Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/76

 Ixxii INTRODUCTION ���In 1755 there appeared a compilation entitled Poems by Eminent Ladies. It was designed, the preface tells us, as Eminent " a so lid compliment to the sex," and was put �Ladies forward as a convincing proof that " great abili- �ties are not confined to men, and that genius often glows with equal warmth and perhaps with more delicacy in the breast of a female." Twelve poems by Lady Winchilsea are quoted in this volume, and for the first time the selections are made, not from Birch's Dictionary but from the Mis- cellany Poems of 1713, nine of the twelve being fables. Wordsworth commented most unfavorably on the literary insight that could choose to represent Lady Winchilsea by these selections. �In Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors (1758) is the note which Wordsworth found so scanty and unsatisfactory when he was in search of information concerning Ardelia. �The Biographia Brittanica (1763), Gough's Anecdotes of British Topography (1768), Granger's Biographical Dictionary (1769), echo in brief and perfunctory fashion the critical dicta of their predecessors. �There is, then, through the century an unemphatic, uncritical, but persistent literary tradition that Lady Win- chilsea's claim to a niche in the Temple of Fame could not be entirely ignored. She was a countess, she wrote The Spleen, and Pope had praised her. These are the chief points on which eulogy was based. But we have also indi- cations of a recognition much more spontaneous and pleasing. In 1763 Anna Seward, a mature little lady of fifteen, was engaged in a serious literary correspondence well calculated to awaken parental fears lest she should become "that dreaded phenomenon, a learned lady." In the midst of counsel to a friend "the morning sun of whose youth is with difficulty escaping from the unwholesome mists of a foolish love affair," we come upon the following bit of criticism: ��� �