“Wit was never my talent,” Anna Seward says, but she has recorded that when the “rulers of our Cathedral” decreed a four years’ silence for “the pealing organ and the full-voic’d choir,” because of alterations to be made there, she considered them “a little bedemoned, or much be-deaned—which is nearly the same thing.” Anna Seward was a faithful and generous friend; her fault would appear to have been her conceit. As Mr. Lucas finely remarks, everything conspired to increase her self-esteem and importance, for the three things that might have corrected it were all lacking: poverty, London life, and marriage. The poetess had several lovers, and was jilted by one, who was a native of Lichfield, and who afterwards became a General. “But overtures, not preceded by assiduous tenderness and, which expected to reap the harvest of love without having nursed its germs, suited not my native enthusiasm, nor were calculated to inspire it.” She wrote in 1767, from Gotham Rectory, “to a female mind, that that can employ itself ingeniously, that is capable of friendship, that is blessed with affluence, where are the evils of celibacy? For my part, I could never imagine that there were any, at least, compared to the _ennui_, the chagrin, the preclusion, which hearts, cast in the warm mould of passion, must feel in a marriage of mere esteem.” As to sermons, she considered, “immoderate length in a sermon is a fault which excellence itself cannot expiate.” . . . “The present mode of dress in our young women of fashion, and _their_ imitators, is, for its gross immodesty, a proper subject of grave rebuke for the preacher.” . . . “Nothing is more disgusting to me, and, indeed, to the generality of people, than dictatorial egotism from the pulpit. Even in the learned and aged clergyman it is priestly arrogance. When we see that man in the pulpit whom we are in the habit of meeting at the festal board, at the card-table, perhaps seen join in the dance, and over whose frailties, in common with our own, no holy curtain has been drawn, we expect modest exhortation, sober reasoning, chastened denunciation.” . . . Anna Seward informs us that she was “no great reader of sermons,” but she wrote a sermon for “an ingenious young clergyman of our neighbourhood, who has just taken orders, and who wishes to make his first essay in the pulpit with something of my writing. If I know anything of my talents, sermonising is their _forte_.” She wrote another sermon for a friend, a funeral sermon, delivered on a festival day—Whit-Sunday, and chose the text from the 7th chapter of Job; a verse than which she thought there was nothing in Scripture more sublime:—“The eyes of them that have seen me, shall see me no more—thine eyes are upon me—and I am not.” “The young preacher,” she says, “spoke this oration with solemn earnestness and unaffected sensibility.”