Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/289

 the form with some measure of success. Leigh Hunt especially admired the sonnet entitled ‘December Morning,’ 1782 (Men, Women, and Books, ii. 141).

Miss Seward published in 1804 a ‘Memoir of Dr. Darwin,’ which she dedicated to the Earl of Carlisle. It consists chiefly of anecdotes of the early part of Darwin's life, and of the society at Lichfield while he lived there. Miss Seward lays claim to the verses that form the exordium of Darwin's poem, ‘The Botanic Garden.’ Miss Seward, it seems, had sent the lines to him in July 1778, and they were forwarded without her knowledge to the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ with an alteration in the concluding lines (cf. Letters, ii. 311–13, iii. 155–6, v. 333–4). Robert Anderson denied the truth of this assertion (cf., Illustr. of Lit. vii. 215–16). Two years after Darwin's death the lines appeared under Miss Seward's name in Shaw's ‘History of Staffordshire,’ 1798 (p. 34). Miss Seward's ‘Memoir of Darwin’ was severely condemned in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ and she wrote to Scott of the editor, ‘Jeffreys ought to have been his name’ (, A Publisher and his Friends, i. 92).

After 1804 her health began to fail. In 1807 she was attacked by a scorbutic disorder, and she died on 25 March 1809. She was buried in the cathedral at Lichfield, where she had erected a monument, the work of the sculptor Bacon, to her father's memory. It commemorates the whole of the Seward family. The lines on it to Anna's memory are by Scott.

Miss Seward was a tall handsome woman with regular features and an animated expression. Scott says that ‘her eyes were auburn, of the precise shade and hue of her hair, and possessed great expression.’ Hayley described her as ‘a handsome likeness of those full-length pictures of Queen Elizabeth, where the painters gave her majesty all the beauty they could, consistent with the character of her face’ (, Memoirs, i. 244). She had a melodious voice, and, according to Hayley, read aloud ‘with peculiar force and propriety.’ In conversation she had great command of literary anecdote (cf., Lit. Anecd. ix. 381). Southey declared that, ‘with all her affectation,’ there was ‘a very likeable warmth and sincerity about her’ (Correspondence of Southey and C. Bowles, p. 319). She held tolerant religious views, and was a liberal in politics. She sympathised with the French revolution: ‘I was educated in whiggism,’ she wrote to Dr. Parr in 1793.

Miss Seward bequeathed her literary works and remains to Scott, and her letters (twelve quarto manuscript volumes) to Archibald Constable, the Edinburgh publisher. By her request, Scott edited her posthumous compositions, and in 1810 published the poetical works in three volumes, prefixing a memoir, by himself, with extracts from her letters. She had asked Scott to perform a like office for the whole of her literary correspondence, but he declined ‘on principle,’ because he had ‘a particular aversion to perpetuating that sort of gossip.’ The matter was therefore left in the hands of Constable, who published in 1811 the letters written between 1784 and 1807 in six volumes. With Constable's consent, Scott examined the manuscript and struck out the extravagant utterances relating to himself and his work. The book had a certain vogue, for in 1813 appeared ‘The Beauties of Anna Seward,’ selected and arranged by W. C. Oulton. Another edition appeared in 1822, and has for frontispiece an engraving by Woolnoth of the Romney portrait.

Miss Seward's poetry belongs to the school represented by William Hayley [q. v.], and satirised by Gifford in the ‘Baviad’ (cf., Thought in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 457). Her work abounds in every sort of affectation. Horace Walpole found that she had ‘no imagination, no novelty.’ He classed her with Helen Williams and ‘a half a dozen more of those harmonious virgins’ whose ‘thoughts and phrases are like their gowns, old remnants cut and turned’ (, Letters, ed. Cunningham, ix. 73). Miss Mitford described her as ‘all tinkling and tinsel—a sort of Dr. Darwin in petticoats’ (Letters, 2nd ser. ed. Chorley, i. 29). Scott was a far more indulgent critic, but he was good-natured to a fault, and was perhaps flattered as a young man by the attentions of a poetess (cf., Scott, 1 vol. ed. pp. 188, 201). Johnson remarked to Boswell (25 June 1784) that there was nothing equal to Miss Seward's description of the sea round the North Pole in her elegy on Captain Cook (, Boswell, iv. 331), for which Hayley was believed to be in part responsible (cf., Illustr. of Lit. vii. 216). Darwin called her the inventress of epic elegy (cf., Unsex'd Females, p. 33). At times she shows an appreciation of natural scenery, and now and then turns a good line (cf., Men, Women, and Books, ii. 141). Of her epitaphs, that on Gilbert Walmsley [q. v.] is inscribed on his tomb in Lichfield Cathedral (, Boswell, i. 81 n.); another, on Garrick, was intended for his monument in the same place, but the sculptor neglected to leave space for it. The third volume of the poems contains paraphrases