deal of reason to condemn my own negligence and folly,
that for so many months I have suffered no memorandums of what has passed
between God and my soul, although some of the transactions were very
remarkable, as well as some things which I have heard concerning others;
but the subject of this article is the most melancholy of any. We lost my
dear and reverend brother and friend, Mr. Sanders, on the 31st of July
last; on the 1st of September, Lady Russell--that invaluable friend, died
at Reading on her road from Bath; and on Friday, the 1st of October, God
was pleased, by a most awful stroke, to take away my eldest, dearest
child, my lovely Betsey. She was formed to strike my affections in the
most powerful manner; such a person, genius, and temper, as I admired
even beyond their real importance, so that indeed I doted upon her, and
was for many months before her death in a great degree of bondage upon
her account. She was taken ill at Newport about the middle of June, and
from thence to the day of her death, she was my continual thought, and
almost uninterrupted care. God only knows with what earnestness and
importunity I prostrated myself before him to beg her life, which I would
have been willing almost to have purchased with my own. When reduced to
the lowest degree of languishment by a consumption, I could not forbear
looking upon her almost every hour. I saw her with the strongest mixture
of anguish and delight; no chemist ever watched his crucible with greater
care, when he expected the production of the philosopher's stone, than I
watched her in all the various turns of her distemper, which at last grew
utterly hopeless, and then no language can express the agony into which
it threw me. One remarkable circumstance I cannot but recollect: in
praying most affectionately, perhaps too earnestly, for her life, these
words came into my mind with great power, "Speak no more to me of this
matter." I was unwilling to take them, and went into the chamber to see
my dear lamb, when, instead of receiving me with her usual tenderness,
she looked upon me with a stern air, and said, with a very remarkable
determination of voice, "I have no more to say to you;" and I think that
from that time, although she lived at least ten days, she seldom looked
upon me with pleasure, or cared to suffer me to come near her. But that
I might feel all the bitterness of the affliction, Providence so ordered
it, that I came in when her sharpest agon