She led
her beloved husband by the hand to Heaven. She led her children the same
road; and she was leading her grandchildren when the angel of death came
for her; and she slept in peace.
Many remember her. For she alone, of all our tale, lived in this present
century; but they speak of her as "old Madam Vane"--her whom we knew so
young and fresh.
She lies in Willoughby Church--her mortal part; her spirit is with the
spirits of our mothers and sisters, reader, that are gone before us; with
the tender mothers, the chaste wives, the loyal friends, and the just
women of all ages.
RESURGET.
I come to her last, who went first; but I could not have stayed by the
others, when once I had laid my darling asleep. It seemed for a while as
if the events of our tale did her harm; but it was not so in the end.
Not many years afterward, she was engaged by Mr. Sheridan, at a very
heavy salary, and went to Dublin. Here the little girl, who had often
carried a pitcher on her head down to the Liffey, and had played Polly
Peachum in a booth, became a lion; dramatic, political and literary, and
the center of the wit of that wittiest of cities.
But the Dublin ladies and she did not coalesce. They said she was a
naughty woman, and not fit for them morally. She said they had but two
topics, "silks and scandal," and were unfit for her intellectually.
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