bookwork was done with rests every half-hour, and
rambles off to water her pinks and roses, or to
gossip a few minutes with any friend or
relation who was in the house. But she read every
day before breakfast two chapters of the Bible,
and a sermon, besides some Hebrew, Greek,
and Latin; and after breakfast, or at some
other time of the day, a little of every modern
language she had learnt, in order to keep her
knowledge of it from rusting.

When she began her translation of Epictetus,
at the wish of her friends Dr. Secker and
Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Carter was helping
her father by taking the sole charge of the
education of her youngest brother, whom she
sent up to Cambridge so well prepared that he
astonished much the examiners, who asked at
what school he had been educated, with the
reply that his only teacher was his eldest
sister. Miss Carter's translation of Epictetus
was not begun with a view to publication, but
when it was done, and revised by Dr. Secker,
there was publication in view, and she was told
that a life of Epictetus must be written.
Her reply to Miss Talbot will astonish those
who connect learning in women with want of
shirt-buttons among men. She said, "Whoever
that somebody or other is who is to write
the life of Epictetus, seeing I have a dozen
shirts to make, I do opine, dear Miss Talbot, that
it cannot be I." It was urged on her also that
she must add notes to christianise the book of
the heathen philosopher, and prevent "danger
to superficial readers." She did all that was
urged on her, at the same time that she was
finishing the preparation of her brother's back
and brains for college.

The book appeared in seventeen 'fifty-eight,
and there were more than a thousand
subscribers for it. By way of compliment, more
copies were subscribed for than were claimed,
and the lady earned by this labour a thousand
pounds. The book, also, when published, was
maintained in good repute. Some years
afterwards her friend Dr. Secker brought her a
bookseller's catalogue, and said, "Here,
Madam Carter, see how ill I am used by the
world. Here are my Sermons selling at half
price, while your Epictetus is not to be had
under eighteen shillings, only three shillings
less than the original subscription." Such a work
from a woman was a thing to be talked of in
Europe, as the world then went. An account
of the learned lady was published even in
Russia, where, as Miss Carter said, they were
just learning to walk on their hind legs.

Four years later appeared Miss Carter's
poems, in a little volume dedicated to the Earl
of Bath; and she was now able to have a
lodging of her own in London—a room on a
first floor in Clarges-street—whence she was
always fetched out to dinner by the chairs or
carriages of her many friends. Her brothers
and sisters had grown up and been put out in
the world; her father's second wife was dead,
and he was moving about at Deal from one
hired house to another. Elizabeth then bought
herself a house by the Deal shore, took her
father for its tenant, and lived there with him
until his death, he working in his library, and
she in hers, with the annual treat of a visit to
London. The nautical world of Deal,
impressed by her erudition, held that she had
done something in mathematics which had
puzzled all the naval officers. She had foretold a
storm, and some were not at all sure that she
could not raise one. A young man remarked
to a verger's wife in Canterbury Cathedral that
it was very cold. "Yes," she said, "and it
will be a dreadful winter, and a great scarcity
of corn; for the famous Miss Carter has
foretold it." While her house at Deal was being
settled (she had bought two small houses and
was turning them into one), Madam Carter
took a tour upon the Continent in company
with the Queen of the Blue Stockings, Mrs.
Montagu, and the Earl of Bath, who died in the
next year rather suddenly, and did not, as her
friends had thought he would, bequeath her
an annuity. The bulk of his property went
to his only surviving brother, who died three
years later, and the next heir then, delicately
professing that it was to fulfil Lord Bath's
intentions, secured to Miss Carter an annuity of
a hundred pounds during her life, which,
towards the close of her life, was increased to a
hundred and fifty. The annuity came to Miss
Carter in seventeen 'sixty-seven, and a couple
of years earlier she had received a like annuity
from Mrs. Montagu, who then, by her
husband's death, obtained the whole disposal of
his fortune. An uncle of Miss Carter's, who
was a silk-mercer, had also died and left
fourteen thousand pounds to Dr. Carter and his
children, of which Elizabeth's share was fifteen
hundred in her father's lifetime. In later years
an annuity of forty pounds came to Miss Carter
from another friend. She was rich, therefore,
beyond her needs; for she lived inexpensively,
and had money to spare for struggling
relations, and for those of the poor whose griefs she
saw. When left alone in the Deal house, she
kept up a healthy hospitality with tea and
rubbers of whist for threepenny points; was a neat
cheerful old woman, simply dressed and
scrupulously clean, before her time in knowledge of
the value of a free use of cold water, fond of
her tea and her snuff, and never worrying her
country friends with ostentation of her learning.

The headaches at last almost put an end to
study. Mrs. Carter read Fanny Burney's novels
with enjoyment, delighted in Mrs. Radcliffe's,
objected to the morality of Charlotte Smith's,
and thought there was more of Shakespeare
in Joanna Baillie than in any writer since his
time. That was because she had a strong
prejudice on behalf of female writers at a time
when women were only beginning to find their
way into the broad space they now occupy in
English literature. She thought much less of
Burns than of Joanna Baillie, because Miss
Baillie was always proper, and Burns was in some
places anything but ladylike. Though living
at Deal, she refused to buy there any article
which, by its cheapness or otherwise, she could
suspect to have been smuggled. But her reason