Honora supplied the place of Sarah Seward, after the latter’s death, in Anna Seward’s affections, and numbers of her poems and letters testify how ardently the poetess admired and loved her.
In 1765 Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the well-known author, visited Lichfield. He had been a wild and gay young man, and had eloped with his first wife, who died in March, 1773. His personal address was “gracefully spirited, and his conversation eloquent.” He danced and fenced well, was an ingenious mechanic, and invented a plan for telegraphing, consequent on a desire to know the result of a race at Newmarket.
Becoming very intimate with the Sewards, and the addresses he had made to and for Honora, “after some time being permitted and approved,” Edgeworth married her on 17th July, 1773, as his second wife, in the beautiful ladies’ choir in Lichfield Cathedral. Mr. Seward, who had become a Canon Residentiary of Lichfield Cathedral, performed the ceremony, and shed “tears of joy while he pronounced the nuptial benediction,” and Anna Seward is recorded to have been really glad to see Honora united to a man whom she had often thought peculiarly suited to her friend in taste and disposition.
Honora died of consumption in 1780, and, in accordance with her dying wish, Edgeworth married her sister Elizabeth on Christmas Day in the same year. Honora, who was buried at King’s Weston, had issue two children.
In Anna Seward’s elegy, entitled “Lichfield,” written in 1781, we read:—
“When first this month, stealing from half-blown bowers,
Bathed the young cowslip in her sunny showers,
Pensive I travell’d, and approach’d the plains,
That met the bounds of Severn’s wide domains.
As up the hill I rose, from whose green brow
The village church o’erlooks the vale below,
O! when its rustic form first met my eyes,
What wild emotions swell’d the rising sighs!
Stretch’d the pain’d heart-strings with the utmost force
Grief knows to feel, that knows not dire remorse;
For there—yes there,—its narrow porch contains
My dear Honora’s cold and pale remains,
Whose lavish’d health, in youth, and beauty’s bloom,
Sunk to the silence of an early tomb.”
Edgeworth is to be remembered as having been a good Irish landlord; he had a property at Edgeworthstown.
In 1802 Anna Seward wrote, “The stars glimmered in the lake of Weston as we travelled by its side, but their light did not enable me to distinguish the Church, beneath the floor of whose porch rests the mouldered form of my heart—dear Honora,—yet of our approach to that unrecording, but thrice consecrated spot, my heart felt all the mournful consciousness.”
It is not easy to agree with Mr. E. V. Lucas, the author of a very entertaining book, entitled “A Swan and her Friends” (Methuen & Co.), when he says, “of Honora’s married life little is known, but she may have been very happy,” for she left a letter, written a few days before her death, which cannot easily be construed as applying
merely to her death-bed state. Here is a paragraph from it:—