By every account, Honora Sneyd must have been a paragon of feminine
loveliness. Her father was a country-gentleman of Staffordshire, who had
been left, by the untimely death of their mother, to the charge of a
bevy of infants. The solicitude of friends and relatives had sought the
care of these, and thus Honora became virtually a daughter of Mrs.
Seward's house. The character of this establishment may be conjectured
from the history of Anna Seward. Remote from the crushing weight of
London authority, she grew up in a provincial atmosphere of literary and
social refinement, and fondly believed that the polite praises (for
censure was a thing unknown among them) that were bandied about in her
own coterie would be cordially echoed by the voices of posterity. In
this she has been utterly deceived; but at the same time it must be
confessed that there was much in the tone of the reigning circles at
Lichfield, in those days, to contrast most favorably with the manners of
the literary sovereigns of the metropolis, or the intellectual elevation
of the rulers of fashion. At Lichfield, it was polite to be learned, and
good-breeding and mutual admiration went hand in hand.
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