collected together, they could hardly have been better conceived or better expressed.  This is to me very surprising when I consider her usual reserve.  I have all imaginable reason to believe that God will make this affliction a great blessing to her, and I hope it may prove so to me.  There was a fond delight and complacence which I took in Betsey beyond any thing living.  Although she had not a tenth part of that rational, manly love, which I pay to her mourning and many surviving friends; yet it leaves a peculiar pain upon my heart, and it is almost as if my very gall were poured out upon the earth.  Yet much sweetness mingles itself with this bitter potion, chiefly in the view and hope of my speedy removal to the eternal world.  May it not be the bounty of this providence, that instead of her living many years upon the earth, God may have taken away my child that I might be fitted for and reconciled to my own dissolution, perhaps nearly approaching?  I verily believe that I shall meet her there, and enjoy much more of her in heaven than I should have done had she survived me on earth.  Lord, thy will be done; may my life be used for the service while continued, and then put thou a period to it whenever thou pleasest.

[Footnote 1:  The following extract from the Diary of Dr. Doddridge is here subjoined, as affording an explanation of some particulars alluded to in the text.

REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF MY DEAR CHILD, AND THE MANY MOURNFUL PROVIDENCES ATTENDING IT.

I have a great deal of reason to condemn my own negligence and folly, that for so many months I have suffered no memorandums of what has passed between God and my soul, although some of the transactions were very remarkable, as well as some things which I have heard concerning others; but the subject of this article is the most melancholy of any.  We lost my dear and reverend brother and friend, Mr. Sanders, on the 31st of July last; on the 1st of September, Lady Russell—­that invaluable friend, died at Reading on her road from Bath; and on Friday, the 1st of October, God was pleased, by a most awful stroke, to take away my eldest, dearest child, my lovely Betsey.  She was formed to strike my affections in the most powerful manner; such a person, genius, and temper, as I admired even beyond their real importance, so that indeed I doted upon her, and was for many months before her death in a great degree of bondage upon her account.  She was taken ill at Newport about the middle of June, and from thence to the day of her death, she was my continual thought, and almost uninterrupted care.  God only knows with what earnestness and importunity I prostrated myself before him to beg her life, which I would have been willing almost to have purchased with my own.  When reduced to the lowest degree of languishment by a consumption, I could not forbear looking upon her almost every hour.  I saw her with the strongest mixture of anguish and delight;