She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had “conceived a kindness” for her lord, their susceptibility, their willingness, their “admirable tempting beauty,” and “such excellent good-nature as would have thawed a rock of ice”; but she adds no less beautifully, “It was not his time to love.”  In her widowhood she remembered that she had been commanded “not to grieve at the common rate of women”; and this is the lovely phrase of her grief:  “As his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken to that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing.”

She has an invincible anger against the enemies of her husband and of the cause.  The fevers, “little less than plagues,” that were common in that age carry them off exemplarily by families at a time.  An adversary is “the devil’s exquisite solicitor.”  All Royalists are of “the wicked faction.”  She suspected his warders of poisoning Colonel Hutchinson in the prison wherein he died.  The keeper had given him, under pretence of kindness, a bottle of excellent wine, and the two gentlemen who drank of it died within four months.  A poison of strange operation!  “We must leave it to the great day, when all crimes, how secret soever, will be made manifest, whether they added poison to all their other iniquity, whereby they certainly murdered this guiltless servant of God.”  When he was near death, she adds, “a gentlewoman of the Castle came up and asked him how he did.  He told her, Incomparably well, and full of faith.”

On the subject of politics, Mrs. Hutchinson writes, it must be owned, platitudes; but all are simple, and some are stated with dignity.  Her power, her integrity, her tenderness, her pomp, the liberal and public interests of her life, her good breeding, her education, her exquisite diction, are such as may well make a reader ask how and why the literature of England declined upon the vulgarity, ignorance, cowardice, foolishness, that became “feminine” in the estimation of a later age; that is, in the character of women succeeding her, and in the estimation of men succeeding her lord.  The noble graces of Lucy Hutchinson, I say, may well make us marvel at the downfall following—­at Goldsmith’s invention of the women of “The Vicar or Wakefield” in one age, and at Thackeray’s invention of the women of “Esmond” in another.

Mrs. Hutchinson has little leisure for much praise of the natural beauty of sky and landscape, but now and then in her work there appears an abiding sense of the pleasantness of the rural world—­in her day an implicit feeling rather than an explicit.  “The happiness of the soil and air contribute all things that are necessary to the use or delight of man’s life.”  “He had an opportunity of conversing with her in those pleasant walks which, at the sweet season of the spring, invited all the neighbouring inhabitants to seek their joys.”  And she describes a dream whereof the scene was in the green fields of Southwark.  What an England was hers!  And what an English!  A memorable vintage of our literature and speech was granted in her day; we owe much to those who—­as she did—­gathered it in.