"'With a trembling hand, my beloved Miss Ponsonby, do I take up the pen to thank you for a thrice kind letter. It had not remained several weeks unacknowledged, but for this terrible malady of the head, which has oppressed me with so much severity during the interim. I think it must soon lay me low. Not at my time of life does the constitution, pushed from its equipoise by long enduring disease, regain it amid the struggles. "Immediately on receiving your last, I sent for Madoc; by far the most captivating work of its genuinely inspired author." In the same letter the following passage occurs:-- "Our young friend Cary has published his translation of Dante's Inferno. It is thought the best which has appeared, and the sale goes on well. He presents a copy to yourself and Lady Eleanor, and I trust you will receive it soon." After some literary disquisitions on the Inferno, the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and Madoc; and an allusion to King George's visit to Lichfield, the letter thus concludes:-- "Present me devoutly to your beloved Lady Eleanor. Most interesting is your description of that visit, mutually paid to that desolate and silent Dinbren. How worthy of yourselves that hour of consecration, with all its tributary sighs! Too happy were the days and weeks which I passed beneath its roof, and in its beautiful and sublime environs, to permit such revisitation from me. "It would break my heart amid its present consciousness, spread over with a dark and impervious pall, which can never be drawn away. "Dear, and amiable Miss Ponsonby, farewell." From Lichfield, October 31st, 1805, we have another letter to Miss Ponsonby, with the following tremendous opening:-- "Nothing, my dear Madam, is so common as hypocrisy and treachery where property is concerned; but a greater excess of them never poured their dark currents from the vulgar heart, than in those circumstances which your last letter narrates. "Thus ever be extortionate villany baffled--and long unclouded be the peace which succeeds to that attempted injury. I cannot express how much I am obliged that you took the kind trouble of retracing the road of peril, which had so nearly engulfed a scene, whose beauties rise perpetually in my sleeping and waking dreams." What ever could have happened at Plas Newydd to excite so grand a burst of tragic passion: here _is_ matter for curious speculation! Then Miss Seward runs into a not very wise dissertation on politics; then reverts to literary subjects, of which Horace Walpole's genius is the chief topic; bemoans her own dizziness of the head; has another touch at Mr. Pitt; and finally ejaculates "Adieu, dearest Madam! Your beloved Lady Eleanor will accept my affectionate devoirs!" Why did not Miss Seward go to Llangollen, to end her days in peace?