that I admire her more every hour of my life[1]; Death is not to her the king of terrours; she beholds him without the least. When she suffers much, she wishes for him as a deliverer from pain; when life is tolerable, she looks on him with dislike, because he is to separate her from those friends to whom she is more attached than life itself. You shall not stay for my next, as long as you have for this letter; and in every one. Pope shall write something much better than the scraps of old philosophers, which were the presents, munuscula, that stoical fop Seneca used to send in every epistle to his friend Lucilius.
P. S. My Lord has spoken justly of his lady: why not I of my mother? Yesterday was her birthday, now entering on the ninety-first year of her age; her memory much diminished, but her senses very little hurt, her sight and hearing good; she sleeps not ill, eats moderately, drinks water, says her prayers; this is all she does. I have reason to thank God for continuing so long to me a very good and tender parent, and for allowing me to exercise for some years, those cares which are now as necessary to her, as hers have been to me. An object of this sort daily before one's eyes very much softens the mind, but perhaps
- ↑ She was niece to madame de Maintenon, educated at St. Cyr, and was a woman of a very beautiful person, and very agreeable manners. Her letters are written in very elegant French. She was a woman of much observation. Madame de Mainitenon mentions her in her letters. Dr. Trapp told me, that lord Bolingbroke boasting one day of his former gallantries, she said to him, smiling, "When I look at you, methinks I see the ruins of a fine old Roman aqueduct; but the water has ceased to flow." Dr. Warton.
may
