down to him, and that because he keepeth the commandments of the Lord, and delighteth in the law of his God."

Eyam, in the person of Miss Seward, furnishes another and a more successful candidate for literary honours. Her claim to notice in the history of her native village cannot be disregarded here, though her talents as an author are too well known to admit of much controversy, and almost every circumstance of her life is already before the public. She was born at Eyam, where her earliest years were spent at the residence of her father, previously to his removal to Litchfield. A manuscript from the pen of Mr. William Newton, of Cressbrook Dale, to whom she gave the honourable appellation of the PEAK MINSTREL, strongly expresses her attachment to the place of her birth. He had a personal knowledge of this eminent female: I have therefore chosen to use his language rather than my own. "In this seat of inspiration," he observes," she passed many of her earliest years, and I have heard her say in more advanced life, her eyes swimming in delight, that in her childhood rambles about her native village, the views of the Alpine scenery around her first elicited the poetic spark, which afterwards mounted into as pure and as bright a flame as ever issued from the altar of the Muses."

The same manuscript, when speaking of the blandishments of her conversation, and her various accomplishments, adds"the grace and elegance of her form were equal to the energies of her mind and the brilliancy of her imagination. Born and nurtured in the bosom of those mountains which gave her birth, I knew her very early in life, and when she was in her twentieth year, to her might have been applied the language of one of our most eminent writers, I saw her at ***, and surely never lighted upon this earth, which she scarcely seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.""

To high personal accomplishments and great mental acquisitions, Miss Seward added benevolence of heart, sweetness of disposition, and an enthusiasm in her friendships and affections that was almost unbounded; but "the most amiable trait in her character," Mr. Newton observes, "was her filial piety." In the latter years of her father's life he shared the fate of SWIFT, STEELE, MARLBOROUGH, and other men of superior talents and great sensibility. In the paroxysms of his disorder she attended his bedside, and for whole nights I have known her watch him with the kindest and most sedulous attention, administering to him his cordials and medicines with her own

hand: and I have seen the tears of joy trickle down her cheek when she found him in a lucid moment. It was her delight, as it was her honour,

"To rock the cradle of declining age."

Miss Seward was removed from Eyam early in life, yet so strong was her attachment to her native village, and so delightful were the recollections that it revived, that she made a pilgrimage to it every year of her life; and many of her letters evince that she visited it with an enthusiastic affection.

From the many volumes of Miss Seward's letters which have been published, she may be regarded more as a writer of prose than poetry. They manifest an intimate acquaintance with polite literature, and occasionally they display a considerable portion of critical taste; at the same time they have more of the stateliness and formality of studied lectures, than the ease and familiarity of private and friendly correspondence. In their production the head has evidently been more consulted than the heart.

The history of Miss Seward's life is too well known, and her talents as a writer too accurately appreciated, to require any illustration from the pen of a Peak Tourist; but her poetic character, and some circumstances connected with it, are sufficiently important and interesting to justify the critical observations that are here indulged.

Cunninghame, from his friendly connexion with Miss Seward, his admiration of her powers, and the fascination of her manners, had become one of her imitators in verse, and his talents as a poet were at one time the theme of her commendation, and at another the object of her unfriendly animadversions: yet his sins in verse, whatever they were, may partly be charged upon herself; she it was who first seduced him from the ease and simplicity of nature, and taught him to indulge in those splendid trickeries and glittering coruscations of artful composition, with which her works too much abound. Early in life she appears to have been under the influence of this error in judgment, if I may so term it; and the maturer compositions of her riper years, though they evince a more vigorous imagination and a greater command of language, are nevertheless tainted with this predominating fault. Perhaps her frequent association with the eccentric Dr. Dar

win, when he resided at Litchfield, was but little calculated to improve her taste. A fire that sparkles and dazzles, but warms not, pervades the productions of both these writers of modern poetry: pictures for the eye, and not the mind, crowd their respective canvasses, and towards the close of their intimate connexion there was a marvellous assimilation in the style and construction of their verse. It was late in life when Dr. Darwin appeared before the public in the character of a poet: there can, however, be no doubt but long previous study was required, and much mechanical construction and management practised, before he could so eminently succeed in elaborating his versification into such splendid feebleness. In this unprofitable labour he was probably assisted by Miss Seward, and the lines that occupy the first four or five pages of the BOTANIC GARDEN, and which are the exordium of the poem, appear to warrant the supposition; they were published originally as Miss Seward's, in the Gentleman's Magazine, eight or nine years before the BOTANIC GARDEN blazed on the literary world. She has claimed them as her own, by a last solemn act, and they appear as her's in the volumes of her works edited by Walter Scott, to whom her papers were entrusted for publication. Dr. Darwin, without any acknowledgment that he had received them from another, has used them as his property, and they certainly afford a fair and ample specimen of the general style and manner of the whole work. They contain his peculiar beauties, and they are marked with his faults. It is, however, remarkable that Miss Seward never reclaimed those lines till after Dr. Darwin's death. There was a reason why the Doctor should permit them originally (supposing they were his own) to be erroneously ascribed to Miss Seward; namely, that his great work was not even known to be in contemplation, much less in progress, for many years after the appearance of these introductory lines. If Miss Seward had been the inventor of this peculiar form of verse, the ground-work of it at least would have been traceable in all her poems; whereas it is only found, in a high degree, in her Elegy on Captain Cook, many passages of which are so thoroughly in the style of Dr. Darwin, both with respect to diction and illustration, that it seems as probable that he was the author of them, as that Miss Seward was the writer of the lines in question. Her largest poems in the heroic measure - the MONODY ON MAJOR ANDRE, and

the poetic novel of LOUISA, Scarcely bear a mark of the Darwinian cadence of metre, and are but little assimilated in imagery to the manner of the author of the BOTANIC GARDEN, throughout all whose works this peculiar manner prevails. In him it is an original characteristic; in Miss Seward it is evidently only incidental and imitative.

William Peveril.

Thor. · Druidical Circle and Ancient Barrow. an Earthquake in a Mine on Eyam Edge.

WHEN William the Conqueror, after the overthrow of

Harold at the battle of Hastings, found himself at leisure to attend to the distribution of the lands which his prowess had obtained, he bestowed the Peak of Derbyshire upon his natural son William Peveril, whom he appointed lord and governor of the counties of Nottingham and Derby. The rich domains thus acquired continued in the family of the Peverils until the reign of Henry the Second, who deprived the then possessor of his honours and his lands, on a charge of poisoning Ranulph, Earl of Chester. The correctness of the accusation was hardly disputable, and he ignominiously fled to another country, stigmatised with the character of a murderer: so terminated the brief honours of this once

wealthy family. Afterwards Richard the First gave and confirmed to his brother John, then Earl of Mortaine, the "counties of Nottingham, Lancaster, and Derby, with the honours belonging to them, and also the honour of Peveril." *

Those parts of Derbyshire which are included under the general denomination of the KING'S FIELD, are subject to the operation of a peculiar system of mineral law, which declares "that by the custom of the mine it is lawful for all the King's liege people to dig, delve, search, subvert, and overturn, all manner of grounds, lands, meadows, closes, pastures, mears, and marshes, for ore-mines, of whose inheritance soever they be; dwelling-houses, orchards, and gardens, excepted." From the inconvenient effects of this comprehensive and sweeping clause, the freehold tenures of the parish of Eyam are happily exempt, in consequence of a mineral charter granted by KING JOHN, when Earl of Mortaine, previously to his being created Duke of Lancaster.

*Cambden.