Mrs. Mason never nods. Her tact, her mental reaction, her confidence, her sense of duty and knowledge of duty, are alike marvellous. When the higher mercy compels her to end a wounded lark’s misery by putting her foot on its head, she ‘turns her own the other way’. At the close of a walk during which her charges have been ‘rational’, she shakes hands with them. Her highest praise to Mary, after the fruit-picking incident on page 40, is to call her ‘my friend’; ‘and she deserved the name,’ adds the lady, ‘for she was no longer a child.’ No child could be her friend. One wonders what she made of the p. xibeautiful words ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me . . . for of such is the kingdom of Heaven’; but of course she did not know them: her Testament was obviously the Old.

p. xi

Yet we have, as it happens, a comment on Christ’s remark, in her statement on page 8, made in one of her recurring monologues on superiority and inferiority, that it is ‘only to animals that children can do good’. Mrs. Mason’s expression of alarm and dismay on hearing the words ‘A little child shall lead them’ could be drawn adequately, one feels, only by Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend Fuseli.

‘I govern my servants and you,’ said Mrs. Mason, ‘by attending strictly to truth, and this observance keeping my head clear and my heart pure, I am ever ready to pray to the Author of Good, the Fountain of truth.’ She never paid unmeaning compliments, (and here it is interesting to compare the second paragraph of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Preface, where she plays at being a Mrs. Mason too), or permitted any word to drop from her tongue that her heart did not dictate. Hence she allowed Mrs. Trimmer’s History of the Robins to be lent to a little girl, only on condition that the little girl should be made to understand that birds cannot really talk. She had in her garden, although large, only one bed of tulips, because the tulip flaunts, whereas the rose, of which she had a profusion, is modest. That God made both does not seem to have troubled her. She thought that the poor who were willing to work p. xii‘had a right to the comforts of life’. During a thunderstorm she walked with the same security as when the sun enlivened the prospect, since her love of virtue had overcome her fear of death. She was weaned from the world, ‘but not disgusted.’ When she visited those who have been reduced from their original place in society by misfortunes, she made such alterations in her dress as would suggest ceremony, lest too much familiarity should appear like disrespect. She forbade Caroline to cry when in pain, because the Most High was educating her for 

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