sex contract or
lose habits, and accommodate their minds to new situations. Politics, war,
and learning, are equally objects of attainment to their delightful
susceptibility. Love has the fancied transparency of the cameleon. When
the art of government directed the feelings of a woman, we behold Aspasia,
eloquent with the genius of Pericles, instructing the Archons; Portia, the
wife of the republican Brutus, devouring burning coals; and the wife of
Lucan, transcribing and correcting the Pharsalia, before the bust of the
poet, which she had placed on her bed, that his very figure might never be
absent. When universities were opened to the sex, they acquired academic
glory. The wives of military men have shared in the perils of the field;
or like Anna Comnena and our Mrs. Hutchinson, have become even their
historians. In the age of love and sympathy, the female often receives an
indelible pliancy from her literary associate. His pursuits become the
objects of her thoughts, and he observes his own taste reflected in his
family; much less through his own influence, for his solitary labours
often preclude him from forming them, than by that image of his own
genius--the mother of his children! The subjects, the very books which
enter into his literary occupation, are cherished by her imagination; a
feeling finely opened by the lady of the author of "Sandford and Merton:"
"My ideas of my husband," she said, "are so much associated with his
_books_, that to part with them would be as it were breaking some of the
last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object. The being in
the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his
_marks_ and _notes_, will still give him _a sort of existence_ with _me_.
Unintelligible as such fond chimeras may appear to many people, I am
persuaded they are not so to you."

With what simplicity Meta Hollers, the wife of Klopstock, in her
German-English, describes to Richardson, the novelist, the manner in
which she passes her day with her poet! she tells him that "she is always
present at the birth of the young verses, which begin by fragments, here
and there, of a subject with which his soul is just then filled. Persons
who live as we do have no need of two chambers; we are always in the same:
I with my little work, still! still! only regarding sometimes my husband's
face, which is so venerable at that time with tears of devotion, and all
the sublimity of the subject--my