The last years of life, it is painful to add, were not her best years. Surviving those by whom life was to her rendered estimable, unshaken as was her religion, her mind, it is acknowledged by friends, yielded to its afflictions; 'her memory became visibly and materially impaired; and her body was so much affected by the sufferings of her mind, that she soon sank into a state of alarming debility.' She who bore with 'calmness and composure' the death of a husband, of him whom she calls 'the man of her choice,' felt that she lost on the death of a brother, 'her strongest tie to this world,' and 'sank into a state of alarming debility!' Where the treasure is, there also will the heart still be found. Sublunary happiness is at the best uncertain as unstable; and those whose plans of good are made for this earth, will see, sooner or later, that they have built on the sands instead of the rock. Contracted in circumstances, and limited in the number of her friends, Mrs. Chapone, with her youngest niece, retired to Hadley, in the autumn of 1800; where her living near to Miss Amy Burrows[13], who had been there for some years, opened new prospects of comfort for her rapidly declining age. It was now that Mrs. Chapone needed all that the most affectionate assiduity could do for her. 'Mrs. and Miss Burrows,' continues the short account by her family, 'were her constant visitors; and while they surveyed, with compassion and humiliation, the awful lesson to nature which the wreck of so bright an ornament to it presented, they omitted no opportunity to administer every soothing means of relief she was then capable of experiencing.' Mr. Cottrell, also, successor to the Rev. Mr. Burrows, at Hadley, and his family, with their friends, sometimes enlivened the solitary seclusion to which she was doomed; but her infirmities augmented so much, at this time, that she was not able to go down stairs more than three or four times. Her life was near its close. October 1801, she completed her 74th year; and on the Christmas-day following, without any direct illness, having described herself as unusually well the day before, and after experiencing less distemper during the last than any of the years of her life, she fell into a doze, from which nothing could rouse her; and at the eighth hour of the night, she drew her last breath, tranquilly and imperceptibly, in the arms of her niece. Mrs. Burrows was also with her. Mrs. Chapone is not represented as one who had pretensions to what men term beauty. If, however, any credit is due to the opinion of Richardson, who knew her in her best days, and who could judge of the sex, there was in her something of physiognomical fascination, that bright emanation of soul, illuminating the countenance, which, candid and benign, gave to the face its best charm.