tch, 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.

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 pe