Her recent death, though a surprise and shock to her innumerable friends, came when she had passed her seventy-second birthday, and it cannot therefore be said that she passed away with her work uncompleted. It was fully and most worthily performed, and was the fruit of a systematic diligence never remitted, and in which few of her sex in any period could have exceeded her. Her memory is fragrant as the month from which she took her _nom-de-plume_, and will at least be cherished by those whom her gentle discourse, continued for more than a generation, has entertained and instructed. From St. Clair McKelway, in the Brooklyn _Eagle_ The death of Jane Cunningham Croly, noticed in Tuesday's _Eagle_, involves the loss of a woman of leadership who put a good deal of help into others' lives. Born in 1829, she began at seventeen to write for newspapers. Her topics were, for a wonder, practical, the young too generally beginning with abstract, academical or recondite subjects. Hers were "fashions" in dress, fads in food, fancies and foibles in decoration etc. From them she advanced to more philosophical or general fields, but on all she wrote was the stamp of applicability to contemporaneous life. In the middle, later, and more genial period of her life she did more talking than writing. And her talking was always earnest, direct, sincere, with a gleam of hope and a note of wisdom in it--the union of experience and reflection. Had it been reported it would have made for her a literary name: but she was content, or constrained, to limit her work to the platform, or to the circle of existence affected by it. As a clubwoman Mrs. Croly achieved the eminence almost of a pioneer. It can be shown that a club or two of women had a titular beginning before "Sorosis," but that was the original society started by her on the theory that there were opportunities and conditions in club life, on an educational or literary basis, of which women could well avail themselves. Mrs. Croly sympathized with the more earnest purposes entering into her idea, and was in little related to any sensational, spectacular, or faddish features that may here or there become attached to it. She was a believer in seriousness, an exemplar of industry, a devotee to system, and a very remarkably punctual, effective and straightforward writer. Her flight was never very high, but it was always progressive, and her regulation of her pen by the precise rules that govern presswork was entitled to distinct praise. She could always be trusted to keep within her topic and herself behind it, and she understood the art of putting things to her public in a way to discover to them their own thoughts as well as to denote her own.