might read; what was in the book, was nothing to her; all her business was to have read it.  Meantime, while the powers he had not were solicited in vain, the talents she had were neglected and suppressed.  Her good-humored enjoyment of ordinary things, her real taste for domestic arrangement, and open simplicity of heart, were derided as vulgar and unintellectual.  Her talent for music was thought not worth cultivating; time could not be spared.  Some little capacity she had for drawing, as an imitative art, was baffled by the determination to teach it her scientifically, thus rendering it as impossible as every thing else.  In short—­for why need I prolong my sketch?—­Fanny was prepared by nature to be the beau ideal of Mrs. W.’s amiable woman.

Constitutionally active and benevolent, judicious culture might have made her sensible, and, in common life, intelligent, pleasing, useful, happy.  Nay, I need only refer to the picture of my former paper, to say what Fanny, well educated, was calculated to become.  But this was what her parents were determined she should not be; and they spent twenty years, and no small amount of cash, to make her a woman of superior mind and distinguished literary attainments.

I saw the result; for I saw Fanny at twenty, the most unlovely, useless, and unhappy being I ever met with.  The very docility of a mind, not strong enough to choose its own part, and resist the influence of circumstances, hastened forward the catastrophe.  She had learned to think herself what she could not be, and to despise what in reality she was; she could not otherwise than do so, for she had been imbued with it from her cradle.

She was accustomed from her infancy to intellectual society; kept up to listen, when she should have been in bed; she counted the spots on the carpet, heard nothing that was said, and prided herself on being one of such company.  A little later, she was encouraged to talk to every body, and give her opinion upon every thing, in order to improve and exercise her mind.  Her mind remained unexercised, because she talked without thinking; but she learned to chatter, to repeat other people’s opinions, and fancy her own were of immense importance.

She was unlovely, because she sought only to please by means she had not, and to please those who were quite beyond her reach; others she had been accustomed to neglect as unfit for her companionship.  She was useless, because what she might have done well, she was unaccustomed to do at all, and what she attempted, she was incapable of.  And she was unhappy, because all her natural tastes had been thwarted, and her natural feelings suppressed; and of her acquired habits and high-sounding pursuits she had no capacity for enjoyment.  Her love of classic and scientific lore, her delight in libraries, and museums, and choice intellects, and literary circles, was a fiction; they gratified nothing but her vanity.  Her small, narrow, weak, and dependent mind, was a reality, and placed her within reach of mortification and disappointment, from the merest and meanest trifles.