Her love and admiration for Lichfield began early in life, and remained keen to its close. When twenty-four years old she wrote from Gotham Rectory, in 1767, “We bend our course towards Lichfield, lovely, interesting Lichfield, where the sweetest days of my youth have passed—the days of prime.” No City could compare with Lichfield in her eyes, and no Cathedral with that of Lichfield when the music to be heard there was also taken into account. After visiting York Cathedral, that “vast and beautiful House of God”: she herself styled it “noble and transcendent,” she wrote, “I passed through York, and heard choral service in the noblest Cathedral in the world; . . . but if the sight perceived the undying superiority of York Minster, my ear acknowledged the yet more transcendent, harmonic advantages of the Gothic boast of Lichfield.” Lichfield, although it may seem to the casual visitor rather a sleepy place to-day, appears to have been pretty lively in Anna Seward’s day. “Plays thrice in the week, balls and suppers at our Inns, cards and feasting within our houses.” And again, “Lichfield has been of late wondrous gay. Six private balls were given, which I was persuaded to attend.” Sir Walter Scott corresponded for some time with the poetess before his visit to Lichfield in May, 1807. He wrote in 1805, “believe me, I shall not be within many miles of Lichfield without paying my personal respects to you, and yet I should not do it in prudence, because I am afraid you have formed a higher opinion of me than I deserve; you would expect to see a person who had dedicated himself much to literary pursuits, and you would find me a rattle-skulled half-lawyer, half-sportsman, through whose head a regiment of horse has been exercising since he was five years old; half-educated, half-crazy, as his friends sometimes tell him, half-everything, but entirely Miss Seward’s much obliged, affectionate and faithful servant, Walter Scott.” She wrote of him, “the stranger guest delighted us all by the unaffected charms of his mind and manners,” and Scott, Lockhart tells us, “had been, as was natural, pleased and flattered by the attentions of the Lichfield poetess in the days of his early aspirations after literary distinction.” No one can deny that Anna Seward was the most famous poetess of her day, but there is, as Sir Walter Scott wrote, “a fashion in poetry, which, without increasing or diminishing the real value of the materials moulded upon it, does wonders in facilitating its currency, while it has novelty, and is often found to impede its reception when the mode has passed away.” It must be admitted that her poetry is not likely ever again to be much read; still, a study of her, and of the Lichfield _Savants_ of her time, must always be instructive.