Old Norwich, in the early years of this century, was a somewhat exceptional place. It so chanced that besides the exclusiveness natural even now to the society of a cathedral town--besides the insular tone of thought and manners which most towns possessed in those pre-railway days, and while our continental wars were holding our country-people isolated from foreign nations--besides all this, Norwich then prided herself upon having produced a good deal of literary ability. Her William Taylor was considered to be almost the only German scholar in England, and other men, whose names are now nearly forgotten, but who in their day were looked up to as lights of learning and literature--Sayers, Smith, Enfield, Alderson, and others,--gave a tone to the society of Norwich, which, if somewhat pedantic, was, nevertheless, favorable to the intellectual life. It is no small testimony to the healthy and stimulating mental atmosphere of old Norwich that there successively came out from her, in an age when individuality and intellect in woman were steadily repressed, three women of such mark as Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Fry and Harriet Martineau. But even in Norwich the repression just alluded to was felt by women. Even there it was held, to say the least, peculiar and undesirable for a girl to wish to study deep subjects. "When I was young," Miss Martineau writes, "it was not thought proper for young ladies to study very conspicuously; and especially with pen in hand." They were required to be always ready "to receive callers, without any sign of blue-stockingism which could be reported abroad. My first studies in philosophy were carried on with great care and reserve.... I won time for what my heart was set upon either in the early morning or late at night." It was thus at unseasonable hours, and without the encouraging support of that public feeling of the value and desirability of knowledge, and the honorableness of its acquisition, by which a young man's studies are unconsciously aided, that Harriet in her young womanhood continued to learn. She read Latin with her brother James, and translated from the classics by herself. Her cousin, Mr. Lee, read Italian with her and her sister; and in course of time they undertook the translation of Petrarch's sonnets into English verse. She read Blair's Rhetoric repeatedly. Her Biblical studies were continued until she was in that position which, according to Macaulay, is necessary "for a critic of the niceties of the English language;" she had "the Bible at her fingers' ends."