occupied him all day. At seven in the morning, he began to attend
his pupils, and, when London was full, was sometimes employed in
teaching

Page xv

till eleven at night. He was often forced to carry in his pocket
a tin box of sandwiches and a bottle of wine and water, on which
he dined in a hackney coach while hurrying from one scholar to
another. Two of his daughters he sent to a seminary at Paris; but
he imagined that Frances would run some risk of being perverted
from the Protestant faith if she were educated in a Catholic
country, and he therefore kept her at home. No governess, no
teacher of any art or of any language was provided for her. But
one of her sisters showed her how to write ; and, before she was
fourteen, she began to find pleasure in reading.

it was not, however, by reading that her intellect was formed.
Indeed, when her best novels were produced, her knowledge of
books was very small. When at the height of her fame, she was
unacquainted with the most celebrated works of Voltaire and
Moli6re ; and, what seems still more extraordinary, had never
heard or seen a line of Churchill, who, when she was a girl, was
the most popular of living poets. It is particularly
deserving of observation that she appears to have been by no
means a novel reader. Her father's library was large, and he had
admitted into it so many books which rigid moralists generally
exclude that he felt uneasy, as he afterwards owned, when Johnson
began to examine the shelves. But in the whole collection there
was only a single novel, Fielding's "Amelia."(5)