Read it through once

More than this, it is astounding to gather from her letters to Sir William Elford that she was keeping up her reading, expressing herself most decisively regarding Scott’s new poems, the preference for which in Edinburgh she deems unlikely to extend southward; and then falling-to at Anna Seward’s letters—The _Swan of Lichfield_—just published in six volumes and which she finds “affected, sentimental, and lackadaisical to the highest degree; and her taste is even worse than her execution.... According to my theory, letters should assimilate to the higher style of conversation, without the snip-snap of fashionable dialogue, and with more of the simple transcripts of natural feeling than the usage of good society would authorize. Playfulness is preferable to wit, and grace infinitely more desirable than precision. A little egotism, too, must be admitted; without it, a letter would stiffen into a treatise, and a billet assume the ‘form and pressure’ of an essay. I have often thought a fictitious correspondence (not a novel, observe) between two ladies or gentlemen, consisting of a little character, a little description, a little narrative, a little criticism, a very little sentiment and a great deal of playfulness, would be a very pleasing and attractive work: ‘A very good article, sir’ (to use the booksellers’ language); ‘one that would go off rapidly—pretty, light summer reading for the watering-places and the circulating libraries.’ If I had the slightest idea that I could induce you to undertake such a work by coaxing, by teasing, or by scolding, you should have no quarter from me till you had promised or produced it.”