Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/405

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OF CELEBRATED WOMEN.
391

faith, the number of sacraments, transubstantiation, communion in one kind, and the authority of the church. This conference gained her much esteem, and is greatly admired and commended by bishop Burnet, Mr. Collier, and other ecclesiastical historians.

Holinshed and Sir Richard Baker inform us, that she wrote divers excellent treatises; but what they were, or where to be found, is not mentioned. Many of her letters remain, remarkably elegant and pious.

On the morning of execution. Lord Guildford earnestly desired to take his last farewell of her; but she declined it, saying, they should soon meet again, and it would only add to their present affliction. All she could do, was to give him a farewell from a window; but when she went to the scaffold, she met his dead body, which moved her to tears. Having ascended it, she declared herself innocent of any wilful transgression of the laws of the kingdom; saying, that her crime was the being too easily persuaded, but she did not murmur at her sentence, and submitted to the scaffold with admirable meekness and composure, at the age of seventeen.

Female Worthies, &c,


GRIERSON (CONSTANTIA), of the County of Kilkennny in Ireland; died 1733, aged 27;

Was allowed, long before, to be an excellent scholar, not only in Greek and Roman literature, but in history, divinity, philosophy, and mathematics. She gave a proof of her knowledge in the Latin tongue, by her dedication of the Dublin edition of Tacitus to the Lord Carteret, and by that of Terence to his son, to whom she likewise wrote a Greek epigram. She wrote several fine

poems