to his house, and frankly explained to him her purpose, at the same time requesting his advice and assistance as to its execution.  After a short conversation, Mr. Johnson invited her to make his house her home, till she should have suited herself with a fixed residence.  She accordingly resided at this time two or three weeks under his roof.  At the same period she paid a visit or two of similar duration to some friends, at no great distance from the metropolis.

At Michaelmas 1787, she entered upon a house in George street, on the Surry side of Black Friar’s Bridge, which Mr. Johnson had provided for her during her excursion into the country.  The three years immediately ensuing, may be said, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, to have been the most active period of her life.  She brought with her to this habitation, the novel of Mary, which had not yet been sent to the press, and the commencement of a sort of oriental tale, entitled, the Cave of Fancy, which she thought proper afterwards to lay aside unfinished.  I am told that at this period she appeared under great dejection of spirits, and filled with melancholy regret for the loss of her youthful friend.  A period of two years had elapsed since the death of that friend; but it was possibly the composition of the fiction of Mary, that renewed her sorrows in their original force.  Soon after entering upon her new habitation, she produced a little work, entitled, Original Stories from Real Life, intended for the use of children.  At the commencement of her literary carreer, she is said to have conceived a vehement aversion to the being regarded, by her ordinary acquaintance, in the character of an 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.