it is the only ring I ever
gave a woman.' She corresponded with Guizot, Barthelemy de St. Hilaire,
the Grotes, Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, Nassau Senior, the
Duchesse d'Orleans, Victor Cousin, and many other distinguished people.
Her translation of Ranke's _History of the Popes_ is admirable; indeed,
all her literary work was thoroughly well done, and her edition of her
husband's _Province of Jurisprudence_ deserves the very highest praise.
Two people more unlike than herself and her husband it would have been
difficult to find. He was habitually grave and despondent; she was
brilliantly handsome, fond of society, in which she shone, and 'with an
almost superabundance of energy and animal spirits,' Mrs. Ross tells us.
She married him because she thought him perfect, but he never produced
the work of which he was worthy, and of which she knew him to be worthy.
Her estimate of him in the preface to the _Jurisprudence_ is wonderfully
striking and simple. 'He was never sanguine. He was intolerant of any
imperfection. He was always under the control of severe love of truth.
He lived and died a poor man.' She was terribly disappointed in him, but
she loved him. Some years after his death, she wrote to M. Guizot:

In the intervals of my study of his works I read his letters to
me--_forty-five years of love-letters_, the last as tender and
passionate as the first. And how full of noble sentiments! The
midday of our lives was clouded and stormy, full of cares and
disappointments; but the sunset was bright and serene--as bright as
the morning, and _more_ serene. Now it is night with me, and must
remain so till the dawn of another day. I am always alone--that is,
_I live with him_.

The most interesting letters in the book are certainly those to M.
Guizot, with whom she maintained the closest intellectual friendship; but
there is hardly one of them that does not contain something clever, or
thoughtful, or witty, while those addressed to her, in turn, are very
interesting. Carlyle writes her letters full of lamentations, the wail
of a Titan in pain, superbly exaggerated for literary effect.

Literature, one's sole craft and staff of life, lies broken in
abeyance; what room for music amid the braying of innumerable
jackasses, the howling of innumerable hyaenas whetting the tooth to
eat them up? Alas for it! it is a sick disjointed time; neither
shall we ever