y very reasonably be inferred that she had
not yet attained the years of discretion. Her _debut_, of course, was as
a wanderer in the realms of imagination, alias, a novel-writer, and in
this capacity she continued to make the public stare for a series of
years. We say stare, for we can find no more appropriate word for
expressing the feelings which her fictions are calculated to excite.
With plots of almost incomprehensible absurdity, they combine a style
more inflated than any balloon in which Madame Blanchard ever sailed
through the regions of air--a language, or rather jargon, composed of
the pickings of nearly every idiom that ever did live, or is at present
in existence, and sentiments which would be often of a highly
mischievous tendency, if they were not rendered ridiculous by the manner
in which they are expressed. The singularity of these productions
excited a good deal of sensation, and, if we believe her own words, she
was placed by them "in a _definite_ rank among authors, and in no
undistinguished circle of society." In some of the principal journals,
however, the lady was severely taken to task, at the same time that she
was counselled to obtain for herself a partner in weal and wo, by which
she might be brought down from her foolish vagaries, to the sober
realities of domestic duty. Wonderful to relate, she followed the advice
of those whom her vanity must have taught her to consider as her
bitterest foes, namely critics,--and as

"Nought but a genius can a genius fit,
A wit herself, Amelia weds a wit."

This wit was a regular knight of the pestle and mortar--a physician,
whose pills and draughts had acquired for him the enviable right of
placing that dignified appellation, Sir, before his Christian name, by
which our authoress became entitled to be addressed as "Your Ladyship,"
as much as if she had married an Earl or a Marquis. Oh! how delighted
the ci-devant plain "Miss" must have been at hearing the servants say to
her, "Yes, my lady,"--"No, my lady."--The year in which the ceremony was
performed that gave her a lord and master, we cannot precisely
ascertain; but as the happy pair favoured the capital of France with
their presence in 1816, it may not be unreasonable to suppose, that they
went there to spend the honeymoon. Miraculous as are the changes which
matrimony sometimes operates, it was powerless in its influence upon her
Ladyship's propensities, and, consequently, not very long after