Miss Fanshawe was born in 1775, and came of a good old English family. At an early age she displayed literary gifts full of promise. The following sonnet, written at the age of fourteen and addressed to her mother, has perhaps not been excelled by any youthful writer:—
“Oh thou! who still by piercing woe pursued,
Alone and pensive, pour’st thy sorrows here,
Forgive, if on thy griefs I dare intrude
To wipe from thy lov’d cheek the falling tear.
Dear mourner, think!—thy son will weep no more;
His life was spotless, and his death was mild,
And, when this vain delusive life is o’er,
He’ll shine a seraph, whom thou lost a child.
Then, as we bend before th’ eternal throne,
Oh may’st thou, with exulting accents boast,
‘Now shall my children ever be my own,
For none of those thou gavest me are lost.’
With rapture then thou’lt meet th’ angelic boy,
And she who sow’d in tears shall meet in joy.”
August, 1789.
A long playful poem composed at the age of sixteen, was addressed to the Earl of Harcourt, on his wishing to spell her name, Catherine, with a K. It displays much erudition, but it is too long to quote in full. We give a few of the lines pleading for the letter C:—
“And can his antiquarian eyes,
My Anglo-Saxon C despise?
And does Lord Harcourt day by day,
Regret the extinct initial K?
And still with ardour unabated,
Labour to get it reinstated?
I know, my lord, your generous passion,
For every long exploded fashion;
And own the Catherine you delight in,
Looks irresistibly inviting,
Appears to bear the stamp and mark,
Of English used in Noah’s Ark;
‘But all that glitters is not gold,’
Not all things obsolete are old.
Would you but take the pains to look,
In Dr. Johnson’s quarto book
(As I did, wishing much to see,
Th’ aforesaid letter’s pedigree),
Believe me, ’twould a tale unfold,
Would make your Norman blood run cold;
My lord, you’ll find the K’s no better,
Than an interpolated letter;
A wand’ring Greek, a franchis’d alien,
Derived from Cadmus or Deucalion;
And why, or wherefore, none can tell,
Inserted ’twixt the J and L.
The learnèd say, our English tongue
On Gothic beams is built and hung.
Then why the solid fabric piece,
With motley ornaments from Greece?
Her lettered despots had no bowels,
For northern consonants and vowels;
The Roman and the Greek grammarian
Deem’d us, and all our words barbarian;
’Till those hard words, and harder blows,
Had silenced all our haughty foes;
And proud they were to kiss the sandals
(Shoes we had none) of Goths and Vandals.”
She wrote a satire on William Cobbett, M.P., for Oldham, which was extremely popular amongst politicians at the period it was penned. This is not surprising, for it contains some most amusing lines. It is entitled “The Speech of the Member for Odium.”
In the lighter vein she produced some verses in imitation of the poetry of Wordsworth.
“There is a river clear and fair,
’Tis neither broad nor narrow;
It winds a little here and there,
It winds about like any hare;
And then it takes as straight a course
As on the turnpike road a horse,
Or through the air an arrow.
The trees that grow upon the shore,
Have grown a hundred years or more,
So long, there is no knowing.
Old Daniel Dobson does not know,
When first these trees began to grow;
But still they grew, and grew, and grew,
As if they’d nothing else to do,
But ever to be growing.
The impulses of air and sky
Have reared their stately stems so high,
And clothed their boughs with green;
Their leaves the dews of evening quaff,—
And when the wind blows loud and keen,
I’ve seen the jolly timbers laugh,
And shake their sides with merry glee—
Wagging their heads in mockery.
Fix’d are their feet in solid earth,
Where winds can never blow;
But visitings of deeper birth
Have reached their roots below.
For they have gained the river’s brink,
And of the living waters drink.
There’s little Will, a five year’s child—
He is my youngest boy;
To look on eyes so fair and wild,
It is a very joy:—
He hath conversed with sun and shower,
And dwelt with every idle flower,
As fresh and gay as them.
He loiters with the briar rose,
The blue-bells are his play-fellows,
That dance upon their slender stem.
And I have said, my little Will
Why should not he continue still
A thing of Nature’s rearing?
A thing beyond the world’s control—
A living vegetable soul,—
No human sorrow fearing.
It were a blessed sight to see
That child become a willow tree,
His brother trees among.
He’d be four time as tall as me,
And live three times as long.”
It was related by the Rev. William Harness, who did much to make known the merits of Miss Fanshawe’s works, that when the foregoing lines were read to a distinguished admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry, she thought them beautiful, and wondered why the poet had never shown them to her!
Miss Fanshawe’s fame rests on the authorship of the celebrated riddle on the letter H, which has frequently been attributed to Byron, and appeared in more than one edition of his poems. At a party held one evening at the house of her friend, Mr. Hope, of Deep Dene, the conversation turned upon the abuse of the aspirate. After the guests had withdrawn, Miss Fanshawe retired to her room and composed her noted poem. Next morning she read it at the breakfast table, much to the surprise and delight of the company. It is as follows:—
“’Twas in heaven pronounced, and ’twas muttered in hell,
And echo caught faintly the sound as it fell;
On the confines of earth ’twas permitted to rest,
And the depths of the ocean its presence confest.
’Twill be found in the sphere, when ’tis riven asunder,
Be seen in the lightning, and heard in the thunder.
’Twas allotted to man with his earliest breath,
Attends at his birth, and awaits him in death,
Presides o’er his happiness, honour, and health,
Is the prop of his house, and the end of his wealth.
In the heaps of the miser ’tis hoarded with care,
But is sure to be lost on his prodigal heir,
It begins every hope, every wish it must bound,
With the husbandman toils, and with monarchs is crown’d,
Without it the soldier, the seaman may roam,
But woe to the wretch who expels it from home!
In the whispers of conscience its voice will be found,
Nor e’en in the whirlpool of passion be drown’d,
’Twill not soften the heart; but though deaf to the ear,
It will make it acutely and instantly hear.
Yet in shade let it rest like a delicate flower,
Ah, breathe on it softly—it dies in an hour.