" I am an ingenuous creature ; as I feel
I speak, or I write," said Miss Seward. This was how she wrote after seeing hyaenas in a booth : " My consciousness of safety luxuriates be- neath the secure view of these sublimely terrible animals, in the sound of their howl and of their roar ; while devout thankfulness for our climate's blessed exemptions, exalts and sanctities 'the gratulation of egotism." FM engage- ments to marry were contracted during the Lichfield season of 1796: " I do not find," writes _Miss Seward, •`• that these guy meetings have collected many combustibles for the Hymeneal torch." Mr. Hesketh Pearson writes less well- educated English, of which the following is a specimen : Following the custom of those days the Sewards had a number of children, who either died in infancy or were still-born, but one other girl, Sarah, survived the hecatomb of off- spring." " Following the custom " I " Hecatomb " I This book (Hatnish Hamilton, 12s. 6d.) is a selection-.---not bad selection—taken mainly from the six-volume collection of Miss Seward's letters of 1811.. That collection is not difficult to come by, and it is to be recommended to those who do not know it for the view it affords of litera- ture and manners in a provincial society at - the - turn of the century. Mr. lesketh Pearson has " edited " these letters, i.e., chosen out some of the more superficially amusing and prefixed " a short biography." The " biography " is not much longer than, and is inferior to, that contained in the D.N.B. Mr. Pearson's style and scholarship may be judged from an extract from his preface; after a reference to his omission of " tedious " passages from the text, he proceeds, " If in our enjoyment of the matters here: dis- played, we laugh at the manner _ of displayal, we should not forget that truth is garbed in strange fashions and that while every fashion goes out. of date the body of truth beneath it re- mains naked to the discerning eye." Such fudge makes one sigh for the kind of tedium to which Mr. Pearson evidently thinks his own superior.
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