in great
ascendancy. He thinks her a woman of violent passions, unbridled
imagination and ill-tempered, but not malevolent; one who has been
so torn to pieces that she now turns upon her enemies, and longs to
tear in her turn. He says she has certainly great powers of
pleasing, though I certainly neither saw nor felt them. But you
know, my dear aunt, that I am not famous for judging sanely of
strangers on a first visit, and I might be prejudiced or mortified
by Madame de Genlis assuring me that she had never read anything of
mine except _Belinda_, had heard of _Practical Education_, and
heard it much praised, but had never seen it. She has just
published an additional volume of her _Petits Romans_, in which
there are some beautiful stories; but you must not expect another
_Mademoiselle de Clermont_--one such story in an age is as much as
one can reasonably expect.

I had almost forgotten to tell you that the little girl who showed
us in is a girl whom she is educating. "_Elle m'appelle Maman, mais
elle n'est pas ma fille._" The manner in which this little girl
spoke to Madame de Genlis, and looked at her, appeared to me more
in her favor than anything else. She certainly spoke to her with
freedom and fondness, and without any affectation. I went to look
at what the child was writing. She was translating Darwin's
_Zoonomia_. I read some of the translation; it was excellent. She
was, I think she said, ten years old. It is certain that Madame de
Genlis made the present Duke of Orleans[7] such an excellent
mathematician, that when he was, during his emigration, in distress
for bread, he taught mathematics as a professor in one of the
German universities. If we could see or converse with one of her
pupils, and hear what they think of her, we should be able to form
a better judgment than from all that her books and her enemies say
for or against her. I say her books, not her friends and enemies,
for I fear she has no friends to plead for her except her books. I
never met any one of any party who was her friend. This strikes me
with real melancholy, to see a woman of the first talents in
Europe, who had lived and shone in the gay court of the gayest
nation in the world, now deserted and forlorn, living in wretched
lodgings, with some of the pictures