Seizing, therefore, an opportunity when Dr. and Mrs. Burney were from home, she made over to a bonfire in a paved play-court the whole stock of her compositions, while faithful Susanna stood by, weeping at the conflagration. Among the works thus immolated was one tale of considerable length, the ‘History of Caroline Evelyn,’ the mother of ‘Evelina.’” As if further to justify the halting or rebuking posture which at first is apt to prove provocative of indignation, remarkable diffidence in maturer life has pushed its way into sight where early publications have been due to parental sympathy. The historian of Greece, Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David’s, was taught Latin at the age of three: at four could “read Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him,” and at seven began the composition of didactic homilies. Now to this precocity was allied a taste for verse, especially as shown in Dryden and in Pope; and the result was the issue of a work, edited and prefaced by the father, entitled “Primitiæ: or Essays and Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral and Entertaining; by Connop Thirlwall, eleven years of age.” But not only did these effusions lead to no riper verse, but it is understood the Bishop disliked the little book, and by no means enjoyed seeing copies of it. That he went to the length of Thomas Lovell Beddoes we are not prepared to say. _He_, when a freshman at Oxford, first owned himself an author by sending to the press the “Improvisatore.” “Of this little memento of his weakness, as he used to consider it,” says his biographer, “Beddoes soon became thoroughly ashamed, and long before he left Oxford he suppressed the traces of its existence, carrying the war of extermination into the bookshelves of his acquaintance, where, as he chuckled to record, it was his wont to leave intact its externals (some gay binding perhaps of his own selection), but thoroughly eviscerated, every copy on which he could lay his hands.”