The success of her Letters is stated by herself to have been the source of much good to her: she who, only ten years before, declared that 'this world had nothing for her but a few friends,' who owns that 'a certain weariness of life, and a sense of insignificance and insipidity,' did then 'deject' her, now feels that the success of her writings appeased 'that uneasy sense of helplessness and insignificancy which often depressed and afflicted her.' Her work gave her some tie to the world. Her intellectual existence, her new life, succeeded to her sympathetic state. Of her next work, the 'Miscellanies,' not much need be said. Unqualified in her admiration of the author's abilities, Mrs. Barbauld seems to labour to explain the unpopularity of this publication. The toil was not worth the pains. Excepting the _Letter to a New-married Lady_, and _Three Essays_, the contents of this volume did not authorize the distinction to which friendship conceived it to be entitled. Her long epistolary controversy with Richardson, respecting 'Filial Obedience' generally, evidences great superiority of thought. It extends to three letters; of which the first is dated October 12, and the second November 10, 1750; and the third, which is her last, bears date the 3d of January, 1750-51. Perhaps Miss Carter was not far from the fact, when, as now appears from one of Mrs. Chapone's Letters to her, she called this controversy 'an unmerciful prolixity upon a plain simple subject.' Still it is, in such hands, of much worth. Differing from Richardson in some essential particulars, Mrs. Chapone, young as she then was, magnanimously promulgated, and resolutely defended, her own sentiments. Authority seems to have been here considered by Richardson as synonymous with what most men think tyranny. Parents were to be despots, and children to live as their bond-slaves. Obligation is reciprocal. Subjection necessarily supposes protection; and paternal authority has the best claim to filial obedience, where benevolence endears dependance, and where conduct demands respect. Goldsmith told no more than truth, when, as his Essays will show, he declared that there were parents who got children for the gratification of tyrannising over them. Mrs. Chapone had the gift of letter-writing. When she writes to her few friends, it is with ease, with sense, and with life. She does not then write for the press. She read much, thought more, and wrote as she thought. Many of her judgments, both of men and books, deserve to be weighed.