and agreeable, but excessively plain, weak in stature, and with a squeaking voice which provoked ridicule. He had an irritable temper, and answered some jesting on this topic by calling out the offender and shooting him through the lungs. In 1840 he was made Medical Inspector, and transferred from the Cape to Malta. He went from Malta to Corfu, and when the English Government ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece, resigned his position in the army and remained at Corfu. There he died last summer, forbidding, with his latest breath, any interference with his remains. The women who attended him regarded this request with the shameless indifference now so common, and unable to believe that an officer who had been forty-five years in the British service, had received a diploma, fought a duel, and been celebrated as a brilliant operator, was not only a woman, but at some period in her life a mother; they called in a medical commission to establish these facts, A sad, sad picture which those of us, who inquire into the fortunes of women, can readily understand.
Last November deprived us of Lady Theresa Lewes and Mrs. Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell has perhaps done,more than any woman of this century, not confessedly devoted to our cause, to elevate the condition of her sex, and disseminate liberal ideas as to their needs and culture. The first part of her career was one of those brilliant successes which startle us into surprise and admiration. It was checked midway by the publication of her life of Charlotte Bronte, the best and noblest of her works. Checked, because condemned, in that instance, without a hearing. She could never afterward feel the elastic pleasure, which was natural to her, in composing and printing, and for three long years afterward never touched her pen. I would not allude to this subject if every notice of her since her death had not done so, repeating the old censure, as a matter of course. Here in America we may exculpate her. The public was wrong in the first place, inasmuch as it has come to demand biography before biography is possible. The publisher was wrong in the second, for he ought to have known, and could easily have ascertained, how plain a statement the English law would permit. The public was still further wrong when it attributed misapprehension and carelessness to a woman whom It very well knew to be Incapable of either. I, for one, shall never forgive nor forget the officious censure of the Westminster Review—censure given by one who must have known that the legal apology tendered in Mrs. Gaskell's absence to protect her pecuniary interests, had the unfortunate effect to put her in a position where explanation and self-defence were alike impossible. Mrs. Gaskell had deserved the steady confidence of the public.
In Paris, recently, died Mrs. Severn Newton. She was the daughter of the artist Severn, the friend of Keats, and now British Consul at Rome. About five years since she married Charles Newton, Superintendent of Greek Antiquities at the British Museum. She was a person in whom power and delicacy were singularly blended. Ary Schæffer was accustomed to hold up her work as a model for his pupils. Her renderings of classic sculpture were so true that they were termed translations, and she had recently devoted herself to oil painting with great success. She died of brain fever at the early age of thirty-three, the most honored of female English artists.
I have kept till the last the name of Fredrika Bremer, whose good fortune it was to secure lasting benefits to her sex. God sent to her early years dark trials and privations. Her father's tyrannical hand crushed all power and loveliness out of her life. At first she rebelled against her sufferings, but when he died in her girlhood she was able to see that they lent strength to her efforts for her sex. It was the rumor of what we were doing in this country for women that first drew her hither. It is not the fashion for Miss Bremer's friends fully to recognize ber position in this respect. I owe my own convictions on the subject of suffrage to the reflections she awakened. When I told her that my mind was undecided on this point, she showed her disappointment up plainly, that I was forced to reconsider the whole subject. Miss Bremer did not hurry her work. She had a serene confidence that she should be permitted to finish what she had begun. She secured popularity by her cheerful humor, her genuine feeling, her true appreciation of men, and her insight into the conditions of family happiness, before she made any direct appeal against existing laws. Those who will read her novels thoughtfully, however, will see that she was from the first intent upon making such an effort possible,