d, to an excess rendering
them wholly unfit for the place they occupy.

Here rests a woman, good without pretence,
Blest with plain reason--

from which _sober sense_ is not sufficiently distinguishable. This verse
and a half, and the one 'so unaffected, so composed a mind,' are
characteristic, and the expression is true to nature; but they are, if I
may take the liberty of saying it, the only parts of the epitaph which
have this merit. Minute criticism is in its nature irksome, and as
commonly practiced in books and conversation, is both irksome and
injurious. Yet every mind must occasionally be exercised in this
discipline, else it cannot learn the art of bringing words rigorously to
the test of thoughts; and these again to a comparison with things, their
archetypes, contemplated first in themselves, and secondly in relation
to each other; in all which processes the mind must be skilful,
otherwise it will be perpetually imposed upon. In the next couplet the
word _conquest_, is applied in a manner that would have been displeasing
even from its triteness in a copy of complimentary verses to a
fashionable Beauty; but to talk of making conquests in an epitaph is not
to be endured. 'No arts essayed, but not to be admired,'--are words
expressing that she had recourse to artifices to conceal her amiable and
admirable qualities; and the context implies that there was a merit in
this; which surely no sane mind would allow. But the meaning of the
Author, simply and honestly given, was nothing more than that she
shunned admiration, probably with a more apprehensive modesty than was
common; and more than this would have been inconsistent with the praise
bestowed upon her--that she had an unaffected mind. This couplet is
further objectionable, because the sense of love and peaceful admiration
which such a character naturally inspires, is disturbed by an oblique
and ill-timed stroke of satire. She is not praised so much as others are
blamed, and is degraded by the Author in thus being made a covert or
stalking-horse for gratifying a propensity the most abhorrent from her
own nature--'Passion and pride were to her soul unknown.' It cannot be
meant that she had no passions, but that they were moderate and kept in
subordination to her reason; but the thought is not here expressed; nor
is it clear that a conviction in the understanding that 'virtue only is
our own,' though it might suppress her pride, would be itself competent