known of her poems is the one in reply to Pope's sarcastic reflections on the sex, in his "Characters of Women."
HOWARD, CATHARINE
Fifth wife of Henry the Eighth, of England, was daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce, his wife. This marriage proved prejudicial to the Reformation, as Catharine was no friend to the Protestants. She gained such an ascendency over the king, that he gave public thanks to God for the happiness he enjoyed with her. But the next day. Archbishop Cranmer came to him with information that the queen was unfaithful to him. Henry would not at first believe this; and on Catharine's guilt being clearly proved, he wept. She was tried, found guilty, and executed on Tower-hill, in 1542, about seventeen months after her marriage. Catharine acknowledged that she was not innocent at the time of her marriage, having been seduced by a retainer of her aunt's the Duchess of Northumberland, who had taken charge of her at her parents' death, when she was only fourteen; but persisted in asserting her fidelity to the king since their marriage. She was young and beautiful at the time of her death.
HOWITT, MARY,
Is by her mother's side directly descended from Mr. William Wood, the Irish patentee, on account of whose half-pence issued under a contract from the government of George the Second, Dean Swift raised so much disturbance with his "Drapier's Letters." His son, Charles Wood, the grandfather of Mrs. Hewitt, and who became assay-master in Ireland, was the first introducer of platinum into Europe. By her father's side she is of an old race of Quakers, many of her ancestors having suffered imprisonment and spoliation of property in the early times when that people produced martyrs. Her childhood and youth were passed in the old paternal mansion in Staffordshire, whence she was married in 1821 to William Howitt, a man of congenial tastes. Of herself she relates—"My childhood was happy in many respects. It was so, indeed, as far as physical health and the enjoyment of a beautiful country, of which I had an intense relish, and the companionship of a dearly beloved sister went—but oh! there was such a cloud over all from the extreme severity of so-called religious education, it almost made coward. and hypocrites of us, and made us feel that if this were religion I it was a thing to be feared and hated. My childhood had completely two phases—one as dark as night—one as bright as day—the bright one I have attempted to describe in "My own Story, which is the true picture of this cheerful side of the first ten year of my life. We studied poetry, botany and flower-painting, and a children wrote poetry. These pursuits were almost out of the pale of permitted Quaker pleasures, but we pursued them with a perfect passion—doing in secret that which we dared not do openly; such as reading Shakspere, translations of the classics, the elder novelists—and in fact, laying the libraries of half the little town where we lived under contribution.
"We studied French and chemistry at this time, and enabled ourselves to read Latin, storing our minds with a whole mass of heterogeneous knowledge. This was good as far as it went—but
