contract, than to enlarge and invigorate, the genius. The writer is
accustomed to see his performances answer the mere mercantile purpose of
the day, and confounded with those of persons to whom he is secretly
conscious of a superiority. No neighbour mind serves as a mirror to
reflect the generous confidence he felt within himself; and perhaps the
man never yet existed, who could maintain his enthusiasm to its full
vigour, in the midst of this kind of solitariness. He is touched with
the torpedo of mediocrity. I believe that nothing which Mary produced
during this period, is marked with those daring flights, which exhibit
themselves in the little fiction she composed just before its
commencement. Among effusions of a nobler cast, I find occasionally
interspersed some of that homily-language, which, to speak from my own
feelings, is calculated to damp the moral courage, it was intended to
awaken. This is probably to be assigned to the causes above described.

I have already said that one of the purposes which Mary had conceived, a
few years before, as necessary to give a relish to the otherwise
insipid, or embittered, draught of human life, was usefulness. On this
side, the period of her existence of which I am now treating, is more
brilliant, than in a literary view. She determined to apply as great a
part as possible of the produce of her present employments, to the
assistance of her friends and of the distressed; and, for this purpose,
laid down to herself rules of the most rigid economy. She began with
endeavouring to promote the interest of her sisters. She conceived that
there was no situation in which she could place them, at once so
respectable and agreeable, as that of governess in private families.
She determined therefore in the first place, to endeavour to qualify
them for such an undertaking. Her younger sister she sent to Paris,
where she remained near two years. The elder she placed in a school near
London, first as a parlour-boarder, and afterwards as a teacher. Her