celebrity. Their variety of description, richness of imagery, and impassioned interest, have been justly admired. She also composed a comedy of the Genre Larmoyante, which contains many ingenious thoughts, but is negligently finished.
Madame de Graffigny sometimes told with mortification, that her mother, having inherited a vast number of the copperplates of the great Callot, sent one day for a brazier and had them all melted down, and made into kitchen utensils.
In her married life she suffered much unkindness from an unworthy husband. Becoming a widow, in 1740 she went to Paris in the suite of Mademoiselle de Guise, little foreseeing the honours that awaited her in the literary world. Her reputation was formed in the capital while she was unconscious of it. Several men of letters engaged her assistance in a periodical production that was in vogue at that time. She wrote for them a tale entitled "Bad examples produce as many virtues as vices." This story is filled with maxims, of which the very title is one. Madame de Graffigny began the career of an author at rather a late period of life; but no want of spirit or animation is to be objected to her writings. Besides many other dramatic and imaginative works, she composed three or four little plays for the young, which were represented in Vienna by 'the children of the Emperor, who gave her a pension. These were of a moral tendency, and written with a characteristic simplicity. She died in 1758,
GRAHAM, ISABELLA,
Was born in the county of Lanark, Scotland, in 1742. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Marshall, educated her carefully and religiously. In 1765, she became acquainted with Dr. John Graham, a physician of Paisley, whom she afterwards married, and by whom she had four children. Soon after then: marriage, her husband was ordered to join his regiment, then in Canada. Four of the happiest years of her life were spent in that country, when Dr. Graham was ordered to Antigua, where he died in 1774. Mrs. Graham then returned to her father in Scotland, where, by taking charge of the education of some young ladies, she supported her aged father, herself, and her children.
In 1789, Mrs. Graham returned to America, and opened a seminar for young ladies in New York, in which she was very successful. ' She was also eminent as a public benefactor, being the projector, the founder, and one of the most efficient members, of the "Widow's Society," the 'Orphans' Asylum," and a "Society for the Promotion of Industry." She devoted her time, talents, influence, and earnings to the building up of these useful charities; even performing the office of teacher for some time in the Orphans' School, before the funds were sufficient to pay an instructor. Few women have accomplished such efficient services for public good as did this truly noble woman; she not only worked herself In the cause of her Heavenly Master, but she had that peculiar faculty, the gift of persuasion, which moved the hearts of many to work with her, who, without such an exemplar and monitor, would never have entered on these plans of doing good. Mrs. Graham was also gifted with genius; her talents, hallowed by piety, and devoted to duty, were of the high order which would have gained her a wide
