husband reading me his young verses, and
suffering my criticisms."

The picture of a literary wife of antiquity has descended to us, touched
by the domestic pencil of genius, in the susceptible CALPHUENIA, the lady
of the younger PLINY. "Her affection for me," he says, "has given her a
turn to books: her passion will increase with our days, for it is not my
youth or my person, which time gradually impairs, but my reputation and my
glory, of which she is enamoured."

I have been told that BUFFON, notwithstanding his favourite seclusion of
his old tower in his garden, acknowledged to a friend that his lady had a
considerable influence over his compositions: "Often," said he, "when I
cannot please myself, and am impatient at the disappointment, Madame de
Buffon reanimates my exertion, or withdraws me to repose for a short
interval; I return to my pen refreshed, and aided by her advice."

GESNER declared that whatever were his talents, the person who had most
contributed to develope them was his wife. She is unknown to the public;
but the history of the mind of such a woman is discovered in the "Letters
of Gesner and his Family." While GESNER gave himself up entirely to his
favourite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and poetry, his wife would
often reanimate a genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, and
often exciting him to new productions, her sure and delicate taste was
attentively consulted by the poet-painter--but she combined the most
practical good sense with the most feeling imagination. This forms the
rareness of the character; for this same woman, who united with her
husband in the education of their children, to relieve him from the
interruptions of common business, carried on alone the concerns of his
house in _la librairie_.[A] Her correspondence with her son, a young
artist travelling for his studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively
terms "a gathered mind." Imagine a woman attending to the domestic
economy, and to the commercial details, yet withdrawing out of this
business of life into the more elevated pursuits of her husband, and at
the same time combining with all this the cares and counsels which she
bestowed on her son to form the artist and the man.

[Footnote A: Gesner's father was a bookseller of Zurich; descended from a
family of men learned in the exact sciences, he was apprenticed to a
bookseller at Berlin, and afterwards entered into his father's business.
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