Secluded as Mrs. Radcliffe was from the world, she was tremblingly alive to every circumstance which could, by the remotest possibility, raise an inference injurious to the personal character she valued far above literary fame; and, as nothing could induce her to appear before the public in any sort of contention, every thing of this nature preyed long upon her mind. She was much affected by a passage of Miss Seward’s correspondence, which seemed, to her apprehensive feelings, to convey an imputation that she had allowed the dramas afterwards avowed by Miss Baillie to be attributed to her pen. Miss Seward in one of her letters dated May 21, 1799, after mentioning the plays, gave the following quotation from a letter of “her literary friend and correspondent Mrs. Jackson”—“Before their author was known, I observed so much of the power and defects of Mrs. Radcliffe’s compositions in these dramas, as to believe them hers, and I hear she owns them. Mrs. Radcliffe, in whatever she writes, attentive solely to the end, is not sufficiently attentive to observe probability in the means she uses to attain it. She bends her plan—or, if it will not bend, she breaks it, to her catastrophe, by making it grow out of the preceding events. Still she always takes hold of the reader’s feelings, and effects her purpose boldly if not regularly. Her descriptive talent, used to satiety in her novels, is here employed with more temperance, and consequently to better purpose.” The imputation thus conveyed was, perhaps, implicitly removed by two letters of a few months later date; in one of which Miss Seward, speaking of the Plays on the Passions, says, “My literary friends now assert that they are not Mrs. Radcliffe’s;” and in the other, “The literary world now asserts, that the Plays on the Passions are not Mrs. Radcliffe’s;” for, if Mrs. Radcliffe had really owned them, it is scarcely probable the literary world could so soon have discredited her acknowledgment, while the real author remained unknown. This implied vindication from a charge, which perhaps no one ever regarded, was not sufficient for Mrs. Radcliffe’s delicate sense of propriety and honour. She made inquiries after Mrs. Jackson, the lady mentioned as Miss Seward’s informant, in order that she might trace out the origin of her rumour. Having learned that Mrs. Jackson, after residing at Bath, had removed to Edinburgh, she requested Mr. Davies, of the firm of Cadell and Davies, who had ample opportunities of procuring information respecting the literary society of Edinburgh, to ascertain if Mrs. Jackson was still in that city. In the result of these inquiries it appeared, that the lady, to whom the report was ascribed, had left Edinburgh; that her residence was unknown; and that she was not even supposed to be living. Under these circumstances, Mrs. Radcliffe was obliged to leave her vindication (as, in truth, she safely might) to the