From the style and versification of this, so much her longest work, I conjecture that Lady Winchelsea had but a slender acquaintance with the drama of the earlier part of the preceding century.  Yet her style in rhyme is often admirable, chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely free from sparkle, antithesis, and that overculture, which reminds one, by its broad glare, its stiffness, and heaviness, of the double daisies of the garden, compared with their modest and sensitive kindred of the fields.  Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think there is a good deal of resemblance in her style and versification to that of Tickell, to whom Dr. Johnson justly assigns a high place among the minor poets, and of whom Goldsmith rightly observes, that there is a strain of ballad-thinking through all his poetry, and it is very attractive.  Pope, in that production of his boyhood, the ‘Ode to Solitude,’ and in his ‘Essay on Criticism,’ has furnished proofs that at one period of his life he felt the charm of a sober and subdued style, which he afterwards abandoned for one that is, to my taste at least, too pointed and ambitious, and for a versification too timidly balanced.

If a second edition of your ‘Specimens’ should be called for, you might add from Helen Maria Williams the ‘Sonnet to the Moon,’ and that to ‘Twilight;’ and a few more from Charlotte Smith, particularly,

    ‘I love thee, mournful, sober-suited Night.’

At the close of a sonnet of Miss Seward are two fine verses: 

    ’Come, that I may not hear the winds of night. 
    Nor count the heavy eave-drops as they fall.’

You have well characterised the poetic powers of this lady; but, after all, her verses please me, with all their faults, better than those of Mrs. Barbauld, who, with much higher powers of mind, was spoiled as a poetess by being a dissenter, and concerned with a dissenting academy.  One of the most pleasing passages in her poetry is the close of the lines upon ‘Life,’ written, I believe, when she was not less than eighty years of age: 

‘Life, we have been long together,’ &c.[104]

You have given a specimen of that ever-to-be-pitied victim of Swift, ‘Vanessa.’  I have somewhere a short piece of hers upon her passion for Swift, which well deserves to be added.  But I am becoming tedious, which you will ascribe to a well-meant endeavour to make you some return for your obliging attentions.

I remain, dear Sir, faithfully yours,
WM. WORDSWORTH.[105]

[104] It was on hearing these lines repeated by his friend, Mr. H.C.  Robinson, that Wordsworth exclaimed, ’Well!  I am not given to envy other people their good things; but I do wish I had written that.’  He much admired Mrs. Barbauld’s Essays, and sent a copy of them, with a laudatory letter upon them, to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[105] Memoirs, ii. 220-22.

66. Hamilton’s ‘Spirit of Beauty:’  Verbal Criticism:  Female Authorship:  Words.