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MEMOIR

hand, we know that she was capable of the most unselfish, the most imprudently generous actions. In pecuniary matters, this may almost be said to have been her ordinary rule of conduct. To the last, she was in the habit of giving away her labour, which to her was money—as she would give away the money with which her principal labours were rewarded. We know her to have offered, upon one occasion, in a manner the most exquisitely delicate, fifty pounds which she could very ill spare, to a friend who had no claim upon her on earth, but for the good wishes which were mutual. In some years, her income was not small, though, for the reason stated, her literary profits were seldom so large as they seemed to be; and in one of those years, 1832, she derived an extra sum of between three and four hundred pounds, under the will of her grandmother, who appointed her sole executrix and legatee. Yet this, like all her literary receipts, she expended freely and liberally; so little of her money being "laid out upon herself," that those who only knew that she received such sums and did not hoard them, wondered what she did with them. Her own occasional inconveniences, from a scarcity of funds, only served to render her more keenly alive to the necessities of any one, whom her affection, her esteem, or her gratitude, in its romantic excess, had invested with a claim upon her assistance.

In our cursory remarks upon her writings, we have freely commented upon her passion for effect. The reflection here occurs—how different a person was the L. E. L. who delighted in saying brilliant things, to the L. E. L. who delighted in doing disinterested and generous actions. Here there never was the remotest view to effect—never the most