Elizabeth Rowe and the Countess of Hertford

Dr. Johnson praised the style of the author of Letters from the Dead to the Living in reviewing a miscellany of his day. “The essayists,” he declared, “imitated, or tried to imitate the copiousness and luxuriance” of Mrs. Rowe's writing, and “laboured to add to her brightness of imagery, her purity of sentiment.” The poets, he continued, “had Dr. Watts before their eyes.” Elizabeth Rowe also observed Dr. Watts. In his preface to her Devout Exercises of the Heart, Watts remarked: Though there is not one complete copy of verses amongst all these transports of her soul, yet she ever carried with her a relish of poesy even into her sacred retirements. Sometimes she springs her flights from a line or two of verse, which her memory had impressed upon her heart: sometimes from the midst of her religious elevation she lights upon a few lines of some modern poet, even Herbert as well as Milton, etc. tho’ ’tis but seldom she cites their names. At other times the verses seem to be the effusions of her own rapturous thoughts in sudden melody and metre; or at least I know not whence the lines are copied; but she most frequently does me the honor to make use of some of my writings in verse in these holy meditations of her heart. Blessed be that God, who has so favored anything my pen could produce, as to assist so sublime a devotion.