Miss Mitford has described Anna Seward as “all tinkling and tinsel—a sort of Dr. Darwin in petticoats.” Edgeworth described her as “a handsome woman of agreeable manners, she was generous, possessed of good sense, and capable of strong affection”; and Sir Walter Scott thought that she must have been, “when young, exquisitely beautiful; for, in advanced age, the regularity of her features, the fire and expression of her countenance, gave her the appearance of beauty, and almost of youth. Her eyes were auburn, of the precise shade and hue of her hair, and possessed great expression. In reciting, or in speaking with animation, they appeared to become darker, and, as it were, to flash fire. . . . Her voice was melodious, guided by excellent taste, and well suited to reading and recitation, in which she willingly exercised it.” An accident to her knee in her youth prevented her from riding, which, had she been able to do, she thought she would have enjoyed. She did not care for “eternal card-parties,” and considered the card-table “an annihilator of ideas.” She had a passionate love for scenery, especially for mountain scenery, and in general for the pleasures of landscape. Her estimates of many of the poets born in her lifetime appear in her letters, but most of their poetry was only read during their respective lives, and for a few years after, and theirs, like her own productions, are little known to readers of this age, though it appears that she hoped her works would be read for a long time after her death. She wrote, “If my poems are of that common order which have, as Falstaff says, a natural alacrity in sinking, the praise of hireling and nameless critics would not keep them above the gulf of oblivion. If, on the contrary, they possess the buoyant property of true poetry, their fame will be established in after years, when no one will ask, ‘What said the reviewers?’” Her remarks as to plagiarism—petty pilferings—and borrowing from others, to be found in her letters, are most interesting. She thought that “imitative traces, of one kind or other, may be found in all works of imagination, up to Homer; and that he is not detected in the same practice, is certainly owing to the little that remains of the writings of his predecessors.”