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APPENDIX,

CONSISTING OF

CORRECTIONS, ADDITIONS, AND

ENLARGEMENTS OF MEMOIRS

Which have appeared in

FORMER VOLUMES OF THIS WORK.

MISS SEWARD.*

AMONGST the honours of the English nation, is to be

enumerated the females of high intellectual attainments, and great natural possessions of mind. The present age is pre-eminently distinguished in this respect; and in no instance more transcendant than in the rare genius and other brilliant endowments of the subject of the following memoir, which we insert in our Appendix to the present work, because a too brief and hasty account found its way into a former volume; and we are by no means unwilling to correct our own precipitation, or the mis-statement of others; and it is with particular satisfaction we collate and adopt more authentic and liberal materials.

Anna Seward is the daughter of the Rev. T. Seward, rector of Eyam, in Derbyshire, prebendary of Salisbury, and canon residentiary of Litchfield; a gentleman of great erudition, and who had passed two years, between thirty and thirty-five, the period of his marriage, in France and Italy with his pupil, Lord Charles Fitzroy, the Duke of Grafton's third son, one of the finest young men in England. His family, and his tutor, in the course of those travels, sustained the severe disappointment of his death by a fever at Rome.

Mr. Seward, to graceful manners added great hilarity of spirit, uncommon singleness of heart, and the most active benevolence. His poetic talents were by no means inconsiderable; and he studied with discriminating taste, in their original language, the Greek, Latin, and English bards. He was known to the world of letters as chief editor of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, published in the year 1750; also as author of a learned and very ingenious tract on the conformity between paganism and popery, a work of much celebrity, and now

Of whom a brief notice appeared in our first volume.

scarce.

scarce. To Dodsley's Collection he contributed a few elegant little poems, which may be found in the latter part of the second volume of that valuable miscellany. As they were printed anonymously, it will be pleasing to ascertain the poems of Mr. Seward, by observing they commence with the "Female Right to Literature," written at Florence, and sent from thence to Miss Pratt, afterwards Lady Camden, the Athenia of the verse, and extend to the close of the volume. To that succeed some lines of Shakespeare's monument at Stratford, which will not lose by a comparison even with Milton's on the same subject. In the later editions, two of the lines are injured by substituting the word swain for the original word swan, either from mistake of the press, or from an ill-judged desire in the editor to improve the rhyme, at the expence of ruin to the sense; a remark which Mr. Seward himself has often been heard to make. The change destroys the antithesis, and confuses the metaphor.

At the village of Eyam, situated amongst the highest of the Peak mountains, Mr. Seward passed the first eight years of his marriage. In the second his eldest daughter, the subject of these memoirs, was born. She had several sisters, and one brother, of whom all died in their infancy, except the second daughter, who lived till she was nineteen, and then died on the eve of her nuptials; the chosen friend as well as companion of our author's youth; lovely in her person, angelic in her disposition, and the intelligent sharer of her sister's studies: our author's tribute to this lady's memory, and the event that deprived the world of her talents at an early age, is exquisitely tender.

In Miss Seward's seventh year her family removed from Eyam to Litchfield, and in the thirteenth they became inhabitants of the bishop's palace, which remains her home to this

hour.

Mrs. Seward, who died at sixty-six, in the year 1780, is said to have been a woman of strong sense, and of extreme

beauty,

beauty, a large portion of which she retained to her latest moments. Without taste for literary pursuits, she had never encouraged them in her daughters; for the delight they mu tually took in books, they were indebted to their father's early instruction.

Mr. Seward fancying he saw the dawn of poetic genius in his eldest girl, amused himself with its culture, though not from any idea or desire that she should ever become an author. Her ear for poetic recitation, in which he himself was remarkably excellent, inspired the pleasure he felt to nurse her in the lap of the Muses. At three years old, before she could read, he had taught her to lisp the Allegro of Milton; and in her ninth she was able to speak by rote the three first books of Paradise Lost, with that variety of accent necessary to give grace and effect to the manly harmonies of that pocm. has been heard to say that its sublime images, the alternate grandeur and beauty of its numbers, perpetually filled her infant eyes with tears of delight, while she performed the parental task by daily committing a portion of them to memory.

She

Mr. Seward brought from the university of Cambridge, and always retained, rich stores of classic knowledge from the Greek and Latin languages; but while he wished to improve the hereditary talent of his daughter, he had the good sense to perceive that the English tongue produces the best models. of fine writing, both in prose and verse; that she might drink from the purest fountains of epic and lyric poetry, in Milton and Gray; and from the dramatic, from the deepest, fullest, and richest sources, in the pages of Shakespeare. He was often heard to say that intimacy with Homer, Virgil, and Horace, never enabled any person to write English verse well; that where Nature had sown the germ of poetic genius, they can only be well cultivated in the bowers of the English Muses.

For an account of the experiments her father practised upon her ability to write verse in infancy, and for the criterion of them extended by the celebrated Dr. Darwin, of Derby, then

resident

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