Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another generation of all she was and did?
She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time.

Anything that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail.

And she certainly did write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and books, poor soul, she had to write.

It was in a sense poor because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren." She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak flutterings over the surface of the ground.

A wren, and she had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain--that dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day, year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the grave.