HAMILTON, Elizabeth, the author of some admirable novels and educational works, was born at Belfast in Ireland, of parents of Scottish extraction. Of her personal history little is known. She seems to have been a governess in the family of a Scottish nobleman, and to have written to the eldest of her pupils, her Letters on the formation of the Religious and Moral Principle. She died after a painful illness at Harrowgate, July 23, 1816. After her death a very well written notice of her literary life and labours appeared in the Monthly Magazine for Sept. 1816, which was attributed on good grounds to Miss Edgeworth.
Of all Miss Hamilton's works the best known, though not the most valuable, is her novelette, entitled the Cottagers of Glenburnie. In this work she describes with graphic force and effect the manners of the lower grades of the Scottish rural population of her day. The filth, self-complacency, laziness, and contentedness of the loutish sluggards that figure in that story are so humorously, so truly, and withal so kindly described, that the book soon gained and still enjoys a wide popularity, and has been really useful in stimulating a great social reformation. Her other leading works are the following, which we give in chronological order:—Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 1796; Modern Philosophers, 1800, a kind of satire on the admirers of the French Revolution, and the dangerous absurdities of their doctrines when carried out to their legiti-
mate conclusions; Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, 1801-2; Life of Agrippina, wife of Germanicus, 1804; Exercises in Religious Knowledge, 1809; Popular Essays, 1813. The most valuable though not the best known of her works, is her Letters on Education, in which she applies to education, and brings within the compass of general comprehension the metaphysics of the question, which before her time had seemed reserved for philosophers only. In the words of Miss Edgeworth, she "shows how the doctrine of the association of ideas may be applied in early education to the formation of the habits, of temper, and to the principles of taste and morals; she has considered how all that metaphysicians know of secretion, abstraction, &c., can be applied to the cultivation of the judgment and the imaginations of children. No matter how little is actually ascertained on these subjects, she has done much in wakening the attention of parents, and of mothers especially, to future inquiry. She has done much by directing their inquiries rightly; much by exciting them to reflect upon their own minds, and to observe what passes in the minds of their children."