She was a person of a highly sanguine temperament, possessing by nature great capabilities, but her intellectual powers had not, by education or circumstances in life, been so much developed and increased as her energetic feelings, which were most excitable, strong, and active. If her education had equalled her natural endowments, her understanding would have assumed no common pre-eminence, and in which case her feelings would probably have been brought under due subordination. It was not, however, so much even the defects of her education, as the circumstances of her life, and especially those connected with her religious associations, which were incomparably more calculated to increase the strength and activity of her feelings, than to call forth and cultivate her intellectual powers; indeed, instead of any such cultivation in any proportionate degree, there is every reason to believe, these associations had a paralysing influence; nor perhaps were any habits of self-control, or any mental restraint whatever, formed or acquired in this connection, except that which operated too exclusively on her religious and conscientious fears; and hence, without entering into the details of her history, the result was the formation of a character, such as is most common under the present artificial systems and circumstances in modern times, ill formed to withstand the effects of adverse or prosperous fortune. It was her lot to pass through these extremes, and after suffering many reverses, mortifications, disappointments, bereavements, and some matters of a private and most afflictive nature, she had a rheumatic fever, when the explosion took place; then the weak and over-exercised parts of her mind displayed themselves in an irregular and increased degree. Her state was an exaggeration of her former energetic and acute nervous sensibility, operating alternately on the depressing, and exhilirating passions.