ingularly witty,
downright man, outspoken and humorous. The lady admires his genius,
bitterly resents his sarcasms; of his celebrated work, the 'Botanic
Garden,' she says, 'It is a string of poetic brilliants, and they are of
the first water, but the eye will be apt to want the intersticial black
velvet to give effect to their lustre.' In later days, notwithstanding
her 'elegant language,' as Mr. Charles Darwin calls it, she said several
spiteful things of her old friend, but they seem more prompted by
private pique than malice.

If Miss Seward was the Minerva and Dr. Darwin the Jupiter of the
Lichfield society, its philosopher was Thomas Day, of whom Miss Seward's
description is so good that I cannot help one more quotation:--

'Powder and fine clothes were at that time the appendages of gentlemen;
Mr. Day wore not either. He was tall and stooped in the shoulders, full
made but not corpulent, and in his meditative and melancholy air a
degree of awkwardness and dignity were blended.' She then compares
him with his guest, Mr. Edgeworth. 'Less graceful, less amusing, less
brilliant than Mr. E., but more highly imaginative, more classical, and
a deeper reasoner; strict integrity, energetic friendship, open-handed
generosity, and diffusive charity, greatly overbalanced on the side of
virtue, the tincture of misanthropic gloom and proud contempt of common
life society.' Wright, of Derby, painted a full-length picture of Mr.
Day in 1770. 'Mr. Day looks upward enthusiastically, meditating on
the contents of a book held in his dropped right hand ... a flash of
lightning plays in his hair and illuminates the contents of the volume.'
'Dr. Darwin,' adds Miss Seward, 'sat to Mr. Wright about the same
period--_that_ was a simply contemplative portrait of the most perfect
resemblance.'

III.

Maria must have been three years old this eventful Christmas time when
her father, leaving his wife in Berkshire, came to stay with Mr. Day at
Lichfield, and first made the acquaintance of Miss Seward and her poetic
circle. Mr. Day, who had once already been disappointed in love, and
whose romantic scheme of adopting his foundlings and of educating one of
them to be his wife, has often been described, had brought one of the
maidens to the house he had taken at Lichfield. This was Sabrina, as he
had called her. Lucretia, having been found troublesome, had been sent
off with a dowry to be apprenticed to a milliner. Sabrina was a charming
li