whereby they certainly murdered this guiltless servant of God." When he
was near death, she adds, "a gentlewoman of the Castle came up and asked
him how he did. He told her, Incomparably well, and full of faith."

On the subject of politics, Mrs. Hutchinson writes, it must be owned,
platitudes; but all are simple, and some are stated with dignity. Her
power, her integrity, her tenderness, her pomp, the liberal and public
interests of her life, her good breeding, her education, her exquisite
diction, are such as may well make a reader ask how and why the
literature of England declined upon the vulgarity, ignorance, cowardice,
foolishness, that became "feminine" in the estimation of a later age;
that is, in the character of women succeeding her, and in the estimation
of men succeeding her lord. The noble graces of Lucy Hutchinson, I say,
may well make us marvel at the downfall following--at Goldsmith's
invention of the women of "The Vicar or Wakefield" in one age, and at
Thackeray's invention of the women of "Esmond" in another.

Mrs. Hutchinson has little leisure for much praise of the natural beauty
of sky and landscape, but now and then in her work there appears an
abiding sense of the pleasantness of the rural world--in her day an
implicit feeling rather than an explicit. "The happiness of the soil and
air contribute all things that are necessary to the use or delight of
man's life." "He had an opportunity of conversing with her in those
pleasant walks which, at the sweet season of the spring, invited all the
neighbouring inhabitants to seek their joys." And she describes a dream
whereof the scene was in the green fields of Southwark. What an England
was hers! And what an English! A memorable vintage of our literature
and speech was granted in her day; we owe much to those who--as she
did--gathered it in.