"I began to live," she observes, "to the purposes of feeling, observation, and recollection much earlier than children usually do. I was not acute, I was not sagacious, but I had an active imagination and uncommon powers of memory. I had no companion; no one fondled or caressed me, far less did any one take the trouble of amusing me. I did not, till I was six years of age, possess a single toy. A child with less activity of mind would have become torpid under the same circumstances. Yet, whatever of purity of thought, originality of character, and premature thirst for knowledge, distinguished me from other children of my age, was, I am persuaded, very much owing to these privations. Never was a human being less improved in the sense in which that expression is generally understood, but never was one less spoilt by indulgence, or more carefully preserved from every species of mental contagion. The result of the peculiar circumstances in which I was placed had the effect of making me a kind of anomaly very different from other people, and very little influenced by the motives, as well as very ignorant of the modes of thinking and acting prevalent in the world at large." It was this anomalous character in her case, happily free from any kind of grotesqueness or absurdity, and allied to everything virtuous and noble, that both directed her to literature and authorship in the first instance, and gave much of its interest to what she wrote. [Annie Macvicar, Mrs Grant's maiden name, the daughter of Duncan Macvicar, "a plain, brave, pious man," having been taken by her parents to America, returned to Scotland, and married in 1779 Mr Grant, a chaplain at Fort-Augustus in Inverness-shire. She acquired a taste for farming, led a life of fervid activity, and had a large family of children, all promising, and the greater number of them beautiful. It would have been strange indeed if her literary aspirations had sprung out of the domestic habits of the mother of a large family, and the manager of a farm; but we are told by herself that she had begun to scrawl a kind of Miltonic verse when she was little more than nine years old. She had early written off many scraps of poetry, and distributed them among her friends, who had taken care to preserve them, while Mrs Grant had retained no copies. It was by a kind of amicable conspiracy that these friends set about the good work of collecting and publishing these pieces in such a way as would secure pecuniary relief to the author. The subscriptions amounted to three thousand names, and the "Original Poems, with some Translations from the Gaelic," appeared in 1803. Some years afterwards came her "Letters from the Mountains," which not only claimed the attention of the reading world, but inspired so much love and respect for the quiet virtues and literary abilities of the author, that many who knew her, and some who did not, contributed to help her in her hard struggle with the world. But Mrs Grant's life was