scription, and, above all, the power exercised over the reader's heart, by filling it with the successive emotions of love, pity, joy, anguish, transport, or indignation, together with the grave impressive moral resulting from the whole, imply talents of the highest order, and command our warmest praise. There is no walk in which taste and genius have more distinguished themselves, or in which virtuous and noble sentiments have come out with greater lustre.”*

It is creditable to public taste in the present day that the vapid trash, the prosy narrations of impossibilities, the delicate distresses and sentimental perplexities, that came out in five or seven volumes at the end of the last and beginning of the present century, have almost entirely disappeared. Female education, registrations, railways, and a penny post, have done away with nearly all the delectable mysteries of nocturnal elopements in post-chaises, forced marriages, foundlings the heirs to titles and estates, and wealthy distant uncles, unapproachable by roads or letters, who yet always arrived at the right time; in short, the old machinery of romance is broken up and done with; and something that does not outrage probability and that elucidates the real, whether good or evil, is energetically demanded and supplied.

*Correspondence of Richardson, edited by Letitia Barbauld, vol. i. p. 10.

CHAP. XVI.

FEMALE WRITERS OF THE LAST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, AND THE BEGINNING OF THE PRESENT.

MRS. ELIZABETH ROWE, the Philomela of Prior, the friend also of Dr. Watts, was unquestionably, as far as elegant literature is concerned, the most popular female writer at the commencement of the eighteenth century; her virtues being fully as admirable as her talents, and her life the best comment on her principles. We have already adverted to Mrs. Catherine Cockburne, the disciple and defender of Locke. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the brilliant and versatile, and, alas! the capricious and eccentric, was the most celebrated woman of her time, though her writings were not published until after her death. Yet the praises of men of genius; the poems that now and then crept into periodicals, and were known to be hers; her travels in the East, a region previously unvisited by an Englishwoman; her wit and vivacity; the independence of mind that induced her at all hazards of opposition and ridicule to introduce inoculation for the small-pox, all combined to render her the "observed of all observers."

As a friend of men of genius, and a patron of literature, Lady Hertford, afterwards Duchess of Somerset, deserves honoured remembrance. She aided Thomson, and he in return dedicated his Spring" to her in stanzas not only exquisitely beautiful, but appropriate to the sweetness and liberality of her nature:

66

"Come, gentle Spring! ethereal mildness, come!
And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,
While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.
Oh, Hertford! fitted or to shine in courts
With unaffected grace, or walk the plain
With innocence and meditation joined
In soft assemblage, listen to my song,
Which thy own season paints, when nature all
Is blooming and benevolent like thee.”

To this lady's spirited intercession with Queen Caroline, wife of George II. the persecuted poet, Savage, owed his life. He had been accused of murder; and his unnatural mother, the Countess of Macclesfield *, did all she could to prejudice the Queen against him. Lady Hertford, who was acquainted with the whole particulars, determined

*Richard Savage was the unacknowledged son of this odious woman. He discovered the secret of his birth, and endeavoured, but in vain, to awaken some sympathy in her callous heart. Her malignity was increased tenfold, and she actually prejudiced the queen's mind by falsely accusing Savage of having attempted to murder her.

that the Queen should know the truth. She obtained an audience, and the life of Savage was spared. This lady was also the friend of Dr. Watts and Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe.

The latter half of the century was, however, far more prolific in female writers than the former. A new kind of literary association sprang up, copied, it must be admitted, from the French, and now chiefly remembered from the fact of its having been the means of introducing some women of superior attainments to celebrated men of the time, whose praise was fame.

Mrs. Montagu, a lady of fortune, and a connection by marriage of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, had resided in Paris, and adopted the then prevailing fashion of holding literary assemblies. On her return to England she introduced the plan; and her house, on stated nights, became the resort of distinguished persons of both sexes. Here might be seen the titled dame, who conferred patronage and expected praise; the young literary aspirant; the men of established repute, who loved to unbend among those who eagerly listened, lauded, and repeated their sayings; and the quiet observers of human character, who could not but be pleased at the mingled wit and wisdom, pretence and folly, that variegated the scene. At Mrs. Montagu's, however, literary ease, either in dress or manner, was not practised;

U

there was stately attire and dignified ceremonial : the deportment of the highly intellectual hostess was full of courtly grace, and influenced the others. The word bas bleu (blue stocking) was applied to these gatherings, though not first at Mrs. Montagu's. Mrs. Vesey, a lady of similar tastes but far smaller fortune, opened her house for literary assemblings every Tuesday evening during the London season, and here greater freedom prevailed. According to Madame D'Arblay, a foreign gentleman, who was invited, once apologised that his dress was unsuitable, when Mrs. Vesey replied, "Pho! don't mind dress; come in your blue stockings." This term was caught up, in a sort of mistake, by the foreigner, and came to be applied to each house, and perhaps more commonly at length to Mrs. Montagu's, who was called "the queen of the blues." Madame D'Arblay observes,

"But while the same bas bleu appellation was given to these two houses of rendezvous, neither that nor even the same associates could render them similar. Their grandeur or their simplicity, their magnitude or their diminutiveness, were by no means the principal cause of this difference; it was far more attributable to the lady presidents than to their abodes. For though they instilled not their characters into their visitors, their characters bore so large a share in their visitors'