Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/418

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HYD. HYP.

gave directions concerning the disposal of his fortune, and left strict injunctions that his children should be guided in all things by their mother; "And tell her," said he, "that as she is above other women, so must she on this occasion show herself a good Christian, and above the pitch of ordinary minds."

Faithfully she fulfilled these injunctions; evincing her sorrow and her love, not by useless repinings, but by training up her children to be like their father, and employing her talents in constructing a monument to his fame. For this purpose she undertook her great work, "The Life of Colonel Hutchinson, by his widow Lucy." This has been republished in several forms, and has taken its place as an English classic.

Mrs. Hutchinson brought up her children and lived to see some of them married. The time of her decease is not known.

HYDE, ANNE, DUCHESS OF YORK,

The eldest daughter of Lord Clarendon, and mother of two of the queens of Great Britain, was born in 1638. During the exile of the royal family she attended her father abroad, and was appointed maid of honour to the Princess of Orange, the eldest sister of Charles the Second. Her intercourse with James, Duke of York, then a young and gallant soldier, commenced when Miss Hyde was in her twenty-first year. She had accompanied the Princess of Orange to Paris, on a visit .to her mother, Queen Henrietta, when James saw, and fell in love with her. They were betrothed at Breda, November 24th., 1659; but there were so many difficulties in obtaining the consent of the royal family to this alliance, that they were not married till September 3rd., 1660. The ceremony was performed at Worcester House, London. The Duchess of York was a handsome and sensible woman, and lived in harmony with her husband, notwithstanding his open infidelities. Before her death she became a Roman Catholic. She died at St. James' Palace, March 31st., 1671, in her thirty-fourth year.

HYPASIA,

A most beautiful, learned, and virtuous lady of antiquity, was the daughter of Theon. who governed the Platonic school at Alexandria, in Egypt, where she was born and educated in the latter part of the fourth century. Theon was famous for his extensive knowledge and learning, but principally for being the father of Hypasia, whom, on account of her extraordinary genius, he educated not only in all the qualifications of her sex, but likewise in the most abstruse sciences. She made astonishing progress in every branch of learning. Socrates, the ecclesiastical historian, a witness of undoubted veracity, at least when he speaks in favour of a heathen philosopher, tells us that Hypasia "arrived at such a pitch of learning, as very far to exceed all the philosophers of her time:" to which Nicephorus adds, "Or those of other times." Philostorgius, a third historian of the same stamp, affirms that she surpassed her father in astronomy; and Suidas, who mentions two books of her writing, one "On the Astronomical Canon of Diophantus," and another "On the Conics of Apollonius," avers that she understood all other parts of philosophy.

She succeeded her father in the government of the Alexandrian