mountain scenery, and in general for the pleasures of landscape.
Her estimates of many of the poets born in her lifetime appear in her letters, but most of their poetry was only read during their respective lives, and for a few years after, and theirs, like her own productions, are little known to readers of this age, though it appears that she hoped her works would be read for a long time after her death. She wrote, “If my poems are of that common order which have, as Falstaff says, a natural alacrity in sinking, the praise of hireling and nameless critics would not keep them above the gulf of oblivion. If, on the contrary, they possess the buoyant property of true poetry, their fame will be established in after years, when no one will ask, ‘What said the reviewers?’” Her
remarks as to plagiarism—petty pilferings—and borrowing from others, to be found in her letters, are most interesting. She thought that “imitative traces, of one kind or other, may be found in all works of imagination, up to Homer; and that he is not detected in the same practice, is certainly owing to the little that remains of the writings of his predecessors.”
Her religious views were broad. She felt “no great reverence for Kings.” In politics she was a Whig. “I was born and bred in Whiggism,” which word, she tells us, was synonymous to “fool and rascal,” from Johnson’s lips. It may be added that Johnson also said, “the Devil was the first Whig.” She confessed she had no great appetite for politics, though she expressed her views pretty freely on the subject. In 1790 the titles of nobility were suppressed in France, and Anna Seward disapproved of Burke’s vindication of hereditary honours. She thought that “they are more likely to make a man repose, with slumbering virtue upon them, for the distinction he is to receive in society, than to inspire the effort of
rendering himself worthy of them. They are to men what beauty is to women, a dangerous gift, which has a natural tendency to make them indolent, silly, and worthless. Let property be hereditary, but let titular honours be the reward of noble or useful exertions. France, in her folly, has destroyed them totally, instead of making them conditional.” Howbeit, titled people appear to have been highly honoured by her, notwithstanding these observations. By 1797 she had lost her long-existing confidence in Pitt’s wisdom and integrity, and in 1798 she thought he was “disqualified for retaining the reasonable confidence of the people of England.” In 1801 she wrote of “Pitt’s low and perfidious manœuvres,” and she never changed her opinion of him. She seemed unable to write what is called plain English. Archdeacon Vyse is described by her as “a man of prioric talents in a metrical impromptu.” Another person “evinced an elevated mind,” while a third exhibited an “attic spirit” in her writings. An evening is described as being “attic”; but even Pope, we may remark, calls a nightingale an
“attic warbler.” It is true, however, he was writing poetry, not prose. Though a Bluestocking, her praise was usually generously bestowed; she knew well how to flatter. She, though unacquainted with Latin, paraphrased Horace; and she admitted her ignorance of French. She loved all animals, notably cats and dogs, and, believing in a future existence for the dumb creation, wrote a poem, entitled “On the Future Existence of Brutes.”
The following are three of more beautiful stanzas:—
“Has God decreed this helpless, suffering train
Shall, groaning yield the vital breath he gave,
Unrecompens’d for years of want, and pain,
And close on them the portals of the grave?Ah, no! the great Retributory Mind
Will recompense, and may, perhaps, ordain
Some future mode of being, more refin’d
Than ours, less sullied with inherent stain;Less torn by passion, and less prone to sin,
Their duty easier, trial less severe,
Till their firm faith, and virtue prov’d, may win
The wreaths of life in yon Eternal Sphere.
She appears to have liked all things bright and beautiful. “It is too seldom,” she wrote, “that people express a conscious
enjoyment of the present. While regret is busy with the past, and expectation with the future, ennui usurps the place of cheerful feelings, and thinks coldly of the social, and yawns through the studious hour.” But as to Balls, she tells us, “I am one of the creatures that love not Balls in general.”