do with my time; my mind has no energy nor power of application.'

How much she felt her loneliness appears again and again from one
passage and another. Then she struggled against discouragement; she
took to her pen again. To Mrs. Kenrick she writes:--'I intend to pay my
letter debts; not much troubling my head whether I have anything to say
or not; yet to you my heart has always something to say: it always
recognises you as among the dearest of its friends; and while it feels
that new impressions are made with difficulty and early effaced,
retains, and ever will retain, I trust beyond this world, those of our
early and long-tried affection.'

She set to work again, trying to forget her heavy trials. It was during
the first years of her widowhood that she published her edition of the
British novelists in some fifty volumes. There is an opening chapter to
this edition upon novels and novel-writing, which is an admirable and
most interesting essay upon fiction, beginning from the very earliest
times.

In 1811 she wrote her poem on the King's illness, and also the longer
poem which provoked such indignant comments at the time. It describes
Britain's rise and luxury, warns her of the dangers of her unbounded
ambition and unjustifiable wars:--

Arts, arms, and wealth destroy the fruits they bring;
Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring.

Her ingenuous youth from Ontario's shore who visits the ruins of London
is one of the many claimants to the honour of having suggested Lord
Macaulay's celebrated New Zealander:--

Pensive and thoughtful shall the wanderers greet
Each splendid square and still untrodden street,
Or of some crumbling turret, mined by time,
The broken stairs with perilous step shall climb,
Thence stretch their view the wide horizon round,
By scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound,
And, choked no more with fleets, fair Thames survey
Through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way.

It is impossible not to admire the poem, though it is stilted and not to
the present taste. The description of Britain as it now is and as it
once was is very ingenious:--

Where once Bonduca whirled the scythed car,
And the fierce matrons raised the shriek of war,
Light forms beneath transparent muslin float,
And tutor'd voices swell the artful note;
Light-leaved acacias, and the shady plane,
And spreading cedars grace the woodland reign.

The poem is forgotten now, though it was s