she roused her faculties
to grapple with it. All her other works were produced with a rapidity,
that did not give her powers time fully to expand. But this was written
slowly and with mature consideration. She began it in several forms,
which she successively rejected, after they were considerably advanced.
She wrote many parts of the work again and again, and, when she had
finished what she intended for the first part, she felt herself more
urgently stimulated to revise and improve what she had written, than to
proceed, with constancy of application, in the parts that were to
follow.

CHAP. X.

I am now led, by the course of my narrative, to the last fatal scene of
her life. She was taken in labour on Wednesday, the thirtieth of August.
She had been somewhat indisposed on the preceding Friday, the
consequence, I believe, of a sudden alarm. But from that time she was in
perfect health. She was so far from being under any apprehension as to
the difficulties of child-birth, as frequently to ridicule the fashion
of ladies in England, who keep their chamber for one full month after
delivery. For herself, she proposed coming down to dinner on the day
immediately following. She had already had some experience on the
subject in the case of Fanny; and I cheerfully submitted in every point
to her judgment and her wisdom. She hired no nurse. Influenced by ideas
of decorum, which certainly ought to have no place, at least in cases of
danger, she determined to have a woman to attend her in the capacity of
midwife. She was sensible that the proper business of a midwife, in the
instance of a natural labour, is to sit by and wait for the operations
of nature, which seldom, in these affairs, demand the interposition of
art.

At five o'clock in the morning of the day of delivery, she felt what
she conceived to be some notices of the approaching labour. Mrs.
Blenkinsop, matron and midwife to the Westminster Lying in Hospital, who
had seen Mary several times previous to her delivery, was soon after
sent for, and arrived about nine. During the whole day Mary was
perfectly cheerful. Her pains came on slowly; and, in the morning, she
wrote several notes, three addressed to me, who had gone, as usual, to
my apartments, for the purpose of study. About two o'clock in the
afternoon, she went up to her chamber,--never more to descend.

The child was born at twenty minutes after eleven at night. Mary had
requested that I would not co