l scorn I thus should wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well it won't advance,
They'll say it's stolen, or else it was by chance.

There was also a Mrs. Murray and a Mercy Otis Warren, who evinced very
fine intellectual ability; and Mrs. Adams had written letters that the
world a hundred years later was to admire and esteem.

On the parlor table in some houses you found a thin volume of poems
with a romantic history. A Mrs. Wheatley bought a little girl at the
slave market one day, mostly out of pity. She learned to read very
rapidly, and was so modest and thoughtful that as a young woman she was
held in high esteem by Dr. Sewall's flock at the Old South Church. She
went abroad with her master's son before the breaking out of the war,
and interested Londoners so much that her poems were published and she
was the recipient of a good many attentions. Afterward they were
reissued in Boston and met with warm commendations for the nobility of
sentiment and smooth versification. So to Phillis Wheately belongs the
honor of having been one of the first female poets in Boston.

And young men even now celebrated their sweethearts' charms in rhyme.
Gay gallants wrote their own valentines. Young collegians struggled with
Latin verse, and sometimes scaled the heights of Thessaly from whence
inspiration sprang. But, for the most part, the temperaments that
inclined to the worship of the Muses sought solace in Chaucer,
Shakspere, and Milton while the later ones were winning their way.

Doris sighed over the doubtfulness in her uncle's tone. But it was music
rather than poetry that floated through her brain.

"You might come and read a little Latin, and then we will have a talk in
French. We will leave the prosaic part. What you will do in square root
and cube root----"

"I am afraid I shall not grow at all. I'll just wither up. Isn't there
some round root?"

"Yes, among vegetables."

They both laughed at that.

She did quite well in the Latin. Then she spelled some rather difficult
words, and being in the high tide of French when dinner was announced,
they kept on talking, to the great amusement of Miss Recompense, who
could hardly convince herself that it really did mean anything
reasonable.

Uncle Winthrop said then they certainly deserved some indulgence, and if
she was not afraid of blowing away they would go out riding again. They
took the small sleigh and he drove, an