add her suffrage to the public voice."

"Thus having said, he placed the boy in the arms of his beloved wife, and
she received him on her fragrant breast, sailing amid her tears;" her
husband uttered a few words of melancholy consolation, "and Andromache
went homewards, weeping, and often turning as she went." There is but one
passage in any work, ancient or modern, which can bear comparison with
this, and that is one in the Odyssey, in which is described the meeting of
Ulysses and Penelope; and yet some unfortunate people, who write
commentaries on the classics, only to show how completely nature has
denied them the faculty of taste, affirm that these passages were written
by different people. It is curious to what a pitch pedantry and dulness
may be brought by diligent cultivation.

As the fanatics of the East, to prove their continence, frequented the
society of women under the most trying circumstances, so these gentlemen
seem to study the writers of antiquity with the view of showing that their
understandings are equally inaccessible. In one respect the analogy does
not hold good. History tells us that the fanatics sometimes sunk under the
temptations to which they exposed themselves; but these gentlemen have
never, in any one instance, yielded to the influence of taste or genius.
Zenophon, in a beautiful treatise, has given an account of the manner in
which an Athenian endeavoured to mould the character of his wife, and to
this we would refer such of our readers as wish for more ample knowledge
on the subject. There is one circumstance, however, which we the rather
mention, as it has not found its way into the work before us, and as it
furnishes the most conclusive and irresistible evidence of the value set
upon matrimonial happiness at Athens, and of the servile vassalage to
which women, in that most polished of all cities, were reduced. By the law
of Athens, a father without sons might bequeath his property away from his
daughter, but the person to whom the property was bequeathed was obliged
to marry her. This was reasonable enough; but the same principle, that of
keeping the inheritance in the stock to which it belonged, occasioned
another law--if the father left his estate to his daughter, and if the
daughter inherited his property after the father's death, her nearest male
relation in the descending line, the [Greek: agchioteus], might, though
she was married to a living husband, lay claim to her, institute