All this indisposed her to attempt a third novel. Yet she commenced some other works, in which she proceeded slowly. But the end of all was at hand. After being married for twenty years, she had at last the prospect of becoming a mother. Her husband's interesting narrative proceeds:] "She was strongly impressed, indeed, with the belief that her confinement was to prove fatal, not in vague presentiment, but on grounds of which I could not entirely remove the force, though I obstinately refused to join in the inference which she drew from them. Under this belief, she completed every, the most minute, preparation for her great change, with the same tranquillity as if she had been making arrangements for one of those short absences which only endeared her home the more to her. The clothes with which she was laid in her grave had been selected by herself; she herself had chosen and labelled some tokens of remembrance for her more intimate friends; and the intimations of her death were sent round from a list in her own handwriting. But these anticipations, though so deeply fixed, neither shook her fortitude nor diminished her cheerfulness. They neither altered her wish to live, nor the ardour with which she prepared to meet the duties of returning health, if returning health were to be her portion. After giving birth to a still-born son on the 7th December, and recovering for a few days with a rapidity beyond the hopes of her medical friends, she was attacked with fever. It advanced with fatal violence, till it closed her earthly life on the morning of Saturday, December 19, 1818." FELICIA HEMANS. [BORN 1794. DIED 1835.] JEFFREY. The business of women being with actual or social life, and the colours it receives from the conduct and dispositions of individuals, they unconsciously acquire, at a very early age, the finest perception of characters and manners, and are almost as soon instinctively schooled in the deep and dangerous learning of feeling and emotion; while the very minuteness with which they make and meditate on these interesting observations, and the finer shades and variations of sentiment which are thus treasured and recorded, trains their whole faculties to a nicety and precision of operation which often discloses itself to advantage in their application to studies of a different character. When women accordingly have turned their minds, as they have done but too seldom, to the exposition or arrangement of any branch of knowledge, they have commonly exhibited, we think, a more beautiful accuracy, and a more uniform and complete justness of thinking, than their less discriminating brethren. There is a finish and completeness, in short, about everything they put out of their hands, which indicates not only an inherent taste for elegance and neatness, but a habit of nice observation, and singular exactness of judgment.