The latter (Watts) only mentions three Qualifications of one Person who was deceased, which therefore could raise Grief and Compassion but for One. Whereas the former, (our most excellent Poet) gives his Reader a Sort of an Idea of the Death of Three Persons, viz.
—a Wife, a Daughter, and a Sister,
which is Three Times as great a Loss as the Death of One, and consequently must raise Three Times as much Grief and Compassion in the Reader.
It was a pity, Silence added, that such an excellent piece should not be dignified with a particular name. Seeing that it could not justly be called either Epic, Saphhic, Lyric or Pindaric, nor any other name yet invented, she presumed it might (in honour and remembrance of the dead) be called the Kitelic.
The next letter on freedom of speech was, or purported to be, an extract from the London Journal, and is written in such a totally masculine spirit that the reader might well have exclaimed like Hugh Evans in the Merry Wives of Windsor: "I like not when a 'oman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler." This is one of its masculine sentiments: "Who ever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing Terrible to Publick Traytors."
And this is another, phrased very much as Grover Cleveland might have phrased it. "The Administration of Government is nothing else but the Attendance of the Trustees of the People upon the Interest and Affairs of the People."
The next letter inveighs against hypocritical pretenders to religion. It had for some time, Silence says, been a question with her whether a commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion, or by the openly profane; but she is inclined to think that the hypocrite is the most dangerous person of the two, especially if he sustains a post in the Government, and his conduct is considered as it regards the public. The local application of these remarks to Boston at the time could be left to take care of itself.
The next letter gives us another peep under Silence's petticoats, for it advances a plan for the insurance of widows, worked out with actuarial precision, and bearing the unmistakable earmarks of the projecting spirit of the founder of the Junto. "For my own Part," Silence ends, "I have nothing left to live on, but Contentment and a few Cows; and tho' I cannot expect to be reliev'd by this Project, yet it would be no small Satisfaction to me to See it put in Practice for the Benefit of Others."
The next letter contains a missive from Margaret After cast, a forlorn Virgin, well stricken in years and repentance, to Silence, in which the writer, prompted by the provision for widows proposed by Silence, begs her to form a project also for the relief of "all those penitent Mortals of the fair Sex, that are like to be punish'd with their Virginity until old Age, for the Pride and Insolence of their Youth."
The next letter is a clever discourse on drunkenness. It hints at the truth that Franklin afterwards insisted upon in the "Dialogue between Horatio and Philocles" that we must stint sensual pleasure to really enjoy it, and sets forth a vocabulary of cant terms for intoxication similar to that subsequently published by him in the Pennsylvania Gazette.