“Lived with him on terms of excessive politeness, and poor Miss Owenson was expected to bear their tempers and attentions, to sit in the cross-fire of their humours, and to find good spirits and sprightly conversation when they were dull. Add to this, that heavy pressure of anxiety about family matters, which was laid upon her before her nerves and sinews were braced to meet it, and before she had any worldly knowledge, produced a feeling of exhaustion. In the material prosperity of her life at Baronscourt the tension relaxed, and the fatigue of past exertion asserted itself. Her own ambition had never allowed her to rest—she had been wonderfully successful; but at Baronscourt and Stanmore Priory all she had attained looked dwarfed and small when measured by the hereditary power and consequence of the family in which she was for the time an inmate. She did not become discontented, but she was disenchanted for the time with all that belonged to herself, and saw her own position on its true comparative scale. Sydney Owenson, from earliest childhood, had depended on herself alone for counsel and support. There is no sign that she ever felt those moments of religious aspiration, when a human being, sensible of its own weakness and ignorance, cries for help to Him who made us. There are no ejaculations of prayer or of thanksgiving; she proudly took up her own burden, and bore it as well as she could; finding her own way, and shaping her own life, according to her own idea of what ought to form her being’s end and aim. She was a courageous indomitable spirit; but the constant dependence on herself, the steady concentration of purpose with which she followed out her own career without letting herself be turned aside, gave a hardness to her nature, which, though it did not destroy her kindness and honesty of heart, petrified the tender grace which makes the charm of goodness.”