Bryant, who was her life-long friend, and who, at her instance wrote some of his hymns, gives this estimate of her character: "Admirable as was her literary life, her home life was more so; and beautiful as were the examples set forth in her writings, her own example was, if possible, still more beautiful. Her unerring sense of rectitude, her love of truth, her ready sympathy, her active and cheerful beneficence, her winning and gracious manners, the perfection of high breeding, make up a character, the idea of which, as it rests in my mind, I would not exchange for anything in her own interesting works of fiction."
II
MARY LOVELL WARE
MARY LOVELL WARE
Of all the saints in the calendar of the Church there is no name more worthy of the honor than that of Mary Lovell Ware. The college of cardinals, which confers the degree of sainthood for the veneration of faithful Catholics, will never recognize her merits and encircle her head with a halo, but when the list of Protestant saints is made up, the name of Mary L. Ware will be in it, and among the first half dozen on the scroll.
The writer was a student in the Divinity School at Cambridge when a classmate commended to him the Memoirs of Mrs. Ware as one of the few model biographies. It was a book not laid down in the course of study; its reading was postponed for that convenient season for which one waits so long; but he made a mental note of the "Memoirs of Mary L. Ware," which many years did not efface. There is a book one must read, he said to himself, if he would die happy.
Mrs. Ware's maiden name was Pickard. To the end of her days, when she put herself in a pillory as she often did, she called herself by her maiden name. "That," she would say, "was Mary Pickard." I infer that she thought Mary Pickard had been a very bad girl.
Her mother's name was Lovell,—Mary Lovell,—granddaughter of "Master Lovell," long known as a classical teacher in colonial Boston, and daughter of James Lovell, an active Revolutionist, a prominent member of the Continental Congress and, from the end of the war to his death, Naval officer in the Boston Custom House. Mr. Lovell had eight sons, one of whom was a successful London merchant, and one daughter, who remained with her parents until at twenty-five she married Mr. Pickard and who, when her little girl was five years old returned, as perhaps an only daughter should, to take care of her parents in their old age. So it happened that the childhood of Mrs. Ware was passed at her grandfather Lovell's, in Pearl St., Boston, then an eligible place of residence.
Mr. Pickard was an Englishman by birth, and a merchant with business connections in London and Boston, between which cities, for a time, his residence alternated. Not much is said of him in the Memoirs, beyond the fact that he was an Episcopalian with strong attachment to the forms of his church, as an Englishman might be expected to be.