Although the quickness and accuracy of Mrs. Radcliffe’s powers of observation were early felt by her friends, it does not seem, that the peculiar bent of her genius was perceived till after her marriage. She had been educated among members of the old school, in manners and morals, whose notions, while they prompted the most considerate kindness towards their young charge, did not perhaps tend to excite precocious intellect, especially in a female of diffidence, approaching to shyness. Something of the formality derived from education may be traced in her works, supplying a massive but noble and definite frame-work for her sombre and heroic pictures. There was also, in the feeling of old gentility, which most of her relatives cherished, a natural repugnance to authorship, which she never entirely lost even after her splendid success was ensured, and she had found herself the creator of a new class in English romances. In the twenty-third year of her age, Miss Ward was married to Mr. William Radcliffe, a graduate of Oxford, who, at one period, intended to follow the profession of the law, and, with that view, kept several terms at one of the Inns of Court, but who afterwards changed his purpose. The ceremony was performed at Bath, where her parents then resided, and she afterwards proceeded with her husband to live in the neighbourhood of London. Encouraged by him, she soon began to employ her leisure in writing; and, as her distrust of herself yielded to conscious success, proceeded with great rapidity. Mr. Radcliffe, about this time, became the proprietor of “The English Chronicle,” and took an active share in the management of the paper, which, with other avocations, obliged him to be frequently absent from home till a late hour in the evening. On these occasions, Mrs. Radcliffe usually beguiled the else weary hours by her pen, and often astonished her husband, on his return, not only by the quality, but the extent of the matter she had produced, since he left her. The evening was always her favourite season for composition, when her spirits were in their happiest tone, and she was most secure from interruption. So far was she from being subjected to her own terrors, that she often laughingly presented to Mr. Radcliffe chapters, which he could not read alone without shuddering.