THIS lady, whose claims to be ranked among distinguished travellers none, I think, will be disposed to contest, was born in 1690 at Thoresby, in Nottinghamshire. Her maiden name was Mary Pierre-pont, and she was the eldest daughter of Evelyn, Duke of Kingston, and Lady Mary Fielding, daughter of William Earl of Denbigh. Having had the misfortune to lose her mother while yet only four years old, she was thrown at once among the other sex, and thus acquired from her earliest years those masculine tastes and habits which distinguished her during life, and infused into her writings that coarse, unfeminine energy, that cynical contempt of decorum, and bearded license, if I may so express myself, which constitute her literary characteristics, and render her compositions different from those of every other woman. It was not the mere study of Latin, which the virtuous and judicious Fenelon considered highly beneficial to women, and which at all events may be regarded as a circumstance perfectly indifferent, that produced this undesirable effect; but an improper or careless choice of authors, operating upon a temperament peculiarly inflammable and inclining to voluptuousness. She acquired, we are told, the elements of the Greek, Latin, and French languages under the same preceptors as Viscount Newark, her brother; but preceptors who might, perhaps, be safely intrusted with the direction of a boy’s mind are not always adequate to the task of guiding that of a young woman through the perilous mazes of ancient literature. In fact, among her favourite classical authors Ovid seems to have been the chief at a very early period of her life; for among her poems there is one written in imitation of this author at twelve years of age, containing passages which it has not been thought decent to publish. At a later period her studies were directed by Bishop Burnet, who would seem to have recommended to her the Manual of the ungracious and austere Epictetus, a work which, although she laboured through a translation of it, now included among her works, could have possessed but few charms for her ardent, erratic fancy. During this early part of her career she lived wholly in retirement at Thoresby or at Acton, near London, where she acquired what by a license of speech may be termed the friendship of Mrs. Anne Wortley, the mother of her future husband. With this lady she maintained an epistolary correspondence, from the published portions of which we discover that both the young lady and the matron were exceedingly addicted to flattery, and that at nineteen the former had already begun to entertain those unfavourable notions of her own sex which in a woman are so justly regarded as ominous of evil. “I have never,” says she, “had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex; and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.”