Her uncle Antony, when he came to settle in England with his vast fortune obtained in the Indies, used to say, “This girl by her charities will bring down a blessing upon us all.” And it must be owned they trusted pretty much to this presumption.
But I need not say more on this head: nor perhaps was it necessary to say so much; since the charitable bequests in her will sufficiently set forth her excellence in this branch of duty.
She was extremely moderate in her diet. “Quantity in food,” she used to say, “was more to be regarded than quality; that a full meal was the great enemy both to study and industry: that a well-built house required but little repairs.”
But this moderation in her diet, she enjoyed, with a delicate frame of body, a fine state of health; was always serene, lively; cheerful, of course. And I never knew but of one illness she had; and that was by a violent cold caught in an open chaise, by a sudden storm of hail and rain, in a place where was no shelter; and which threw her into a fever, attended with dangerous symptoms, that no doubt were lightened by her temperance; but which gave her friends, who then knew her value, infinite apprehensions for her.419
In all her readings, and her conversations upon them, she was fonder of finding beauties than blemishes, and chose to applaud but authors and books, where she could find the least room for it. Yet she used to lament that certain writers of the first class, who were capable of exalting virtue, and of putting vice out of countenance, too generally employed themselves in works of imagination only, upon subjects merely speculative, disinteresting and unedifying, from which no useful moral or example could be drawn.
But she was a severe censurer of pieces of a light or indecent turn, which had a tendency to corrupt the morals of youth, to convey polluted images, or to wound religion, whether in itself, or through the sides of its professors, and this, whoever were the authors, and how admirable soever the execution. She often pitied the celebrated Dr. Swift for so employing his admirable pen, that a pure eye was afraid of looking into his works, and a pure ear of hearing anything quoted from them. “Such authors,” she used to say, “were not honest to their own talents, nor grateful to the God who gave them.” Nor would she, on these occasions, admit their beauties as a palliation; on the contrary, she held it as an aggravation of their crime, that they who are so capable of mending the heart, should in any places show a corrupt one in themselves; which must weaken the influences of their good works; and pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.
All she said and all she did was accompanied with a natural ease and dignity, which set her above affectation, or the suspicion of it; insomuch that that degrading fault, so generally imputed to a learned woman, was never laid to her charge. For, with all her excellencies, she was forwarder to hear than speak; and hence, no doubt, derived no small part of her improvement.
Although she was well read in the English, French, and Italian poets, and had read the best translations of the Latin classics; yet seldom did she quote or repeat from them, either in her letters or conversation, though exceedingly happy in a tenacious memory; principally through modesty, and to avoid the imputation of that affectation which I have just mentioned.
Mr. Wyerley once said of her, she had such a fund of knowledge of her own, and made naturally such fine observations upon persons and things, being capable, by the egg
, (that was his familiar expression), of judging of the bird
, that she had seldom either room or necessity for foreign assistances.
But it was plain, from her whole conduct and behaviour, that she had not so good an opinion of herself, however deserved; since, whenever she was urged to give her sentiments on any subject, although all she thought fit to say was clear an intelligible, yet she seemed in haste to have done speaking. Her reason for it, I know, was twofold; that she might not lose the benefit of other people’s sentiments, by engrossing the conversation; and lest, as were her words, she should be praised into loquaciousness, and so forfeit the good opinion which a person always maintains with her friends, who knows when she has said enough.—It was, finally, a rule with her, “to leave her hearers wishing her to say more, rather than to give them cause to show, by their inattention, an uneasiness that she had said so much.”—
You are curious to know the particular distribution of her time; which you suppose will help you to account for what you own yourself surprised at; to wit, how so young a lady could make herself mistress of so many accomplishments.
I will premise, that she was from infancy inured to rise early in a morning, by an excellent, and, as I may say, a learned woman, Mrs. Norton, to whose care, wisdom, and example, she was beholden for the groundwork of her taste and acquirements, which meeting with such assistances from the divines I have named, and with such a genius, made it the less wonder that she surpassed most of her age and sex.
Her sex,
