Miss Fanshawe was born in 1775, and came of a good old English family. At an early age she displayed literary gifts full of promise. The following sonnet, written at the age of fourteen and addressed to her mother, has perhaps not been excelled by any youthful writer:-- "Oh thou! who still by piercing woe pursued, Alone and pensive, pour'st thy sorrows here, Forgive, if on thy griefs I dare intrude To wipe from thy lov'd cheek the falling tear. Dear mourner, think!--thy son will weep no more; His life was spotless, and his death was mild, And, when this vain delusive life is o'er, He'll shine a seraph, whom thou lost a child. Then, as we bend before th' eternal throne, Oh may'st thou, with exulting accents boast, 'Now shall my children ever be my own, For none of those thou gavest me are lost.' With rapture then thou'lt meet th' angelic boy, And she who sow'd in tears shall meet in joy." _August, 1789._ A long playful poem composed at the age of sixteen, was addressed to the Earl of Harcourt, on his wishing to spell her name, Catherine, with a K. It displays much erudition, but it is too long to quote in full. We give a few of the lines pleading for the letter C:-- "And can his antiquarian eyes, My Anglo-Saxon C despise? And does Lord Harcourt day by day, Regret the extinct initial K? And still with ardour unabated, Labour to get it reinstated? I know, my lord, your generous passion, For every long exploded fashion; And own the Catherine you delight in, Looks irresistibly inviting, Appears to bear the stamp and mark, Of English used in Noah's Ark; 'But all that glitters is not gold,' Not all things obsolete are old. Would you but take the pains to look, In Dr. Johnson's quarto book (As I did, wishing much to see, Th' aforesaid letter's pedigree), Believe me, 'twould a tale unfold, Would make your Norman blood run cold; My lord, you'll find the K's no better, Than an interpolated letter; A wand'ring Greek, a franchis'd alien, Derived from Cadmus or Deucalion; And why, or wherefore, none can tell, Inserted 'twixt the J and L. The learnèd say, our English tongue On Gothic beams is built and hung. Then why the solid fabric piece, With motley ornaments from Greece? Her lettered despots had no bowels, For northern consonants and vowels; The Roman and the Greek grammarian Deem'd us, and all our words barbarian; 'Till those hard words, and harder blows, Had silenced all our haughty foes; And proud they were to kiss the sandals (Shoes we had none) of Goths and Vandals." She wrote a satire on William Cobbett, M.P., for Oldham, which was extremely popular amongst politicians at the period it was penned. This is not surprising, for it contains some most amusing lines. It is entitled "The Speech of the Member for Odium." In the lighter vein she produced some verses in imitation of the poetry of Wordsworth.