author, and to have employed some precautions to prevent its occurrence.

The employment which the bookseller suggested to her, as the easiest and
most certain source of pecuniary income, of course, was translation.
With this view she improved herself in her French, with which she had
previously but a slight acquaintance, and acquired the Italian and
German languages. The greater part of her literary engagements at this
time, were such as were presented to her by Mr. Johnson. She
new-modelled and abridged a work, translated from the Dutch, entitled,
Young Grandison: she began a translation from the French, of a book,
called, the New Robinson; but in this undertaking, she was, I believe,
anticipated by another translator: and she compiled a series of extracts
in verse and prose, upon the model of Dr. Enfield's Speaker, which bears
the title of the Female Reader; but which, from a cause not worth
mentioning, has hitherto been printed with a different name in the
title-page.

About the middle of the year 1788, Mr. Johnson instituted the Analytical
Review, in which Mary took a considerable share. She also translated
Necker on the Importance of Religious Opinions; made an abridgment of
Lavater's Physiognomy, from the French, which has never been published;
and compressed Salzmann's Elements of Morality, a German production,
into a publication in three volumes duodecimo. The translation of
Salzmann produced a correspondence between Mary and the author; and he
afterwards repaid the obligation to her in kind, by a German translation
of the Rights of Woman. Such were her principal literary occupations,
from the autumn of 1787, to the autumn of 1790.

It perhaps deserves to be remarked that this sort of miscellaneous
literary employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and