win, and from Godwin to Nicholson, to consult on the publication or no publication of the life of the good man, her husband. It is called The Life Everlasting. How does that same Life go on in your parts? Goodbye, God bless you. I shall be glad to see you when you come this way.
"I am going in great haste to see Mrs. Clarkson, for I must get back to dinner, which I have hardly time to do. I wish that dear, good, amiable woman would go out of town. I thought she was clean gone, and yesterday there was a consultation of physicians held at her house to see if they could keep her among them here a few weeks longer."
The concluding volumes of this same Life Everlasting remained unprinted somewhere in a damp hamper, Mr. Carew Hazlitt tells us: for, in truth, the admirable fragment of autobiography Holcroft dictated on his death-bed contained the cream of the matter, and was all the public cared to listen to. Mary continuing "in a feeble and tottering condition," Charles found it needful to make a decisive stand on her behalf against the exhaustion and excitement of incessant company, and especially against the disturbed rest, which resulted from sharing her room with a guest.
"Mary has been very ill indeed since you saw her," he wrote to Hazlitt, "as ill as she can be to remain at home. But she is a good deal better now, owing to a very careful regimen. She drinks nothing but water, and never goes out; she does not even go to the Captain's. Her indisposition has been ever since that night you left town, the night Miss Wordsworth came. Her coming, and that d———d Mrs. Godwin coming
