The lady who signed herself “Anna Matilda” was Mrs. Hannah Cowley, the wife of an absent East India captain, then in her forty-fifth year, and known to-day as the authoress of the _Belle's Stratagem_, a play which still, and deservedly, keeps the stage. Her biographer records the beginning of her literary career as follows: “In the year 1776, some years after her marriage, a sense of power for dramatic writing suddenly struck her whilst sitting with her husband at the theatre. 'So delighted with this?' said she to him; 'why, I could write as well myself.' She then wrote _The Runaway_. Many will recollect the extraordinary success with which it was brought out.” Her habits of composition were not, perhaps, likely to result in poetry of much excellence. “Catching up her pen immediately as the thought struck her, she always proceeded with the utmost facility and celerity. Her pen and paper were so immediately out of sight again, that those around her could scarcely tell when it was she wrote. She was always much pleased with the description of Michael Angelo making the marble fly around him, as he was chiselling with the utmost swiftness, that he might shape, however roughly, his whole design in unity with one clear conception.” Her preparatory note to her collected “Anna Matilda” poems bears out this account. “The beautiful lines of _The Adieu and Recall to Love_ struck her so forcibly that, without rising from the table at which she read, she answered them. Della Crusca's elegant reply surprised her into another, and thus the correspondence most unexpectedly became settled. Anna Matilda's share in it had little to boast; but she has one claim of which she is proud, that of having been the first to point out the excellence of Della Crusca; if there can be merit in discerning what is so very obvious.” She further apologizes for one of her poems to Della Crusca, on the ground that it was written while sitting for her portrait, the painter interrupting her with “Smile a little,” or “More to the right.” Only that class of mind which grows incredulous when informed that orators prepare their speeches, will expect much from such methods of workmanship. Nevertheless, to Mrs. Cowley appears to belong the credit, or discredit, of giving to the Della Cruscan poetry a certain turn or development which did much to make it popular. A hint of this development may be seen in the description of the pen, which was “borne on the vapor of a sigh.” It took final shape in such phrases as these:— Hushed be each ruder note! Soft silence spread With ermine hand thy cobweb robe around. Was it the shuttle of the Morn, That wove upon the cobweb'd thorn Thy airy lay? Or in the gaudy spheroids swell Which the swart Indian's groves illume. Gauzy zephyrs fluttering o'er the plain, In Twilight's bosom drop their filmy rain. Bid the streamy lightnings fly In liquid peril from thine eye.