The person and manners of Miss Roberts were extremely prepossessing.  In early life, she was handsome; and although latterly her figure had attained some degree of fulness, it had lost none of its ease and grace, whilst her pleasing features, marked by no lines of painful thought, were open and expressive, beaming with animation and good humour.  She had not the slightest tinge of pedantry in her manner and deportment, which were natural and affable, so that a stranger never felt otherwise than at ease in her society.  It was not her ambition to make a display of mental superiority, which inspires the other sex with any feelings but those of admiration—­which is, indeed, tacitly resented as a species of tyranny, and frequently assigned as the ground of a certain prejudice against literary ladies.  “It may safely he said,” observes a friend of her’s at Calcutta, “that, although devoted to literature as Miss Roberts was, yet in her conversation and demeanour she evinced less of what is known as ‘blue’ than any of her contemporaries, excepting Miss Landon.”  Another Calcutta acquaintance says:  “Though her mind was deeply interested in subjects connected with literature, her attention was by no means absorbed by them, and she mixed cordially and freely in society without the least disposition to despise persons of less intellectual elevation.  She had a true relish of all the little pleasures that promiscuous society affords, and did not underrate those talents which are better fitted for the drawing-room than the study.”  Her warmth of heart and kindness of disposition, which co-operated with her good sense in thus removing all disagreeable points from her external character, made her the sincerest of friends, and ever ready to engage in any work of charity or benevolence.

It would be affectation to attempt in this slight Memoir to elaborate a picture of the intellectual character of Miss Roberts, cut off, as she has been, before that character had been fully developed.  The works, upon which her reputation as a writer principally rests, are not, perhaps, of a quality which calls for any commanding powers of mind.  Her business was with the surfaces of things; her skill consisted in a species of photography, presenting perfect fac-similes of objects, animate and inanimate, in their natural forms and hues.  Deep investigations, profound reflections, and laboured and learned disquisitions, would have defeated the very object of her lively sketches, which was to make them, not only faithful and exact, but popular.  Of her success in this design, the following testimony from a competent authority, the Calcutta Literary Gazette, is distinct and decisive; and with this extract we may fitly close our melancholy office:  “Nothing can be more minute and faithful than her pictures of external life and manners.  She does not, indeed, go much beneath the surface, nor does she take profound or general views of human nature; but we can mention