ly, reserved: she too was one of those not destined to be old.

Miss Seward seems to have loved this friend with a very sincere and
admiring affection, and to have bitterly mourned her early death. Her
letters abound in apostrophes to the lost Honora. But perhaps the poor
Muse expected almost too much from friendship, too much from life.
She expected, as we all do at times, that her friends should be not
themselves but her, that they should lead not their lives but her own.
So much at least one may gather from the various phases of her style
and correspondence, and her complaints of Honora's estrangement and
subsequent coldness. Perhaps, also, Miss Seward's many vagaries and
sentiments may have frozen Honora's sympathies. Miss Seward was all
asterisks and notes of exclamation. Honora seems to have forced feeling
down to its most scrupulous expression. She never lived to be softened
by experience, to suit herself to others by degrees: with great love she
also inspired awe and a sort of surprise. One can imagine her pointing
the moral of the purple jar, as it was told long afterwards by her
stepdaughter, then a little girl playing at her own mother's knee in her
nursery by the river.

People in the days of shilling postage were better correspondents than
they are now when we have to be content with pennyworths of news and of
affectionate intercourse. Their descriptions and many details bring all
the chief characters vividly before us, and carry us into the hearts and
the pocket-books of the little society at Lichfield as it then was. The
town must have been an agreeable sojourn in those days for people of
some pretension and small performance. The inhabitants of Lichfield seem
actually to have read each other's verses, and having done so to have
taken the trouble to sit down and write out their raptures. They were a
pleasant lively company living round about the old cathedral towers,
meeting in the Close or the adjacent gardens or the hospitable Palace
itself. Here the company would sip tea, talk mild literature of their
own and good criticism at second hand, quoting Dr. Johnson to one
another with the familiarity of townsfolk. From Erasmus Darwin, too,
they must have gained something of vigour and originality.

With all her absurdities Miss Seward had some real critical power and
appreciation; and some of her lines are very pretty.[1] An 'Ode to the
Sun' is only what might have been expected from this Lichfield Corinne.