The poetess had several lovers, and was jilted by one, who was a native of Lichfield, and who afterwards became a General. “But overtures, not preceded by assiduous tenderness and, which expected to reap the harvest of love without having nursed its germs, suited not my native enthusiasm, nor were calculated to inspire it.” She wrote in 1767, from Gotham Rectory, “to a female mind, that that can employ itself ingeniously, that is capable of friendship, that is blessed with affluence, where are the evils of celibacy? For my part, I could never imagine that there were any, at least, compared to the ennui, the chagrin, the preclusion, which hearts, cast in the warm mould of passion, must feel in a marriage of mere esteem.”
As to sermons, she considered, “immoderate length in a sermon is a fault which
excellence itself cannot expiate.” . . . “The present mode of dress in our young women of fashion, and their imitators, is, for its gross immodesty, a proper subject of grave rebuke for the preacher.” . . . “Nothing is more disgusting to me, and, indeed, to the generality of people, than dictatorial egotism from the pulpit. Even in the learned and aged clergyman it is priestly arrogance. When we see that man in the pulpit whom we are in the habit of meeting at the festal board, at the card-table, perhaps seen join in the dance, and over whose frailties, in common with our own, no holy curtain has been drawn, we expect modest exhortation, sober reasoning, chastened denunciation.” . . .
Anna Seward informs us that she was “no great reader of sermons,” but she wrote a sermon for “an ingenious young clergyman of our neighbourhood, who has just taken orders, and who wishes to make his first essay in the pulpit with something of my writing. If I know anything of my talents, sermonising is their forte.” She wrote another sermon for a friend, a funeral sermon, delivered on a
festival day—Whit-Sunday, and chose the text from the 7th chapter of Job; a verse than which she thought there was nothing in Scripture more sublime:—“The eyes of them that have seen me, shall see me no more—thine eyes are upon me—and I am not.” “The young preacher,” she says, “spoke this oration with solemn earnestness and unaffected sensibility.”
Her love and admiration for Lichfield began early in life, and remained keen to its close. When twenty-four years old she wrote from Gotham Rectory, in 1767, “We bend our course towards Lichfield, lovely, interesting Lichfield, where the sweetest days of my youth have passed—the days of prime.” No City could compare with Lichfield in her eyes, and no Cathedral with that of Lichfield when the music to be heard there was also taken into account. After visiting York Cathedral, that “vast and beautiful House of God”: she herself styled it “noble and transcendent,” she wrote, “I passed through York, and heard choral service in the noblest Cathedral in the world; . . . but if the sight perceived
the undying superiority of York Minster, my ear acknowledged the yet more transcendent, harmonic advantages of the Gothic boast of Lichfield.”
Lichfield, although it may seem to the casual visitor rather a sleepy place to-day, appears to have been pretty lively in Anna Seward’s day. “Plays thrice in the week, balls and suppers at our Inns, cards and feasting within our houses.” And again, “Lichfield has been of late wondrous gay. Six private balls were given, which I was persuaded to attend.”
Sir Walter Scott corresponded for some time with the poetess before his visit to Lichfield in May, 1807. He wrote in 1805, “believe me, I shall not be within many miles of Lichfield without paying my personal respects to you, and yet I should not do it in prudence, because I am afraid you have formed a higher opinion of me than I deserve; you would expect to see a person who had dedicated himself much to literary pursuits, and you would find me a rattle-skulled half-lawyer, half-sportsman, through whose head a regiment of horse has been
exercising since he was five years old; half-educated, half-crazy, as his friends sometimes tell him, half-everything, but entirely Miss Seward’s much obliged, affectionate and faithful servant, Walter Scott.”