A young lady, at the age of nineteen, was extremely beautiful, in possession of a large fortune, and by no means deficient in understanding or wit; but was immoderately fond of play. She soon gambled away her whole fortune. Reflections on the past became bitter; anticipation of the future alarming; melancholy increased, and weariness of life succeeded. Being at Bath, in the year 1731, she was seen to retire to her chamber with her usual composure, and was found in the morning hanging by a gold and silver girdle to a closet door. Her youth, beauty, and distress, rendered her an object of pity to every one but a near relation, who, on hearing of her death, was inhuman enough to exclaim, in a punning style—“Then she has tied herself up from play.”
On the morning of her death she left these lines in the window:—
“O death, thou pleasing end of human woe!
Thou cure for life! thou greatest good below!
Still mayst thou fly the coward and the slave,
And thy soft slumbers only bless the brave.”
On reading which a gentleman wrote thus:—
“O dice, ye vain diverters of our woe!
Ye waste of life! ye greatest curse below!