hand small engravings as birthday gifts to her friends. Still, in spite of these cautious restraints upon her inordinate thirst for knowledge, she was at eighteen well versed in many things not generally included in the education of her sex—history, philosophy, chemistry, the languages, and mathematics, in addition to the graceful accomplishments usually taught her sex.
As a child she was ardent, enthusiastic, devout, and studious, with a firm will, and vivid imagination. History was her favorite reading, and to her perusal of Plutarch’s "Lives," at nine years of age, she ascribes her first admiration and adoption of republican principles. But these principles would more likely be awakened to the mind of a proud, sensitive, and thoughtful nature, like hers, by the social inequalities and injustices which at that time existed in France, than by the perusal of any book, though the book might help define the unformed thought. The writings of Rousseau were already discussed with freedom by all classes in France,
