Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/244

244 Inscribe one sentence—life's first truth and last
 * On the pale marble where our dust is sleeping—

We might have been.'

"Who wrote those lines? Miss Landon! What she might have been, is now idle to conjecture; but, apart from her literary abilities and her literary industry, she was, in every domestic relation of life, honourable, generous, dutiful, self-denying; zealous, disinterested, and untiring in her friendships; and, as an ornament of society, what Miss Jewsbury called her—'a gay and gifted thing.

The able writer, whose speculations on her death have been already adverted to and quoted, eloquently bore witness to the noble generosity of her nature as indicated in her works:—

What remains of our task is of a less doubtful and less melancholy character. It is simply to introduce to public notice her latest writings; the