family; she was not remarkable for physical beauty; and she
had none of the brazen ingenuity of patronage-hunters, by which
admission is secured into the houses of distinguished people. She came
to London a stranger, a plain schoolmistress from Bristol, and yet in a
marvellously short time she was one of the best known characters in the
ranks of the wise and great.

The causes of her rapid rise to distinction are not far to seek. Her
wonderful talent for conversation at once proved an attraction to both
men and women. But she was not merely a fluent talker, never at a loss
for a word, a phrase or a metaphor; had this been her crowning
recommendation, Dr. Johnson's long-standing friendship would never have
been gained. Her talk was always sensible--the outcome of a
well-furnished, retentive mind. Her judgment was sound, her
discrimination delicate, and her grasp of fundamental truths
consistently firm. She did not accommodate her opinions to meet the
exigencies of different coteries, nor was she addicted to compromise.
She was equally at ease in discussing the merits of _Rasselas_ with Dr.
Johnson, the curiosities of art with Lord Orford, Roman history with
Gibbon, and the state of the Church with Bishop Porteus. Not that she
pretended equality of learning with such men, but she had just
sufficient knowledge of various subjects to provoke a conversation, and
enough cleverness to sustain it by "drawing out" the scholar who might
be seated at her side. But this was not all. Her conversation sparkled
with wit and repartee. "The mind laughed," says her friend Zachary
Macaulay, "not the muscles; the countenance sparkled, but it was with an
ethereal flame: everything was oxygen gas and intellectual champagne:
and the eye, which her sisters called 'diamond,' and which the painters
complained they could not put upon canvas, often gave signal by its
coruscation, as the same sort of eye did in her friend Mr. Wilberforce,
that something was forthcoming which in a less amiable and religiously
disciplined mind might have been very pretty satire, but which glanced
off innoxiously in the shape of epigrammatic playfulness."

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Her genial disposition and good temper disarmed difference of opinion of
anything harsh or unpleasant, and formed another credential for the
prominence she attained in society. The absence of all artificiality in
sentiment and manners, when contrasted with the straining after effect
acquired by