recording the successes and sorrows of her life. It is therefore, that the writer feels it to be a duty thus to advert to the slander, and thus to record the reply.

How deep was the shock her feelings sustained, her own words show. It would be in vain, perhaps, to speculate upon the duration of that bitterness and gloom which pervade the above transcript of her feelings; but the evil effect was certainly not of brief continuance, and, perhaps, from this time her real sentiments towards society, and her philosophical speculations on life, whether expressed in her correspondence or conversation, partook far more of the morbid, despairing, and desolate tone of her poetry than before. In her next letter to the same friend (dated a month afterwards from Aberford, whither she had again gone on a visit to her uncle James), the usual playful humour is dashed with excessive bitterness; and this mixture of the gentle and violent, the amiable and the scornful—a mingling of so much that was good with so dreary a disbelief in goodness—so that it often seemed to be wilful, and adopted for the mere sake of paradox—continued to be character istic of her in her late life.

"I had intended, my dear Mrs. Thomson, taking my chance of spending Monday evening with you, but my cousin's return home with me, and the beneficial effect of leaving everything to the last, prevented my going out. So I must begin my letter by bidding you most affectionately 'good bye,' with far more sincerity than those words generally convey. For my own part, in making my round of calls, I thought 'my friends' had entered into a conspiracy to wish me health and happiness in the set-terms of the polite letter-