Thomas Birch then made a note, which showed
that she already seemed to be upon the way to
fame. "This lady," said Dr. Birch, in noting
her bit of translation, "is a very extraordinary
phenomenon in the republic of letters, and
justly to be ranked with the Sulpitias of the
ancients and the Schurmanns and the Daciers
of the moderns. For to an uncommon vivacity
and delicacy of genius, and an accuracy of
judgment worthy the maturest years, she has
added the knowledge of the ancient and modern
languages at an age when an equal skill in any
one of them would be a distinction in a person
of the other sex."

A learned woman was a marvel in those
days, and her place in creation yet unsettled.
Already there cropped up in connexion with
Miss Carter, when she was little more than a
girl, the sublime idea, not merely that she was
fit to be an elector of M.P.s, but that she was
competent to be one. "Here's all Deal,"
wrote one of her sisters to her. "is in amazement
that you want to be a Member of the
Parliament House; and Mrs. Blank, was told
it, but so strongly affirmed that it was no such
thing, that she came to our house quite eager
to ask, and was quite amazed to hear 'twas so.
Let me know in your next whether 'tis a jest,
or that you really want to go."

Her scholarship and knowledge of modern
languages must have attracted a good deal of
general attention, for Miss Carter was hailed
as a sister prodigy by the marvellous youth
John Philip Baratier, who was about four years
younger than herself. Of Baratier it is said
that, when four years old, he talked with his
mother in French, with his father in Latin, and
with the servants in German. He read Greek
at the age of six, Hebrew at eight, and translated
Benjamin of Tudela's travels out of
Hebrew into French when a boy of eleven.
When he was but fourteen years old, the
University of Halle conferred on him the degree of
Master of Arts, and he astonished crowded
audiences by his disputations upon fourteen
theses. He died of consumption before he had
attained the age of twenty, and it was in the
last year or two of his life that he heard of the
learned English damsel Elizabeth Carter. He
then opened a correspondence, in which he
praised her as one whose Latin verse the
Romans of the Augustan age would have taken
for that of the swan of Mantua, or of a Latin
Sappho.

While corresponding with Baratier, Miss
Carter formed a more abiding friendship with
Miss Catherine Talbot, a bishop's
granddaughter, who lived with her widowed mother
in the family of Dr. Secker, then Bishop of
Oxford, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury;
Dr. Secker gratefully remembering that he
was indebted to her family for his first steps of
promotion in the church. Through her friend
Catherine Talbot, Miss Carter obtained the
friendship of Dr. Secker, which was so
emphatically shown, that when the archbishop
became a widower the London world assigned to
him Elizabeth Carter for a second wife. But
some there were who gave her to Dr. Hayter,
Bishop of London. "Brother Hayter," the
archbishop said one day, "the world has it
that one of us two is to marry Madam Carter;
now I have no such intention, and therefore
resign her to you." "I will not pay your
grace the same compliment," replied the
bishop. "The world does me much honour
by the report." So as Deal had held that Elizabeth
Carter was the woman to have a seat in
the House of Commons, London believed her
place to be among the bishops. Or among the
players. For when Edward Moore's play of
the Gamester came out, it was held to be so
highly judicious and moral, that it was at first
attributed to Mrs. Carter. Moore wrote also
Fables for the Female Sex, which were not
less worthy of one who might be assigned as
bride to an archbishop. But among he-writers
of that day the true primate of the female
world was Samuel Richardson; and Richardson
embalmed a characteristic piece of Elizabeth
Carter's verse, her Ode to Wisdom, in his
Clarissa. He had not been able to find out
the author of the ode, and had, therefore,
republished it in his novel (in the first edition
part of it only) without consent; for which,
though he had done honour thereto by
engraving it and giving it with music, he was
called to order by the lady. He replied with
extreme courtesy, as one who "would sooner
be thought unjust or ungenerous by any lady
in the world than by the author of the Ode
to Wisdom."

When at home with her father in the
parsonage at Deal, Miss Carter had a bell at the
head of her bed, pulled by a string which went
through a chink in her window, down into the
sexton's garden. The sexton, who got up
between four and five, made it his first duty
to toll this bell lustily. "Some evil-minded
people of my acquaintance," she wrote to a
friend, "have most wickedly threatened to cut
my bell-rope, which would be the utter
undoing of me, for I should infallibly sleep out
the whole summer." Up thus betimes, she
went to work as a schoolboy to his lessons,
and thence to the ramble before breakfast over
sunny commons, or through dewy cornfields,
or the brambles of the narrow lane, pulling
sometimes a friend out of bed to be companion
of the walk, and respectfully noted by the
country folks as "Parson Carter's daughter."
Then home, and "when I have made myself fit
to appear among human creatures we go to
breakfast, and are extremely chatty; and this
and tea in the afternoon are the most sociable
and delightful parts of the day. We have a
great variety of topics in which everybody
bears a part, till we get insensibly upon books;
and whenever we go beyond Latin and French,
my sister and the rest walk off, and leave my
father and me to finish the discourse and the
teakettle by ourselves, which we should
infallibly do, if it held as much as Solomon's
molten sea." Her work in later life was mainly
to keep fresh the fruits of early study. Her
headaches had to be considered, and her