was the predominant virtue in him as which is so in its own nature." "He
had made up his accounts with life and death, and fixed his purpose to
entertain both honourably." "The heat of his youth a little inclined him
to the passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of love
and grief; but reason was never dethroned by them, but continued governor
and moderator of his soul."

She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had "conceived a
kindness" for her lord, their susceptibility, their willingness, their
"admirable tempting beauty," and "such excellent good-nature as would
have thawed a rock of ice"; but she adds no less beautifully, "It was not
his time to love." In her widowhood she remembered that she had been
commanded "not to grieve at the common rate of women"; and this is the
lovely phrase of her grief: "As his shadow, she waited on him everywhere,
till he was taken to that region of light which admits of none, and then
she vanished into nothing."

She has an invincible anger against the enemies of her husband and of the
cause. The fevers, "little less than plagues," that were common in that
age carry them off exemplarily by families at a time. An adversary is
"the devil's exquisite solicitor." All Royalists are of "the wicked
faction." She suspected his warders of poisoning Colonel Hutchinson in
the prison wherein he died. The keeper had given him, under pretence of
kindness, a bottle of excellent wine, and the two gentlemen who drank of
it died within four months. A poison of strange operation! "We must
leave it to the great day, when all crimes, how secret soever, will be
made manifest, whether they added poison to all their other iniquity,
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 h