for every thing. It seemed to forebode the vicissitudes of future
life, and enabled me to bear them. In every place I am at home. I can
prepare my own dinner with as much address as Philopoemen cut wood;
but no one seeing me thus engaged would think it an office in which I
ought to be employed."

Jane was thus prepared by Providence for that career which she
rendered so illustrious through her talents and her sufferings. At
this early period there were struggling in her bosom those very
emotions which soon after agitated every mind in France, and which
overthrew in chaotic ruin both the altar and the throne. The
dissolute lives of many of the Catholic clergy, and their indolence
and luxury, began to alarm her faith. The unceasing denunciations of
her father gave additional impulse to every such suggestion. She could
not but see that the pride and power of the state were sustained by
the superstitious terrors wielded by the Church. She could not be
blind to the trickery by which money was wrested from tortured
consciences, and from ignorance, imbecility, and dotage. She could not
but admire her mother's placid piety, neither could she conceal from
herself that her faith was feeling, her principles sentiments. Deeply
as her own feelings had been impressed in the convent, and much as she
loved the gentle sisters there, she sought in vain for a foundation
for the gigantic fabric of spiritual dominion towering above her. She
looked upon the gorgeous pomp of papal worship, with its gormandizing
pastors and its starving flocks, with its pageants to excite the sense
and to paralyze the mind, with its friars and monks loitering in sloth
and uselessness, and often in the grossest dissipation, and her reason
gradually began to condemn it as a gigantic superstition for the
enthrallment of mankind. Still, the influence of Christian sentiments,
like a guardian angel, ever hovered around her, and when her
bewildered mind was groping amid the labyrinths of unbelief, her
_heart_ still clung to all that is pure in Christian morals, and to
all that is consolatory in the hopes of immortality; and even when
benighted in the most painful atheistic doubts, _conscience_ became
her deity; its voice she most reverently obeyed.

She turned from the Church to the state. She saw the sons and the
daughters of aristocratic pride, glittering in gilded chariots, and
surrounded by insolent menials, sweep by her, through the Elysian
Fields, while she t