people:  so that her learning appeared like the gift poured out on the apostles, of speaking all languages without the pains of study; or, like the intuitive knowledge of angels:  yet inasmuch as the power of miracles is ceased, we must allow she used human means for such great and excellent acquirements.  And yet, in a long friendship and familiarity with her, I could never obtain a satisfactory account from her on this head; only she said, she had received some little instruction from the minister of the parish, when she could spare time from her needle-work, to which she was closely kept by her mother.  She wrote elegantly both in verse and prose, and some of the most delightful hours I ever passed were in the conversation of this female philosopher.

’My father readily consented to accept of her as a pupil, and gave her a general invitation to his table; so that she and I were seldom asunder.  My parents were well pleased with our intimacy, as her piety was not inferior to her learning.  Her turn was chiefly to philosophical or divine subjects; yet could her heavenly muse descend from its sublime height to the easy epistolary stile, and suit itself to my then gay disposition[4].

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Mrs. Barber has preserved several specimens of her talent in this
    way, which are printed with her own poems.

[2] Dr. Van Lewen of Dublin, an eminent physician and man-midwife.

[3] Her knowledge of the Hebrew is not mentioned by Mrs. Barber.

[4] Vide MRS. PILKINGTON’S MEMOIRS, Vol.  I.

* * * * *

MRS. CATHERINE COCKBURN.

The Revd.  Dr. Birch, who has prefixed a life of Mrs. Cockburn before the collection he has made of her works, with great truth observes, that it is a justice due to the public, as well as to the memory of Mrs. Cockburn, to premise some account of so extraordinary a person.  “Posterity, at least, adds he, will be so sollicitous to know, to whom they will owe the most demonstrative and perspicuous reasonings, upon subjects of eternal importance; and her own sex is entitled to the fullest information about one, who has done such honour to them, and raised our ideas of their intellectual powers, by an example of the greatest extent of understanding and correctness of judgment, united to all the vivacity of imagination.  Antiquity, indeed, boasted of its Female Philosophers, whose merits have been drawn forth in an elaborate treatise of Menage[1].  But our own age and country may without injustice or vanity oppose to those illustrious ladies the defender of Lock and Clark; who, with a genius equal to the most eminent of them, had the superior advantage of cultivating it in the only effectual method of improvement, the study of a real philosophy, and a theology worthy human nature, and its all-perfect author. [Transcriber’s note:  closing quotes missing from original.]