nature unfold itself, and such as she is at fourteen shall we find her still at thirty-eight.
Besides her letters to Sophie and Henriette Cannet, often complete little essays in themselves, Marie Phlipon wrote a number of detached pieces, entitled, Mes Loisirs, "Leisure Hours." Most of these have been published in her collected works. They are short prose essays, of a reflective and elegiac character, "On the Soul," "On Melancholy," "On Friendship," "On the Close of Day," "Reverie in the Wood of Vincennes," "On the Multiplication of Men being the Cause of Despotism, and of the Corruption of Morals," and so forth. They possess less biographical and even literary interest than the letters, then her favourite style of composition.
But a young lady who was capable of expressing herself clearly and concisely on some of the questions which have exercised the powers of the most robust thinkers, questions which lay at the very root of the approaching crisis, should have been in no perplexity as to her future vocation. Nature had endowed her with a great gift; the trammels of opinion forbade her to make use of it. She rattled her chains and yet had no heart to break them asunder. It was only when by an unforeseen concurrence of circumstances fate had cast her in the very focus of action, when by her daily contact with men at the head of affairs she gradually learned to measure her powers with theirs, that she came fully to realise the extent of her own abilities. But, indeed, at this time she held avowed authorship in horror; and, on being urged by a friend to devote herself seriously to composition, her outburst was that she would sooner cut off her right hand than turn authoress. If a woman writes a good book,
