Mrs. Rowe's most popular literary compositions took an epistolary form, which she employed with much skill. In 1728 she published ‘Friendship in Death, in twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living’ (3rd edit. 1733, 5th edit. 1738, and many other editions until 1816). Here she gave a curiously realistic expression to her faith in the soul's immortality. ‘Thoughts on Death, translated from the Moral Essays of Messieurs de Port Royal,’ was appended. A second epistolary venture, ‘Letters Moral and Entertaining’ (pt. i. 1729, pt. ii. 1731, and pt. iii. 1733), was undertaken with the pious intention of exciting religious sentiment in the careless and dissipated. But the frankness with which Mrs. Rowe's imaginary characters acquaint each other with their profane experiences lends her volumes some secular interest. Dr. Johnson, while commending Mrs. Rowe's ‘brightness of imagery’ and ‘purity of sentiment’ in this work, describes the author as the earliest English writer to employ with success ‘the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion.’ ‘The only writer,’ Dr. Johnson adds, who had made a like endeavour was Robert Boyle, in the ‘Martyrdom of Theodora;’ and he failed (Boswell, Life of Johnson, i. 312). In 1736 she published ‘The History of Joseph,’ a poem which she had written in her younger years (4th edit. 1744; Boston, U.S.A. 1807). After her death Isaac Watts, in accordance with her request, revised and published in 1737 prayers of her composition, under the title of ‘Devout Exercises of the Heart in Meditation and Soliloquy, Praise and Prayer.’ A second edition was called for within a year, and many others appeared in London until 1811. Outside London, editions were issued at Newry (1762), Edinburgh (1766 and 1781), Dublin (1771), and Windsor, U.S.A. (1792). In 1739 Mrs. Rowe's ‘Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse’ were published in 2 vols. 8vo; a full account of her life and writings by her brother-in-law, Theophilus Rowe, was prefixed, and her husband's poems were printed in an appendix. A portrait of Mrs. Rowe, engraved by Vertue, formed the frontispiece. These volumes were reissued in 1749, 1750 (with ‘History of Joseph’), 1756, and 1772. A completer collection appeared in 4 vols. in 1796. Mrs. Rowe is represented in ‘Poems by Eminent Ladies,’ 1755, ii. 271. ‘Hampden,’ an unpublished poem by her, is in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 29300 f. 112). Dr. Johnson declared that human eulogies of two such saintly writers as Mrs. Rowe and Dr. Watts were vain; ‘they were applauded by angels and numbered with the just.’ Abroad Mrs. Rowe excited hardly less enthusiasm. Two French translations of her ‘Friendship in Death’ were published—at Amsterdam in 1740 and at Geneva in 1753. Her poems were translated into German in 1745, and achieved much popularity. The German poets Klopstock and Wieland vied with each other in the praises they lavished on her poetic fervour and devotional temperament. ‘Die göttliche Rowe’ and ‘Die himmlische und fromme Singer’ are phrases to be frequently met with in Klopstock's private correspondence.
[The full life prefixed to Mrs. Rowe's Miscellaneous Works (1739) was issued separately in 1769, and was included in Thomas Jackson's Library of Christian Biogr. 1837, vol. x. It is summarized in Cibber's Lives of the Poets and in Noble's Biogr. Hist. iii. 309–10. The most scholarly biography is Die göttliche Rowe von Theodor Vetter, Zürich, 1894; see also Plumptre's Thomas Ken, ii. 172 seq., and Correspondence of John Hughes, esq., 1773, i. 166, 177.]
ROWE, GEORGE ROBERT (1792–1861), physician, was born in 1792, and pursued his medical studies at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. He was admitted a member of the London College of Surgeons on 12 March 1812, and he subsequently entered the army, where he served as surgeon during the later years of the Peninsular war. He at length settled at Chigwell in Essex, and there practised for many years. He was admitted a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1840, and in 1846 he moved into Golden Square, though he still continued to practise in Essex. He relinquished his country work about 1848, when he took the house in Cavendish Square in which he died on 25 Jan. 1861. He was an honorary physician to the Royal Dramatic College and a member of the London Medical Society. He wrote:
- ‘A Practical Treatise on the Nervous Diseases which are denominated Hypochondriasis,’ 2nd edit. 1841; 16th edit. 1860.
- ‘On some Important Diseases of Females,’ London, 1844 (2nd edit. 1857). This work reached a second edition.
He also contributed to the ‘Lancet’ ‘Observations on Cancer cured by Calcium Chloride’ (1813, p. 687) and ‘The Abernethian Oration delivered as President of the Abernethian Society’ (1849, p. 390).
[Obituary notices in the Lancet and Medical Times and Gazette for 1861.]
ROWE, HARRY (1726–1800), ‘emendator of Shakespeare,’ the son of poor parents, was born at York in 1726. He served as trumpeter to the Duke of Kingston's light
