The project upon which she now determined, was no other than that of a day-school, to be superintended by Fanny Blood, herself, and her two sisters.

They accordingly opened one in the year 1783, at the village of Islington; but in the course of a few months removed it to Newington Green.  Here Mary formed some acquaintances who influenced the future events of her life.  The first of these in her own estimation, was Dr. Richard Price, well known for his political and mathematical calculations, and universally esteemed by those who knew him, for the simplicity of his manners, and the ardour of his benevolence.  The regard conceived by these two persons for each other, was mutual, and partook of a spirit of the purest attachment.  Mary had been bred in the principles of the church of England, but her esteem for this venerable preacher led her occasionally to attend upon his public instructions.  Her religion was, in reality, little allied to any system of forms; and, as she has often told me, was founded rather in taste, than in the niceties of polemical discussion.  Her mind constitutionally attached itself to the sublime and the amiable.  She found an inexpressible delight in the beauties of nature, and in the splendid reveries of the imagination.  But nature itself, she thought, would be no better than a vast blank, if the mind of the observer did not supply it with an animating soul.  When she walked amidst the wonders of nature, she was accustomed to converse with her God.  To her mind he was pictured as not less amiable, generous and kind, than great, wise and exalted.  In fact, she had received few lessons of religion in her youth, and her religion was almost entirely of her own creation.  But she was not on that account the less attached to it, or the less scrupulous in discharging what she considered as its duties.  She could not recollect the time when she had believed the doctrine of future punishments.  The tenets of her system were the growth of her own moral taste, and her religion therefore had always been a gratification, never a terror, to her.  She expected a future state; but she would not allow her ideas of that future state to be modified by the notions of judgment and retribution.  From this sketch, it is sufficiently evident, that the pleasure she took in an occasional attendance upon the sermons of Dr. Price, was not accompanied with a superstitious adherence to his doctrines.  The fact is, that, as far down as the year 1787, she regularly frequented public worship, for the most part according to the forms of the church of England.  After that period her attendance became less constant, and in no long time was wholly discontinued.  I believe it may be admitted as a maxim, that no person of a well furnished mind, that has shaken off the implicit subsection of youth, and is not the zealous partizan of a sect, can bring himself to conform to the public and regular routine of sermons and prayers.