AN errant perusal of half the pages of this little volume once caused me to determine to eschew literary criticism in the preface I was asked to write, and to speak of the book solely according to its historical and hence its intrinsic value. Continual reading here and there, and, at length, a careful examination of the work as a whole have convinced me that several merits may be attributed to the book which range themselves separately in my mind and which are distinct and wholly unique characteristics. They seem to me to be as follows: the bare antiquarian value—as a relic, rare, and old; the historical-literary value, as an expression of the times in which it was written; and its purely artistic worth, as a specimen of English novel writing. The book was published, as the title page shows, early in 1789, and the self-acknowledged author was Mrs. Perez Morton whose maiden name was Sarah Wentworth Apthorp. Miss Apthorp was born in Braintree in 1759, and had, before her marriage in 1777 with Mr. Morton, gained something more than a local reputation as a clever maker of rhymes, having contributed many poems to the early _New England Magazine_—the first periodical published in America. These, with additional verses and short didactic essays, were together brought out in 1823, under the title of “My Mind and Its Thoughts.” The edition was small, and sold entirely by subscription. Miss Apthorp wrote over the pseudonym of “Philenia.” Her longer poems, epics, are “Ouabi, or The Virtue of Nature: an Indian Tale in Four Cantos,” and “Beacon Hill,” in which is told the story of the American Revolution. This last is said to have moved Robert Treat Paine to designate her as the “American Sappho.” In 1788, while Mr. and Mrs. Morton were occupying the historical Taylor mansion in Dorchester, a painful domestic tragedy occurred, which, taken in connection with similar contingencies that were happening in the society in which they moved, doubtless gave “Philenia” the impetus and _raison d’être_ for the “Power of Sympathy,” published anonymously the following year. Although evidently written with the purest motive, the good people of that day were not anxious to receive the lesson, probably because many of them figured as examples. The edition was bought up and destroyed,—as Drake remarks in his “History of Roxbury”, “so effectually suppressed that no copy is now known to exist.” With the exception of the book now before me, I believe this to be true.