was written slowly and with mature consideration.  She began it in several forms, which she successively rejected, after they were considerably advanced.  She wrote many parts of the work again and again, and, when she had finished what she intended for the first part, she felt herself more urgently stimulated to revise and improve what she had written, than to proceed, with constancy of application, in the parts that were to follow.

CHAP.  X.

I am now led, by the course of my narrative, to the last fatal scene of her life.  She was taken in labour on Wednesday, the thirtieth of August.  She had been somewhat indisposed on the preceding Friday, the consequence, I believe, of a sudden alarm.  But from that time she was in perfect health.  She was so far from being under any apprehension as to the difficulties of child-birth, as frequently to ridicule the fashion of ladies in England, who keep their chamber for one full month after delivery.  For herself, she proposed coming down to dinner on the day immediately following.  She had already had some experience on the subject in the case of Fanny; and I cheerfully submitted in every point to her judgment and her wisdom.  She hired no nurse.  Influenced by ideas of decorum, which certainly ought to have no place, at least in cases of danger, she determined to have a woman to attend her in the capacity of midwife.  She was sensible that the proper business of a midwife, in the instance of a natural labour, is to sit by and wait for the operations of nature, which seldom, in these affairs, demand the interposition of art.

At five o’clock in the morning of the day of delivery, she felt what she conceived to be some notices of the approaching labour.  Mrs. Blenkinsop, matron and midwife to the Westminster Lying in Hospital, who had seen Mary several times previous to her delivery, was soon after sent for, and arrived about nine.  During the whole day Mary was perfectly cheerful.  Her pains came on slowly; and, in the morning, she wrote several notes, three addressed to me, who had gone, as usual, to my apartments, for the purpose of study.  About two o’clock in the afternoon, she went up to her chamber,—­never more to descend.

The child was born at twenty minutes after eleven at night.  Mary had requested that I would not come into the chamber till all was over, and signified her intention of then performing the interesting office of presenting the new-born child to its father.  I was sitting in a parlour; and it was not till after two o’clock on Thursday morning, that I received the alarming intelligence, that the placenta was not yet removed, and that the midwife dared not proceed any further, and gave her opinion for calling in a male practitioner.  I accordingly went for Dr. Poignand, physician and man-midwife to the same hospital, who arrived between three and four hours after the birth of the child.  He immediately proceeded to the extraction of the placenta, which he brought away in pieces, till he was satisfied that the whole was removed.  In that point however it afterwards appeared that he was mistaken.