Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/765

Rh this resolution. In compliance with the importunate request of the Honourable Mrs. Thynne, she passed some months with her in London, after the death of her daughter, the Lady Brooke; and, on the melancholy occasion of the decease of Mrs. Thynne herself, she could not dispute the commands of the countess of Hertford, who earnestly desired her to reside some time with her at Marlborough, to soften, by her conversation and friendship, the severe affliction of the loss of so excellent a mother: and I think, once or twice, the power this last lady had over Mrs. Rowe drew her, by an obliging kind of violence, to spend a few months with her at some of the earl's seats in the country. Yet, even on these occasions, she never quitted her retreat without regret.

In this recess she composed the most celebrated of her works. Friendship in Death, 1728, and the several parts of the Letters moral and entertaining, in 1729 and 1731. The design of both is, by fictitious examples of the most generous benevolence and heroic virtue, to allure the reader to the practice of every thing that ennobles human nature, and benefits the world; and by just and lively images of the sharp remorse and real misery that attend the false and unworthy satisfactions of vice, to warn the young and unthinking from being seduced by the name of pleasure, to inevitable ruin. Mr. Cowley observed of her, that she possessed so much strength and firmness of mind, and such a perfect natural goodness, as could not be perverted by the largeness of her wit, and was proof against the art of poetry itself. These Letters, which are more popular than any of her other works (excepting perhaps a few of her Hymns, which certainly have no superior in that species of