With the final lines a rush of dissatisfaction came over the writer, and she added certain couplets, addressed to her father, for whom the whole set seems to have been originally written, and who may be responsible in part for the bald and didactic quality of most of her work.
My Subjects bare, my Brain is bad,
Or better Lines you should have had;
The first fell in so nat'rally,
I knew not how to pass it by;
The last, though bad I could not mend,
Accept therefore of what is pen'd,
And all the faults that you shall spy
Shall at your feet for pardon cry.
Mr. John Harvard Ellis has taken pains to compare various passages in her "Four Monarchies" with the sources from which her information was derived, showing a similarity as close as the difference between prose and verse would admit. One illustration of this will be sufficient. In the description of the murder of the philosopher Callisthenes by Alexander the Great, which occurs in her account of the Grecian Monarchy, she writes:
The next of worth that suffered after these,
Was learned, virtuous, wise Calisthenes,
Who loved his Master more than did the rest,
As did appear, in flattering him the least;
In his esteem a God he could not be,
Nor would adore him for a Deity.
For this alone and for no other cause,
Against his Sovereign, or against his Laws,
He on the Rack his Limbs in pieces rent,
Thus was he tortur'd till his life was spent
Of this unkingly act doth Seneca
