, commanded the death of her husband, the
wife, stabbing herself, handed him the dagger, with the immortal
words, "Brutus, it does not hurt."

Seneca and his Paulina were bound together by community of tastes and
acquirements, and unbroken happiness. He asks, "What can be sweeter
than to be so dear to your wife that it makes you dearer to
yourself?" When the tyrant ordered the philosopher to commit suicide,
his wife insisted on opening her veins, and dying with him. After
long resistance, he consented, saying, "I will not deprive you of the
honor of so noble an example." But Nero would not allow her to die
thus, and had her veins bound up; not, however, until she had lost so
much blood that her blanched face, for the rest of her days, gave
rise to the well known rhetorical comparison, "as pale as Seneca's
Paulina."

Calpurnia, likewise, the wife of the younger Pliny, was identified
with her husband in all his studies, ambitions, triumphs. She
fashioned herself after his pattern, knew his works by heart, sang
his verses, listened behind a screen to his public speeches, drinking
in the applauses lavished on him. We may justly infer from the whale
character of the "Letter of Consolation," which he wrote to her, on
occasion of the death of their beloved daughter, Timoxena, that a
relation similar to the one just mentioned subsisted between Plutarch
and his wife.

By friendship in marriage is meant companionship of inner lives,
community of aims and efforts, the lofty concord of aspiring minds.
These are comparatively few, as made known to us in classic
antiquity, owing to the jealous separation of the sexes in social
life, that strict subjection of woman to man, which was
characteristic of the ancient world. If we were thinking of wedded
love instead of wedded friendship, it would be easy to cull a host of
affecting and imposing instances: such as, the Hebrew Rebekah and
Rachel; the Greek Alcestis; the Hindu Savitri; the Persian Pantheia;
and a glorious crowd of Roman matrons, like Lucretia, who have left a
renown as grand and deathless as the memory of Rome itself.

The modern examples of fortunate friendship in marriage are more
numerous than the ancient ones. Two delightful instances,
particularly worthy of study, have been so fully described by Mrs.
Jameson as to make superfluous any thing more than a slight allusion
here. The first of these pairs is the early English poet, William
Habington, and his Castara. Habi