The variety of her accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of its species she went very near perfection.

One is never quite certain whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father Richard--one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the Revolutionary period--did her more harm than good.

It certainly loaded her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done much less, perhaps nothing.

As it was, she lived for more than eighty years (till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for more than sixty.

Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, for our present purpose, in three groups--her short stories written mainly but not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies.
Of these the middle division has been, and no doubt has deserved to be, the least popular: but its principal example, _Belinda_ (1801) (_Patronage_, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date, deserves special notice here.