ach other, without being known or even
suspected by one another, or, for some time, by the public. These
productions formed a new era or rather a new school of poetry, which
excited such attention and curiosity that every art was resorted to in
order to discover the authors. It was at length whispered abroad, and
then what most surprised the world was, that the two persons were
totally strangers to each other.

Mrs. Merry remained a widow for more than four years: she then, on the
first of January 1803, married Mr. Wignell, the manager of the
Philadelphia theatre, who died in seven weeks after their marriage. For
three years and a half she retained the name of Wignell, when the
present manager solicited her hand so successfully that she consented,
and took the name of Warren, on the 15th of August, 1806. By this
marriage the property and management of the Philadelphia theatre
devolved upon Mr. Warren; than whom, exclusive of the personal
attachment that subsisted between them, she could not have pitched upon
any one person more competent to the care of her property or the
direction of the theatre; or one more worthy of the sacred trust of
being a parent and a guardian to her infant daughter. For near two years
they lived together in a state of ease and felicity which bid fair to
last for years, when he being obliged to attend his company to their
customary summer stations, Mrs. Warren, then in a far advanced state of
pregnancy, desired to go along with him. Aware of the fatigue, the
inconveniences, and the privations to which she would, in all
likelihood, be exposed, during her journey southward, and still more in
her _accouchement_, which must necessarily take place before his return,
he endeavoured to prevail upon her to stay behind. But "Fate came into
the list," and she would go. Arrived at Alexandria, he took a large
commodious house, and put it in a condition sufficiently comfortable;
Mrs. Warren was in lusty health, and as the time approached all was fair
and promising. By one of those turns, however, which it pleases
Providence for his own wise purposes frequently to ordain, to mock our
best hopes and baffle our most sanguine expectations, this admirable
woman was, contrary to every antecedent prognostic, visited in her
travail with epileptic fits, in which she expired, "leaving," (as the
sublime Burke no less truly than pathetically said on the death of
doctor Johnson,) "not only nothing to fill her place, but