a soldier as she is, would not have armed him without her own previous
indignation against the enemy. She is a soldier at his orders, but she
had warily and freely chosen her captain.

Briefly, and with the dignity that the language of her day kept unmarred
for her use, she relates her own childhood and youth. She was a child
such as those serious times desired that a child should be; that is, she
was as slightly a child, and for as brief a time, as might be. Childhood,
as an age of progress, was not to be delayed, as an age of imperfection
was to be improved, as an age of inability was not to be exposed except
when precocity distinguished it. It must at any rate be shortened. Lucy
Apsley, at four years old, read English perfectly, and was "carried to
sermons, and could remember and repeat them exactly." "At seven she had
eight tutors in several qualities." She outstripped her brothers in
Latin, albeit they were at school and she had no teacher except her
father's chaplain, who, poor gentleman, was "a pitiful dull fellow." She
was not companionable. Her many friends were indulged with "babies"
(that is, dolls) and these she pulled to pieces. She exhorted the maids,
she owned, "much." But she also heard much of their love stories, and
acquired a taste for sonnets.

It was a sonnet, and indeed one of her own writing, that brought about
her acquaintance with Mr. Hutchinson. The sonnet was read to him, and
discussed amongst his friends, with guesses at the authorship; for a
young woman did not, in that world, write a sonnet without a feint of
hiding its origin. One gentleman believed a woman had made it. Another
said, if so, there were but two women capable of making it; but he owned,
later, that he said "two" out of civility (very good civility of a kind
that is not now practised) to a lady who chanced to be present; but that
he knew well there was but one; and he named her. From her future