our cause, to elevate the condition of her sex,
and disseminate liberal ideas as to their needs and culture. The first
part of her career was one of those brilliant successes which startle
us into surprise and admiration. It was checked midway by the
publication of her life of Charlotte Bronte, the best and noblest of
her works. Checked, because condemned, in that instance, without a
hearing. She could never afterward feel the elastic pleasure, which
was natural to her, in composing and printing, and for three long
years afterward never touched her pen. I would not allude to this
subject if every notice of her since her death had not done so,
repeating the old censure, as a matter of course. Here in America we
may exculpate her. The public was wrong in the first place, inasmuch
as it has come to demand biography before biography is possible. The
publisher was wrong in the second, for he ought to have known, and
could easily have ascertained, how plain a statement the English law
would permit. The public was still further wrong when it attributed
misapprehension and carelessness to a woman whom it very well knew to
be incapable of either. I, for one, shall never forgive nor forget the
officious censure of the _Westminster Review_--censure given by one
who must have known that the legal apology tendered in Mrs. Gaskell's
absence to protect her pecuniary interests, had the unfortunate effect
to put her in a position where explanation and self-defence were alike
impossible. Mrs. Gaskell had deserved the steady confidence of the
public.

In Paris, recently, died Mrs. Severn Newton. She was the daughter of
the artist Severn, the friend of Keats, and now British Consul at
Rome. About five years since she married Charles Newton,
Superintendent of Greek Antiquities at the British Museum. She was a
person in whom power and delicacy were singularly blended. Ary
Schaeffer was accustomed to hold up her work as a model for his pupils.
Her renderings of classic sculpture were so true that they were termed
translations, and she had recently devoted herself to oil painting
with great success. She died of brain fever at the early age of
thirty-three, the most honored of female English artists.

I have kept till the last the name of Fredrika Bremer, whose good
fortune it was to secure lasting benefits to her sex. God sent to her
early years dark trials and privations. Her father's tyrannical hand
crushed all power and loveliness out of