mely pretty and graceful. Mrs. Aphra Behn was the first
Englishwoman who adopted literature as a regular profession. Mrs.
Katharine Philips, according to Mr. Gosse, invented sentimentality. As
she was praised by Dryden, and mourned by Cowley, let us hope she may be
forgiven. Keats came across her poems at Oxford when he was writing
Endymion, and found in one of them 'a most delicate fancy of the Fletcher
kind'; but I fear nobody reads the Matchless Orinda now. Of Lady
Winchelsea's Nocturnal Reverie Wordsworth said that, with the exception
of Pope's Windsor Forest, it was the only poem of the period intervening
between Paradise Lost and Thomson's Seasons that contained a single new
image of external nature. Lady Rachel Russell, who may be said to have
inaugurated the letter-writing literature of England; Eliza Haywood, who
is immortalised by the badness of her work, and has a niche in The
Dunciad; and the Marchioness of Wharton, whose poems Waller said he
admired, are very remarkable types, the finest of them being, of course,
the first named, who was a woman of heroic mould and of a most noble
dignity of nature.

Indeed, though the English poetesses up to the time of Mrs. Browning
cannot be said to have produced any work of absolute genius, they are
certainly interesting figures, fascinating subjects for study. Amongst
them we find Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who had all the caprice of
Cleopatra, and whose letters are delightful reading; Mrs. Centlivre, who
wrote one brilliant comedy; Lady Anne Barnard, whose Auld Robin Gray was
described by Sir Walter Scott as 'worth all the dialogues Corydon and
Phillis have together spoken from the days of Theocritus downwards,' and
is certainly a very beautiful and touching poem; Esther Vanhomrigh and
Hester Johnson, the Vanessa and the Stella of Dean Swift's life; Mrs.
Thrale, the friend of the great lexicographer; the worthy Mrs. Barbauld;
the excellent Mrs. Hannah More; the industrious Joanna Baillie; the
admirable Mrs. Chapone, whose Ode to Solitude always fills me with the
wildest passion for society, and who will at least be remembered as the
patroness of the establishment at which Becky Sharp was educated; Miss
Anna Seward, who was called 'The Swan of Lichfield'; poor L. E. L., whom
Disraeli described in one of his clever letters to his sister as 'the
personification of Brompton--pink satin dress, white satin shoes, red
cheeks, snub nose, and her hair a la Sappho'; Mrs.