quently protracted during great part of the night, and was afterwards unable to give up the custom, though it was very disagreeable to her father. This ardent thirst after knowledge was, however, at length crowned with complete success; and her acquirements became, even very early in life, such as are rarely met with. What she had once gained she never afterwards lost; an effect indeed to be expected from the intense application by which she acquired her learning, and which is often by no means the case with respect to those, the quickness of whose faculties renders lábour almost needless. Amidst her severer studies, however, more feminine accomplishments were not neglected. Her father sent her for a year to board in the house of Mr. Le Sueur, a French refugee minister at Canterbury. There she learnt to speak the French language, which she continued to do to the close of her life, better than most persons who have not lived abroad. She learnt also the common branches of needle-work, which she practised to the very last; and music, in which, though very. fond of it, she never seems to have made any considerable. progress. She played both on the spinnet and German flute; and certainly took some pains to acquire this accomplishment, as there is a great deal of music for both instruments in her own hand writing. Her father was very intimately acquainted with Dr. Lynch, the Dean of Canterbury, and his brother, a physician of some note. In those respectable families she spent great part of her time; and her friendship for the remaining branches of them continued as long as she lived. She seems very early to have cultivated a taste for poetry; for in the year 1738, she published a very small collection of poems, written before she was twenty years of age. They were printed by Cave, the original editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, and St. John's Gate appears in the title-page. The The motto to them is from Euripides, Tad dev*. This edition is now very scarce, and hardly to be met with. It contains only twenty-four quarto pages. None of the poems contained in it appear in the edition generally called the first, which was not published till the year 1762, except the first, on her birthday, and the translation of the 30th Ode of Anacreon. In the present edition they are restored, more as literary curiosities than from their merit, in which they are certainly very inferior to the others. Mrs. Carter's progress in learning very soon occasioned her to be noticed by some of the most respectable families in Kent; among these was the Honourable Mrs. Rooke, widow of George Rooke, Esq. (son to Admiral Sir G. Rooke) and sister to John, first Viscount Dudley and Ward, who resided at the mansion-house of St. Laurence, near Canterbury . She had also a house in London, where Miss Carter, as she was then called, passed a winter with her, and was introduced by her to many persons of distinction in rank, as well as letters; and this first gave her a taste for such society, as out of London can hardly be met with. She also spent a good deal of her time with a brother of her father, a silk merchant, who was partner with Mr. Vere, of Bishopsgate street, who was his wife's brother, and uncle to the present Banker of that name. So that from the age of 18 or 19 years, Mrs. Carter generally passed great part of the winter in London, where her acquaintance was much courted, and estimated as it deserved. The summer she chiefly spent with her father at Deal, or with her friends at Canterbury. "These things however are nothing."-As indeed the piety of her mind led her to consider all things but such as could promote and further the great ends of our existence. + This lady and her sister, Miss Ward, were warmly attached to Mrs. Carter; and both of them kept up a constant correspondence with her for many years. It is not easy, at this distance of time, to relate exactly her progress in learning, in its proper order. She began with the Latin and Greek languages, and after some time added to them the Hebrew. Of her proficiency in this last, the writer of this is not a competent judge, though he has every reason to believe it to be considerable, and she never neglected reading it every day when in health; but with the two former she was thoroughly and intimately acquainted, especially with Greek, to which noble language she was particularly partial. She used to relate with much pleasure in her own family (for no person spoke less of herself, and of her own acquirements, in company) that Dr. Johnson had said, speaking of some celebrated scholar, that he understood Greek better than any one whom he had ever known, except Elizabeth Carter. Yet with the Greek and Latin grammars she was almost wholly unacquainted, and used to say of them, with some degree of unmerited contempt, that she had never learnt them. As a general science, however, she understood grammar well, but not as taught in schools, and rather thought it ought to be a consequence of understanding the language, than a handmaid to that knowledge. But her ignorance of it was never perceptible except in regard to Prosodia, of which she knew but little, and in which therefore she sometimes, though very rarely, made mistakes *. The French language, as has been observed before, she learnt (to speak at least) of a native, and understood it thoroughly so she did Italian, Spanish, and German, which languages she taught herself without any assistance. assistance. Of this last * Of the knowledge of Greek construction, which she had acquired by study, she gave a striking proof in her detection of an error, into which every translator of Homer has fallen, in making the verb Aiscopal govern a dative case, which it never does. See Iliad i. v. 284. There are some interesting letters on this subject between her, Archbishop Secker, and Dr. Salter, of the Charter-house; and his Grace was convinced by her arguments. language she was particularly fond, and took great delight in reading it. She began to study German when slie was about twenty years of age, by desire of her father, in order to qualify herself for some place at court. Sir George Oxenden, a very intimate friend of her father, proposed this scheme, and offered to use his interest for that purpose. This her father inade known to her in a very elegant as well as sensible Latin epistle,. dated from Bath, November 1, 1737; in which he tells her, that virtue may be preserved in every place, at court as well as in the country *. The language, indeed, was soon and completely attained; but whether she disliked the confinement of a court, or whether Sir George's interest† could not procure her a desirable situation there, certain it is, that the German * Quo facilior sit aditus (says Dr. Carter) ad principis aulam. Ibi honos, divitiæque : Virtus est quid cuique proprium in omnibus locis: virtus igitur non minus propria atque integra est in aulis, quam in rure. + Sir George Oxenden, Bart. father of the late, and grandfather of the present Sir Henry Oxenden, was one of the Lords of the Admiralty in 1725, and the following year; and one of the Lords of the Treasury from July 1727 to June 1737. He was. an intimate friend of Sir Robert Walpole, and was a gentleman of considerable talents and learning, as well as a politician, and man of the world. He had, however, sometimes a proper sense of the vanity of mere worldly pursuits, as appears by the following extract of a letter from Dr. Carter to his daughter in 1739. "I had more than one whole sheet-full from Sir George, in Latin and English, on Saturday night. He concluded thus:--Vale. Ignosces mihi de me ipso aliquid prædicanti: Itaque, ut mones, quantum potero, ab omnibus molestiìs et angoribus me abducam, transferamque animum ad ea quibus secundæ res ornantur, adversæ juvantur." Another of Dr. Carter's letters also, dated in January 1738-9, shews Sir George to have been a better scholar than could have been expected from a man who had lived so much in the gay as well as great world. "I made a shift to remember, and write down on Sunday night the epigram EIS BIEXION. Mr. Oxenden construed it, and so did Sir George, and Kingsley,, (afterwards General Kingsley) with their joint force. Sir George, as he sat at supper, turned it into four Latin verses very prettily. Now, Harry,' says he, ''tis your turn.' He only smiled; but slid away, and in a moment outdid Sir George: at which Sir George was much pleased. The next morning Sir George, booted, and just going a hunting, gave us another translation, quite different, and I think the best of all." 3 language language was of no use to her with respect to her advancement in life. Later in life she learned Portuguese; in which, for want of books, she probably made no great progress. Last of all, she taught herself Arabick; but this very difficult language she never professed to understand well, but was just able to read it with the constant assistance of a dictionary. She made indeed an Arabick dictionary for herself, containing various meanings of words, and their combinations, which she found, from her own reading, to have been improperly translated, or misunderstood. Meantime the sciences were not neglected, though they were far from being her forte, or from giving her the pleasure which she received from classic and historic learning. However, she bestowed a great deal of attention upon astronomy; which she thought a noble science, and in which she made a very considerable progress. In the course of her Greek studies, especially in reading the Greek historians, to whom she was very partial, Mrs. Carter took great delight in ancient geography, and made many MS. corrections and alterations in the maps which she used to consult. With this indeed she was much more conversant than with modern geography, or even that of her own country, of which she had only a general, and, in some cases, merely a superficial knowledge; so that she was literally better acquainted with the meanderings of the Peneus, and the course of the Ilyssus, than she was with those of the Thames or Loire ; and could give a better account of the wanderings of Ulysses and Æneas, than she could of the voyages and discoveries of Cook or Bougainville. But among her studies there was one which she never neglected; one which was always dear to her from her earliest infancy to the latest period of her life, and in which she made a continual |