between London, and a farm upon Epping Forest, which was the principal
scene of the five first years of her life.

Mary was distinguished in early youth, by some portion of that exquisite
sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character,
which were the leading features of her mind through the whole course of
her life. She experienced in the first period of her existence, but few
of those indulgences and marks of affection, which are principally
calculated to sooth the subjection and sorrows of our early years. She
was not the favourite either of her father or mother. Her father was a
man of a quick, impetuous disposition, subject to alternate fits of
kindness and cruelty. In his family he was a despot, and his wife
appears to have been the first, and most submissive of his subjects. The
mother's partiality was fixed upon the eldest son, and her system of
government relative to Mary, was characterized by considerable rigour.
She, at length, became convinced of her mistake, and adopted a different
plan with her younger daughters. When, in the Wrongs of Woman, Mary
speaks of "the petty cares which obscured the morning of her heroine's
life; continual restraint in the most trivial matters; unconditional
submission to orders, which, as a mere child, she soon discovered to be
unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory; and the being
often obliged to sit, in the presence of her parents, for three or four
hours together, without daring to utter a word;" she is, I believe, to
be considered as copying the outline of the first period of her own
existence.

But it was in vain, that the blighting winds of unkindness or
indifference, seemed destined to counteract the superiority of Mary's
mind. It surmounted every obstacle; and, by degrees, from a person
little considered in the family, she became in some sort its director