Our Queen was estimable in essentials; but she was not beloved even by her family, if we except her good, kind husband. We cannot be surprised if she was little regretted by her people. Her age and sufferings had prepared the good, and the unfeeling do not see that any affectation of sorrow is called for.
TO CHARLES MANNERS ST. GEORGE, ESQ.
London, March 10, 1819.
I wish to send you Rogers’ new poem. It is rather too largely entitled Human Life: it is the beau ideal of the life of an English country gentleman, from his cradle to his tomb, and is exquisitely touched; but to relish it one must love the country, and love one’s children, and be alive to all the minutiæ of domestic life; for though our country gentleman is a soldier and a senator, yet his retirement forms by far the longest, as well as the most beautiful, part of the poem. It is not much relished in my little London—is called flat, prosaic, and dull; but the public have bought it with avidity.
TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.
London, March 18, 1819.
I should feel ungrateful if I deferred thanking you for the pleasure your last poem has given me. You deserve the peculiar gratitude of every fond mother, for you have divined, embodied, and immortalized the tenderest and the purest feelings of her existence. In looking back, the only days I earnestly desire to recall, are those which glided away while I was ‘girt with growing infancy,’ and read in the eyes and the smiles of my children, who were affectionate and beautiful, a promise of happiness, such as this world can never fulfil.