Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), April 26, 1845, vol. 1, no. 17, p. ??

[page 267, column 1, continued:]

The Diary of Lady Willoughby. No. 5 of Wiley & Putnam's Library of Choice Reading, pp. 100. Price 25 cents.

THE Diary of Lady Willoughby is framed on the exact plan of the Amber Witch, and is quite as successful a composition in its way, although it is entirely unlike that remarkable production.

It professes to be the diary of an English lady, in the latter part of the reign of Charles I, during the first fourteen years of her married life. To make the resemblance to reality the more perfect, the first edition in England was published in exact imitation of books in the seventeenth century. This external evidence of authenticity must have helped, in a degree, to render more perfect the illusion which the author has created, and it is not strange that many, even among learned readers, believed it to be a genuine diary of the troublous times of the English revolution. As a literary curiosity it could have but little value for the million, but as a truthful record of human affections, which are the same in all time, it will have a value, like that of those simple tales which are always so acceptable to the great mass of English readers. A lady of our acquaintance, who is no great devourer of books, by the way, took it up by accident, and declared that she had never been so bewitched by a book before. It is evidently the work of a pious, tender-hearted mother — such a passage as the following could have been written by none other:

“Arose this morning with mind more composed than for some time past. Cicely's mother ill, and I went down to see her: She is a bright Example of Patience; her Trials and Sufferings have been manifold, bodily pain the least, has lost three children in infancy, and one daughter grown up: and yet, can it be, has known still deeper sorrow. Returned through the Park. Never saw the chestnuts and beeches more beautiful in their autumnal tints, the fallen leaves crushed pleasantly beneath my feet; the Sun was setting before I was aware, and the Aire grew suddenly chill. Taking the nearest way I entered the house by a side door, and there beneath the old Mulberry saw the little Carle and whip as they had been left by my poor Child the last day he was out, when he looked so tired and I carried him in. I stooped and took up the Whip. and hiding it beneath my cloke, went straight up stairs: no Hand had touched it since his: the teares 1 wept over it did me good: it seemed my innocent right to weep over this Token of my lost one.

“The fullnesse and brightnesse of a voting mother can never againe be my experience, since that joy has ‘been a Source of Suffering and agony never to be forgotten. Death followed into the habitation where lite had just taken his abode. Not in short space of time can the Heart recover such Dispensations, and in the excellency of no other joys can it ever forget the stroke that first destroyed its sweetest hopes. Death once seene at our Hearth leaveth a shadow which abideth there forever.”