It perhaps deserves to be remarked that this sort of miscellaneous literary employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and 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 brother James, who had already been at sea, she first took into her house, and next sent to Woolwich for instruction, to qualify him for a respectable situation in the royal navy, where he was shortly after made a lieutenant.  Charles, who was her favourite brother, had been articled to the eldest, an attorney in the Minories; but, not being satisfied with his situation, she removed him; and in some time after, having first placed him with a farmer for instruction, she fitted him out for America, where his speculations, founded upon the basis she had provided, are said to have been extremely prosperous.  The reason so much of this parental sort of care fell upon her, was, that her father had by this time considerably embarrassed his circumstances.  His affairs having grown too complex for himself to disentangle, he had