Mrs. Warren employed much of her leisure with her pen. She kept a faithful record of occurrences during the dark days of her country's affliction, through times that engaged the attention both of the philosopher and the politician. She did this with the design of transmitting to posterity a faithful portraiture of the most distinguished characters of the day.
Her intention was fulfilled in her history of the war. Her poetical compositions, afterwards collected and dedicated to General Washington, were the amusement of solitude, when many of her friends were actively engaged in the field or cabinet. Some of them contain allusions to bodily sufferings, her health being far from robust. The tragedies, "The Sack of Rome," and "The Ladies of Castile," are more remarkable for patriotic sentiment than dramatic merit. The verse is smooth and flowing, and the language poetical, but often wanting in the simplicity essential to true pathos. An interest deeper than that of the story is awakened by the application of many passages to the circumstances of the times. The truth of the following lines must have been dolefully felt:
"'Mongst all the ills that hover o'er mankind,
Unfeigned, or fabled in the poet's page,
The blackest scroll the sister furies hold
For red-eyed wrath, or malice to fill up,
Is incomplete to sum up human woe;
Till civil discord, still a darker fiend,
Stalks forth unmasked from his infernal den,
With mad Alecto's torch in his right hand,