The seven works attributed to Mrs. Collyer fall between 1743 and 1763. It is unnecessary to consider these works here in detail except so far as may serve to indicate their historical significance. For this purpose we may take up first the last of her books, the translations from the German, for it is on these that her modicum of fame has rested. When Mrs. Collyer translated Gesner's _Der Tod Abels_ in 1761 and began Klopstock's _Messiah_ the year after, she was a pioneer in a new kind of learning. The professed linguists seldom included German in their list, and German literature was practically unknown.[347] Mr. Haney, in his study of "German Literature in England before 1790," gives William Taylor of Norwich as "the first literary critic to attempt a systematic introduction of German literature into England," and Mr. Taylor's period of literary activity did not begin until 1790. Of the sporadic translations before that period, aside from scientific and theological works and a few hymns, Mr. Haney cites but two anterior to Mrs. Collyer's _Death of Abel_. There were few more popular works in the eighteenth century than this translation. There were eighteen editions in twenty-one years, and many later editions. It satisfied alike the pious reader and the lover of fiction. _The Quarterly Review_ for 1814[348] says: "No book of foreign growth has ever become so popular in England as the Death of Abel. Those publishers whose market lies among that portion of the people who are below what is called the public, but form a far more numerous class, include it regularly among their 'sacred classics': it has been repeatedly printed at country presses with worn types and on coarse paper; and it is found at country fairs, and in the little shops of remote towns almost as certainly as the Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe." Miss Hughes quotes numerous other testimonies to the same effect. This remarkable popularity was due, of course, to the original author rather than to the translator. Mrs. Collyer's version received high contemporary praise, but according to modern ideas it would be counted loose and inaccurate. Miss Reed characterizes the style as unnatural and affected, and she thinks that while the translation made Gesner widely known, it in reality injured his fame. But the excellence of the work, or its defects, are not so significant in a study of Mrs. Collyer as are the facts that she was sufficiently well trained in German to give even a fairly adequate version, and that she should be the first to present a German poet of the new school to an English public. Mrs. Collyer died before completing her translation of Klopstock and her husband carried it to a conclusion. He said in his Preface that his wife's fatal illness was brought on by her agitation of mind in connection with her work on the _Death of Abel_.