Page:The works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld volume 1.djvu/67

 cost her some struggles to attain, had at least the advantage of causing her easily to admit of such substitutes as occurred for those contemporary and truly congenial friendships which, in the course of nature, were now fast failing her. She lost her early and affectionate friend Mrs. Kenrick in 1819. In December 1822 her brother sunk under a long decline, which had served as a painful preparation to the final parting. A few months later she lost, in the excellent Mrs. John Taylor of Norwich, perhaps the most intimate and most highly valued of all her distant friends; to whose exalted and endearing character she bore the following well-merited testimony in a letter addressed to one of her daughters.

"Receive the assurance of my most affectionate sympathy in those feelings with which you must be now contemplating the loss of that dear woman, so long the object