na Seward, her friends and her enemies, stand
before us in very marked outline. As with Walpole also, she must have
written with an eye to publication. Veracity was not her strong point,
but her literary faculty was very marked indeed. Those who have read the
letters that treat of her sister's betrothal and death, for example, will
not easily forget them. The accepted lover, you remember, was a Mr.
Porter, a son of the widow whom Johnson married; and Sarah Seward, aged
only eighteen, died soon after her betrothal to him. That is but one of
a thousand episodes in the world into which we are introduced in these
pages. {8}

The Bishop's Palace was the scene of brilliant symposiums. There one
might have met Erasmus Darwin of the _Botanic Garden_, whose fame has
been somewhat dulled by the extraordinary genius of his grandson. There
also came Richard Edgeworth, the father of Maria, whose _Castle Rackrent_
and _The Absentee_ are still among the most delightful books that we
read; and there were the two young girls, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd, who
were destined in succession to become Richard Edgeworth's wives. There,
above all, was Thomas Day, the author of _Sanford and Merton_, a book
which delighted many of us when we were young, and which I imagine with
all its priggishness will always survive as a classic for children.
There, for a short time, came Major Andre, betrothed to Honora Sneyd, but
destined to die so tragically in the American War of Independence. It is
to Miss Seward's malicious talent as a letter writer that we owe the
exceedingly picturesque account of Day's efforts to obtain a wife upon a
particular pattern, his selection of Sabrina Sidney, whom he prepared for
that high destiny by sending her to a boarding school until she was of
the right age--his lessons in stoicism--his disappointment because she
screamed when he fired pistols at her petticoats, and yelled when he
dropped melted sealing-wax on her bare arms; it is a tragi-comic picture,
and one is glad that Sabrina married some other man than her exacting
guardian. But we would not miss Miss Seward's racy stories for anything,
nor ignore her many letters with their revelation of the glories of old-
time Lichfield, and of those 'lunar meetings' at which the wise ones
foregathered. Now and again these worthies burst into sarcasm at one
another's expense, as when Darwin satirizes the publication of Mr.
Seward's edition of _Beaumont and Fletcher_,