, her active and cheerful
beneficence, her winning and gracious manners, the perfection of high
breeding, make up a character, the idea of which, as it rests in my
mind, I would not exchange for anything in her own interesting works
of fiction."

II

MARY LOVELL WARE

[Illustration: MARY LOVELL WARE]

Of all the saints in the calendar of the Church there is no name more
worthy of the honor than that of Mary Lovell Ware. The college of
cardinals, which confers the degree of sainthood for the veneration of
faithful Catholics, will never recognize her merits and encircle her
head with a halo, but when the list of Protestant saints is made up,
the name of Mary L. Ware will be in it, and among the first half dozen
on the scroll.

The writer was a student in the Divinity School at Cambridge when a
classmate commended to him the Memoirs of Mrs. Ware as one of the few
model biographies. It was a book not laid down in the course of study;
its reading was postponed for that convenient season for which one
waits so long; but he made a mental note of the "Memoirs of Mary L.
Ware," which many years did not efface. There is a book one must read,
he said to himself, if he would die happy.

Mrs. Ware's maiden name was Pickard. To the end of her days, when she
put herself in a pillory as she often did, she called herself by her
maiden name. "That," she would say, "was Mary Pickard." I infer that
she thought Mary Pickard had been a very bad girl.

Her mother's name was Lovell,--Mary Lovell,--granddaughter of "Master
Lovell," long known as a classical teacher in colonial Boston, and
daughter of James Lovell, an active Revolutionist, a prominent member
of the Continental Congress and, from the end of the war to his death,
Naval officer in the Boston Custom House. Mr. Lovell had eight sons,
one of whom was a successful London merchant, and one daughter, who
remained with her parents until at twenty-five she married Mr. Pickard
and who, when her little girl was five years old returned, as perhaps
an only daughter should, to take care of her parents in their old age.
So it happened that the childhood of Mrs. Ware was passed at her
grandfather Lovell's, in Pearl St., Boston, then an eligible place of
residence.

Mr. Pickard was an Englishman by birth, and a merchant with business
connections in London and Boston, between which cities, for a time,
his residence alternated. Not much is said of him in the Memoirs,
beyond the f