642 
Letters of Anna Seward. 
fend the cruel executions of that dark I could fancy him saying to the fair 
bigot, Queen Mary. 
HANNAH MORE. 
Miss More’s poems have spirit and 
genius, Lut contain an affected and pe- 
dantic display of knowledge and erudi- 
tion, especially the Bas bleu. In the 
Florio we find many brilliant passages ; 
many just and striking observations, and 
some admirable portraits in satiric traits. 
Not Hayley himself has drawn a modern 
‘beau better. Florio is the rival of Filli- 
gree, in the Triumphs of Temper, with 
sufficient difference to avert the charge 
6f plagiarism from the female author; -— 
but the versification in Florio is, at 
times, strangely inharmonious, often 
alliterating with the hardest consonants, 
and sometimes disgraced by vulgarism : 
instances, 
_ For face, no mortal cou'd resist her.” 
And, 
6 He felt not Celia’s powers of face.” 
These face-expressions put me in mind 
of an awkward pedantic youth, once re- 
sident, for a little time, at Lichfield. He 
was asked how he liked Miss Honora 
Sneyd. ‘Almighty powers!” replied 
the oddity, * 1 could not have conceived 
that she had half the face she has!” 
Honora was finely rallied about this im- 
puted: plenitude of face. The oval ele- 
gance of its delicate and beauteous con- 
tour, made the exclamation trebly ab- 
surd. How could Miss More so apply a 
phrase, always expressive of effrontery? 
- ‘and how could so /earned a lady suffer 
the pleonasm of the following line to 
escape her pen? 
&¢ With truth to mingle fables feign’d.” 
The character of Celia is pretty, but in 
-the satirical strokes lie all the genius of 
the work. 
As tor the Bas bleu.—You have heard 
me sigh after the attainment of other 
languages with hopeless yearning; yet I 
had rather be ignorant of them, as I am, 
if I thought their acquisition would induce 
me to clap my wings and crow in Greek, 
Latin, and French, through the course of 
a poem which ought to have been written 
in an unaffected and unmingled English, 
I am diverted with its eulogies on Gar- 
rick, Mason,-and Johnson, who all three 
hated each other so heartily, Not very 
pleasantly, I trow, would the two former 
have sat in the presence of Old Cato, as 
this poem oddly terms the arrogant John- 
- gon, surrounded by the worshipful and 
worshipping Blue Stocking.—Had_ the 
cynic lived to hear his Whig-title, Cato, 
author, * You had better have called me 
the first Whig, Madam, the father of the 
tribe, who got kicked out of Heaven for 
his republican principles.” . To the lady 
president herself, L fancy the cynic would 
not now, were he living, be the most 
welcome guest, since the publication of 
Mr. Boswell’s Tour. Miss More puts 
him to bed to little David. Their mutual 
opiates are pretty powerful, else her 
quondam friend, Garrick, would not 
thank her for his companion ;—but mi- 
sery, matrimony, and mortality, make 
strange bed-feliows. sitg 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
So France has dipt her lilies in the 
living streams of American freedom, and 
bids her sons be slaves no longer. In 
such a contest, the vital sluices- must be 
wastefully opened—but few English 
hearts, I hope, there are, that do not 
wish victory may sit upon the swords that 
freedom has unsheathed. 
MOLLY ASTON. 
It is very true, as you observe, John- 
son appears much more amiable as a 
domestic man, in his letters. te Mrs. 
Thrale, than in any other memorial 
which has been given us of his life and 
manners; but that was owing to the care 
with which Mrs, Piozzi weeded them of 
the prejudiced and malevolent passages 
on characters, perhaps much more 
essentially worthy than himself, ‘were 
they to be tried by the rules of Christian 
charity. I do not think with you, that 
his ungrateful virulence against Mrs, 
Thrale, in her marrying Piozzi, arose 
from his indignation against her on his 
deceased friend’s account. Mr. Boswell 
told me Johnson wished and expected to 
have married her himself. You ask who 
the Molly Aston was, whom those let- 
ters mention with such passionate tens 
derness? Mr. Walmsley, my father’s 
predecessor in this house, was, as you 
have heard, Johnson’s Mecenas, and 
this lady, his wife’s sister, a daughter of 
Sir Thomas Aston, a wit, a beauty, and 
a toast. Johnson was always fancying 
himself in love-with some princess or 
other. His wife’s daughter, Lucy Por- 
ter, so often mentioned in those letters, 
was his first love, when he was a school- 
boy, under my grandfather, a clergyman, 
vicar of St. Mary’s, and master of the 
free-school, which, by his scholastic abi- 
lity, was high-in fame, and thronged with 
pupils, from some of the first gentle- 
men’s families in this and the adjoining 
couulies, 
