Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/770

756 or fashionable. She mixed in no parties of pleasure, and extremely despised the trivial and uninstructive conversation of formal visits, which she avoided as much as possible.

The love of money she thought the most sordid and ignoble of passions, and was so far from that rigour in exacting her due, which approaches to inhumanity, that her neglect of her interest might rather be censured as excessive: she let her estates beneath their intrinsic value, and was so gentle to her tenants, that she would not so much as suffer them to be threatened with the seizure of their goods, on the neglect of payment of their rents. She trembled at the idea of injustice, and the delicacy of her conscience, with regard to this sin, was so great, that she hardly thought she could keep far enough from it. She devoted the whole of her income, but what was barely sufficient for the necessities of life, to the relief of the indigent and distressed; and it is astonishing, how the moderate estate she was possessed of could supply such various and extensive benefactions as she was in the habit of bestowing. The first time she accepted of a gratification from the bookseller for any of her works, she bestowed the whole sum on a family in distress. And once, when she had not by her a sum of money sufficient to supply the like necessities of another family, she readily sold a piece of plate for that purpose. She was accustomed, on going abroad, to furnish herself with pieces of money of different value, that she might relieve any objects of compassion who should fall in her way, according to their several degrees of indigence. She contributed to some designs that had the appearance of charity, though she could not approve of them in