A Poem addressed to Elizabeth Craven
It was addressed to Elizabeth Craven, and chides her for spending her time doing needlework, rather than cultivating her literary talents.
Written in rhyming couplets, it is really not a bad poem. The flattery of Craven's beauty, when she was aged nearly sixty at this time, is a bit over the top, and conventional but the praise of her writing - "wit in prose and elegance in rhyme" - is far more unusual. To tell a woman to desist from humdrum domestic tasks and get on with writing is a welcome change.
The poem was reprinted in an anthology three years later. It was unsigned, and was attributed hypothetically to Lumley Skeffington, a rather rakish young friend of Elizabeth's youngest son Keppel. The attribution is not very convincing. "Skeffie" as his friends called him, was a dandy and somewhat wild young man, who enjoyed taking part in the Brandenburgh House theatricals but was not known to write poetry or to have much taste for it.
A more likely author for the lines might be another one of Keppel's friends, the young Scottish poet Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. He was a correspondent and admirer of Elizabeth Craven, and is known to have urged her to write her Memoirs. He was also a friend and correspondent of Sir Walter Scott.
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