Who the first English poetess was I cannot say. I believe it was the Abbess Juliana Berners, who lived in the fifteenth century; but I have no doubt that Mr. Freeman would be able at a moment’s notice to produce some wonderful Saxon or Norman poetess, whose works cannot be read without a glossary, and even with its aid are completely unintelligible. For my own part, I am content with the Abbess Juliana, who wrote enthusiastically about hawking; and after her I would mention Anne Askew, who in prison and on the eve of her fiery martyrdom wrote a ballad that has, at any rate, a pathetic and historical interest. Queen Elizabeth’s ‘most sweet and sententious ditty’ on Mary Stuart is highly praised by Puttenham, a contemporary critic, as an example of ‘Exargasia, or the Gorgeous in Literature,’ which somehow seems a very suitable epithet for such a great Queen’s poems. The term she applies to the unfortunate Queen of Scots, ‘the daughter of debate,’ has, of course, long since passed into literature. The Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney’s sister, was much admired as a poetess in her day. In 1613 the ‘learned, virtuous, and truly noble ladie,’ Elizabeth Carew, published a _Tragedie of Marian_, _the Faire Queene of Jewry_, and a few years later the ‘noble ladie Diana Primrose’ wrote _A Chain of Pearl_, which is a panegyric on the ‘peerless graces’ of Gloriana. Mary Morpeth, the friend and admirer of Drummond of Hawthornden; Lady Mary Wroth, to whom Ben Jonson dedicated _The Alchemist_; and the Princess Elizabeth, the sister of Charles I., should also be mentioned. After the Restoration women applied themselves with still greater ardour to the study of literature and the practice of poetry. Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, was a true woman of letters, and some of her verses are extremely 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 immortalized 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.