ble in his religion it is difficult to imagine. If his own constitutional despondency was too strong for his religion, if he was the victim of his own morbid sensibility; his sadness and severity terminated in himself, and offered no outrage or offence to society. Who that reads the letters of that virtuous and tender being, and compares them with the bounding egotism, the sanguine self-sufficiency, and the vehement sentimentality of Miss Seward's correspondence, can hesitate for a moment on which of these characters to bestow the superior praise of charity, sense, and sensibility?

Throughout the letters of this indefatigable female letter-writer there appears to us to reign a most disgusting affectation of feelings, which from the internal evidence of the letters themselves may be plainly perceived to have had no real existence. Her letter to Mrs. Knowles in the first volume, written on the evening in which dear Lucy Porter was buried, is that sort of patch-work of levity and lamentation which hypocritical female sentimentalists are so apt to assume. Her recollections of the dear lost Honora are surrounded with the same affected effusions of merriment. It is not the "humorous sadness" of philosophy, nor the smile and the tear of tenderness, but an artificial conjunction of simulated feelings.

Her spleen towards Johnson seems well accounted for by herself, in page 205 of the first volume, where she frankly confesses that Johnson 'hated her.'

There is a disgusting indelicacy in the allusions of this maiden lady which, if it found place in her conversation, might well excite the disapprobation of persons of strict and even common morality. These instances are disgracefully numer

ous, but it may suffice to refer the reader to the end of the fortyfourth and fifty-first letters in the first volume of the letters. The thirtieth letter also in the same volume appears to us to exhibit a great coarseness of feeling. The reader may make for himself the application of this remark to the part of that letter to which it appears to him to belong.

We will produce a few specimens of this lady's prose style, not selected by us with any pains, but offering themselves almost in every page.

"I have to thank you for a charming letter as to talent, though of lamented intelligence respecting Mr. Park's health. So many fruitless medical experiments reduce us to helpless sympathy, and the forlorn hope, that time may subdue, or at least abate, the force of those maladies which pharmacy seems to combat in vain." (Vol. vi. p. 41.)

"Ah! dearest ladies, it is under the pressure of a severe cold, fierce cough, and inflamed lungs, that I address you. A duty so

delightful had, but for this incapacitating malady, been earlier paid.” (Vol. vi. p. 49.)

"Ah! yes! on the 2d of August last the evening of my life suddenly darkened. Joy will illumine it no more.-A dim chilled twilight all that remains." (This for the loss of her lover.)

"I thank you for the third volume of Cowper, which arrived the first of this month. Its contents perused with deliberate attention, still deeper impress my conviction, that far indeed from perfect was Cowper's character, his judgment, or his epistolary style-that his character was sullied by want of charity to the failings of others, and by an unsocial exclusion of all except a few worshippers, whose attention himself and his writings wholly engross-his judgment perverted by jealous prejudice against the compositions of contemporary genius; his epistolary style, by a dearth of imagination and eloquence, inconceivable to me from the pen which gave us the Task. "Aware as you were how little I thought his style in letter-writing deserved the superiority you allot to it, it seems strange that in this supplementary volume you should boast of universal concurrence in that attested pre-eminence; and add, that every intelligent reader must be sensible of its peculiar grace, ease, and harmony. So you sweep into the lumber of unintelligent readers that friend, to whose keen sensibility of the genuine emanations of genius of every species, and to whose ardour in praising them your pen has borne frequent testimony, &c. &c.

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Thus is this clamour of popularity almost exclusively in favour of Cowper not rational; and irrational popularity always fades away before the slowly-accumulating edicts of the impartially ingenious." (Vol. vi. p. 159.)

"My dear friend, the fatal, fatal day is come!—yet five hours of life, and health, and hope, remained in all the cunning flattery of nature, promising duration! I have been pouring forth the anguish of this day's sensations to her who sprung from him, whose extinction at evening, spread over the sun, to these eyes, the impervious veil of desolation. After short and interrupted slumbers, unblessed by any distinct idea of my soul's chosen friend, on that the anniversary of his last human sleep, I waked at day dawn.-Alas! with what sensations, my dear friend's congenial imagination will but too faithfully conceive! It will truly tell her that I count the hours, the minutes, with all the woe, if not the horror, with which the condemned criminal enumerates them on the day of execution." (Vol. vi. p. 188.)

"Present me devoutly to your beloved Lady Eleanor.” (Vol. vi. p. 227.)

"Your letter has symptoms of a speedy return home; but I know not how to trust them, remembering how your ladyship loves to linger beneath her native bowers, even when, as now they are, cold and leafless, so long as glowing hearths, and the attractions of consanguinity deride their desolation; remembering also your heart's ess to oblige her." (Vol. vi. p. 244.)

Of Cowper

"His generally insipid, VAIN, and SELF-ENGROSSED letters." (Vol. vi. p. 162.)

All this from a lady, too, who deliberately copied into volumes, arranged and retouched all her letters which she thought worth publishing, and left them to a bookseller for the purpose-But we are tired of extracting for the sake of censuring: we will produce a passage or two for the purpose of entertainment.

The following is Miss Seward's opinion of Dr. Johnson's epistolary talents:

"Letter-writing appears not to have been his talent, though in the course of these epistles we find frequently scattered rays of Johnsonian fire. He, whose eloquence has, in his essays, unrivalled majesty and force, seems an unwieldly trifler. When he will gambol, he gambols best with Dr. Taylor's great bull, a sort of cousingerman of his in strength and surliness."

"His playfulness wants the elegance, his wit the brilliance, and his style the polished ease of Gray's letters; which, as letters, are very superior indeed to Johnson's, though he pronounces them a dull work; but that was from envy." (Vol. ii. p. 39.)

There is an ingenious criticism in letter v. vol. iv. p. 25, which yet raises a smile at the lady's ignorance of her own characteristic defects.

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"I pointed out (she says) to Mr. White a passage in Richard III. of much poetic grandeur, though with most admired stupidity' expunged from the play as it is altered for the stage. Queen Margaret, surrounded by her conquerors of the York line, says to Gloucester,

“Those who stand high have many blasts to shake them.' "He replies,

"That may be true, but I was born so high!-
Our eyrie buildeth in the cedar's top,

And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.'

"Mr. White and I agreed, that with all Dr. Darwin's consummate skill in fabricating the splendidly-ornamented and elaborate species of verse, he has yet too little taste for simple poetic greatness, generally most sublime when least adorned, to feel the transcendent poetic excellence of this metaphoric allusion, whose simple expressions leave the effect to be produced solely by the grandeur of the idea. I observed to him, that if Darwin had chosen to describe an eagle's nest, he would, perhaps, do it somehow thus:

"Build thy strong eyrie, plumy son of light,
Pois'd on the cedar top's majestic height;
Aloft in air the quivering cradle plays,

Scorns the loud storm, and mocks the solar rays,

"That if Pope had chosen to describe the same object, it would probably have been in this kind of numbers

"Thus on the cedar-top the eagle builds
His dancing eyrie in ethereal fields;

It scorns the winters wind, and beating rain,
And summer-suns shoot vertical in vain.”

Another piece of criticism in the same volume, p. 51, is worth transcribing:

"Some of Cowley's poetry enchants me not less than yourself:but in general, I am soon weary of treading the intricate mazes of his wit. His ode, entitled the Complaint, on the place at court promised to him being presented to another, is peculiarly my favourite. It has sublime imagery and beautiful allusion, with great simplicity ofstyle,and its tender irony upon his own pursuits affects one strangely. Mrs. Brooke's sweet novel, the Excursion, has the same uncommon vein, as to irony I mean; where the credulity which excites our pitying smiles nothing diminishes our love and respect for the character that exhibits it.

Johnson, whose decision is, on the whole, not unfavourable to Cowley, speaks with scorn of that ode; but it was his custom, even where he spoke favourably in the aggregate, to reprobate the best work of the poet he is reviewing-as if unwilling that the reader should estimate him by that just test, viz. his most beautiful composition. Thus, while he commends Lord Lyttleton, he expresses scorn of the poem his fame must live by, his Monody. And it is thus he affects to despise those lovely little tales of Prior's, so highly original, so enchanting to the fancy."

In p. 107, Miss Seward thus speaks of the late Mrs. Tighe, whose PSYCHE has justly attracted so much notice.

"I must not conclude my letter" (Sep. 1795) "without observ ing, that, on my second visit to the fairy palace, (Llangollen) a lovely Being cast around its apartments the soft lunar rays of her congenial beauty-Mrs. Tighe, the wife of one of my friend's nephews, an elegant and intelligent young gentleman, whom I should have observed more, had his wife's beauty been less. I used the word lunar as characteristic of that beauty, for it is not resplendent and sunny, like Mrs. Plummer's, but, as it were, shaded, though exquisite. She is scarcely two-and-twenty. Is it not too much that Aonian inspiration should be added to the cestus of Venus? She left an elegant and accurate sonnet, addressed to Lady E. Butler and her friend, on leaving their enchanting bowers."

Miss Seward's opinions in politics appear to have been very unfixed; sometimes infected with violent whiggism; but occasionally alarmed at the excesses of the French revolution She seems to have paid but a very superficial attention to the subject;

and of course to have formed hasty opinions concerning it. But few can now be found who will not concur with her in the following observations in a letter to Mr. Park, March 1796.

"What an admirable composition is Burke's letter! I read it for the first time, except in extract, last night. The west is indeed on fire with his descending glories. In what broad and effulgent day do they reveal the infatuation of the Duke of Bedford; sharpening the axe for his own neck, and for the necks of all men of rank and property in the kingdom, whether they had been opposers or abettors of the dire imitation here of anarchy, atheism, and massacre. Surely this TRUMPET-TONGUED PAMPHLET will awaken the duke from his miserable day-dream, to behold his own certain fate in that of Orleans, should the malignant party succeed in leading up the death-dance in England." "

In pages 114, and 140, there is some very discriminative and able, though perhaps too indulgent criticism on Darwin's poetry, caused by the ridicule thrown on it by The Loves of the Triangles.

In page 333 occurs the following passage.

"I disavow all partiality to Darwin; his conduct to me has not been calculated to inspire it. He has taken pleasure, from the time he commenced author himself, to depreciate my writings, which till then he had warmly praised. His taking my Landscape of the Valley he cultivated near Litchfield, written and published in my name in the Gentlemen's Magazine and Annual Register, before one line of his noble poem was written, and years before it came out: taking it, I say, and publishing it as the exordium of his work, without the least acknowledgment, could have no tendency to produce in me an exaggerating spirit concerning his talents. But treatment thus unhandsome shall not induce me to suppress the power of my testimony in their favour, when they appear to me unjustly arraigned."

Affectation appears to have been the predominant foible of Miss Seward, and a fault which constantly clouded the beauty of her poetical as well as prose compositions; all at least but her two first poetical publications. And it was a fault which inereased with her years. Her correspondence, though it exhibits a mind always labouring with thought, always awake to the passing literature of the day, and never suffering to escape without reflection the novel occurrences which her narrow sphere of life threw in her way, is generally heavy; often disgusting; and sometimes soporific. We do not recollect that it once breaks forth into the touching strains of natural eloquence.

These letters deliberately copied into a book before they were sent for the purpose of future publication, afford not that flattering idea of our being admitted into the secret recesses of the writer's