Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/772

758 was equal to the great satisfaction she received when it appeared that her care and bounty had been well placed. Her charities were not confined to those of her own opinions; all partook of her bounty. Nor was her beneficence confined to the poor, since she used to say, "It was one of the greatest benefits that could be done to mankind, to free them from the cares and anxieties that attend a narrow fortune;" in pursuance of these generous sentiments, she has been often known to make large presents to persons, who were not oppressed with the last extremes of indigence.

Mrs. Rowe declined all honours that might have been paid her, on account of her works, by not prefixing her name to any of them, except a few poems in the earlier part of her life. The same modest disposition of mind appears in the orders that she left in writing to her servant, in which, after having desired that her funeral might be by night, and attended only by a small number of friends, she adds, "Charge Mr. Bowden," (the gentleman who preached the funeral sermon) "not to say one word of me in the sermon. I would lie in my father's grave, and have no stone nor inscription over my vile dust, which I gladly leave to oblivion and corruption, till it rise to a glorious immortality."

Filial piety was a remarkable part of her character. She loved her father as she ought, and repaid his uncommon care and tenderness by the just returns of duty and affection. She has been heard to say, "that she would rather die than displease him;" and the anguish she felt at seeing him in pain, in his last sickness, was so great, that it occasioned some kind of convulsion; a disorder from which she was wholly free in every other part of her life. When