tenderness--a banished wife, a
careless mother--on whom extraordinary wit, masculine sense, a clear
judgment, and an ardent love of letters seem to have been lavished for no
other purpose than to show that, without a good heart, they serve only to
make their possessor the most contemptible of mankind. Lady Mary Wortley's
heart was the receptacle of all meanness and sensuality--the prey of a
selfishness as intense as rank, riches, a bad education, natural
malignity, and the extremes of good and bad fortune, ever engendered in
the breast of woman. The remarks on her character, in the volume before
us, are, as might be expected, excellent.

The condition of women among the more polished nations of antiquity, is a
subject which, if fully examined, would more than exhaust our narrow
limits. It does not appear from Homer, says our author, that the condition
of women was depressed. Achilles, in a very striking passage, declares
that every wise and good man loves and is careful for his wife, and
Hector, in the passage which Cicero is so fond of quoting, urges the
opinion of

"Troy's proud dames, whose garments sweep the ground,"

as a motive for his conduct. However this may be, certain it is, that the
feelings and affections of domestic life are portrayed by Homer with a
degree of purity, truth, and pathos, that casts every other writer, Virgil
not excepted, into the shade; and which, to carry the panegyric of human
composition as far as it will go, he himself, in his most glorious
passages, has never been able to surpass. It has been so long the fashion
to represent Virgil as the sole master of the pathetic, that this
assertion may appear to many paradoxical; and it is undoubtedly true, that
the fourth book of the Aeneid cannot he read by any one of common
sensibility without strong emotion; but how different is the lamentation
of Andromache over her living husband, uttered in all the glow and
consciousness of returned and "twice blest" love, from the raving of the
slighted woman, abandoned by the lover whom she has too rashly trusted,
and to whom she has too plainly become indifferent! How different is the
character of the patriot warrior, the prop and bulwark of his country,
sacrificing his life to delay that ruin which he knew it was beyond his
power to avert--snatching, amid the bloody scenes around him, a moment for
the indulgence of a father's pride and a husband's tenderness, from the
perfidious paramour flying