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 Edward. Shall I tell him the secret? No, he'll certainly blab it. But he's asleep, and won't hear me ;-so I'll e'en venture. (Goes up to Sir EDWARD, whispers him, and exit.)

Her own mature opinion of the desirableness of such an early habit of composition is given in the following words of a niece:-

'As I grew older, my aunt would talk to me more seriously of my reading and my amusements. I had taken carly to writing verses and stories, and I am sorry to think how I troubled her with reading them. She was very kind about it, and always had some praise to bestow, but at last she warned me against spending too much time upon them. She said how well I recollect it!-that she knew writing stories was a great amusement, and she thought a harmless one, though many people, she was aware, thought otherwise; but that at my age it would be bad for me to be much taken up with my own compositions. Later still it was after she had gone to Winchester-she sent me a message to this effect, that if I would take her advice I should cease writing till I was sixteen; that she had herself often wished she had read more, and written less in the corresponding years of her own life. As this niece was only twelve years old at the time of her aunt's death, these words seem to imply that the juvenile tales to which I have referred had, some of them at least, been written in her childhood.