We have now a pleasant duty, to connect with these records the recollections of two or three of L. E. L.'s personal friends, and the tributes of a few other writers who have expressed themselves most worthily in relation alike to her genius and her misfortunes.
And with respect to her genius, the course she should have more diligently pursued for its cultivation, was pointed out in a friendly note, written by the late William Gifford,to a mutual acquaintance, just before his relinquishment of the editorship of the "Quarterly Review;" in respect to which he says, "there is little or no chance of my holding my station for another number." Had L. E. L. strictly followed his plain advice, she would earlier have attained the elevation to which her later writings were rapidly advancing her.
"Meanwhile," he says, "the young lady must plume her wings for a steadier flight. She has fancy, a good ear, a command of poetical language, and a quick succession of imagery; but all these will not make a good, much less a great poet, without correct taste and feeling and knowledge. Your amiable friend, she may be assured, cannot retain her present elevation in the public mind, but by something of a more decisive description, of a more uniform and direct tendency than her last poem. If I might advise her, she should no longer dance from measure to measure in the same story, but end with that she began—either lyric or heroic:—and let her plan her subject at first, and not trust to accident for its course and end."
The passages that follow are selected from recollections which we owe to a female pen—the same that supplied a note descriptive of L. E. L.'s study, in the earlier part of our narrative. Since this
