Introduction ix 



dealings with " the great merchant " as she calls the 

 world. It is a delightful picture she gives in her Memoirs 

 of the circle at St. John's, in which she grew up; suggest- 

 ing one of those English groups painted by Lely's suc- 

 cessors with daughters like the graces, blooming and 

 summer-coloured, and a mother hardly less youthful 

 in her middle-aged comeliness. But one of the daughters 

 should in this case hold a book in her hand, and this is 

 Margaret Lucas, the youngest. 



" You desired me," she says in one place, " to send 

 you the sixteen books I writ in my childhood ; methinks 

 they sound hke the twelve labours of Hercules, only 

 that there are Four Labours more ... In my sixteen 

 books is sense and no sense, knowledge and ignorance, 

 mingled together, so that you will not know what to 

 make of it. . . . Neither can you read them when you 

 have them, unless you have the art or gift to read un- 

 known letters, for the letters are not only unlegible, but 

 each letter stands so cowardly from the other, as all 

 the lines of your sight cannot draw or bring them into 

 words. Moreover there are such huge blots as I may 

 similize them to broad seas or vast mountains. . . . 

 Also there are long hard scratches, which will be as 

 bad for your eyes as long stony lanes would be to your 

 feet. Let me tell you my sixteen books will be as 

 tedious, troublesome, and dangerous to your under- 

 standing as the dry deep sandy and barren deserts of 

 Arabia to travellers." 



She was by her own account a moody self-absorbed 

 child, who needed to live among those who knew her 

 and would indulge her in her solitary moods, whims, and 

 awkwardness. Her ambition led her time after time, 

 it is true, out of herself, only to recoil when she found 

 that the outer world was not so easy to manage as the 

 inner. So on one occasion she tells us that young people 

 should be sent out to know the world, that they may see 

 men and manners, and observe creatures, customs, and 

 ceremonies; and at another that young women should 

 not be sent to boarding schools, because of the danger 

 of their learning from one another " craft, dissembling 



