a grave which probably does not record the name of its
martyr of literature.

She was descended from a family of distinction in Ireland; but as she
expressed it, "she had been deprived of her birthright by the
chicanery of law." In her former hours of tranquillity she had
published some elegant odes, had written a tragedy and comedies--all
which remained in MS. In her distress she looked up to her pen as a
source of existence; and an elegant genius and a woman of polished
manners commenced the life of a female trader in literature.

Conceive the repulses of a modest and delicate woman in her attempts
to appreciate the value of a manuscript with its purchaser. She has
frequently returned from the booksellers to her dreadful solitude to
hasten to her bed--in all the bodily pains of misery, she has sought
in uneasy slumbers a temporary forgetfulness of griefs which were to
recur on the morrow. Elegant literature is always of doubtful
acceptance with the public, and Eliza Ryves came at length to try the
most masculine exertions of the pen. She wrote for one newspaper much
political matter; but the proprietor was too great a politician for
the writer of politics, for he only praised the labour he never paid;
much poetry for another, in which, being one of the correspondents of
Della Crusca, in payment of her verses she got nothing but verses; the
most astonishing exertion for a female pen was the entire composition
of the historical and political portion of some Annual Register. So
little profitable were all these laborious and original efforts, that
every day did not bring its "daily bread." Yet even in her poverty her
native benevolence could make her generous; for she has deprived
herself of her meal to provide with one an unhappy family dwelling
under the same roof.

Advised to adopt the mode of translation, and being ignorant of the
French language, she retired to an obscure lodging at Islington, which
she never quitted till she had produced a good version of Rousseau's
"Social Compact," Raynal's "Letter to the National Assembly," and
finally translated De la Croix's "Review of the Constitutions of the
principal States in Europe," in two large volumes with intelligent
notes. All these works, so much at variance with her taste, left her
with her health much broken, and a mind which might be said to have
nearly survived the body.

Yet even at a moment so unfavourable, her ardent spirit engaged in a
translation of Fr