WOMEN OF RENOWN.* THERE is always a great fascination in
learning how cele- brated people have worked and suffered and conquered, how strong natures and powerful intellects have overcome diffi- culties, and ambitious natures endowed with great physical charms have scaled dizzy and insecure heights. We have here Womon of Renotm. By G. Barnett Smith'. London : W. H. Allen and Co. ten sketches of celebrated women, whose lives were passed chiefly in our own century. Literature, science, music, the drama, philanthropy, and society are all represented. Mr. Barnett Smith has not included any living women ; he has also left out Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Brown- ing, and Maria Edgeworth. We miss their familiar per- sonalities, but he gives as a reason for omitting memoirs of Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Browning, that he had already written on them in a former book on Poets and Novelists. Among the lives here briefly epitomised, those of George Eliot and Jenny Lind, the latest in point of date, will, we imagine, be most familiar to the general reader. Fredrika Bremer had a great influence in her own country, and was a pioneer of the emancipation of women, and as a novelist she has been compared with our own Jane Austen ; but we doubt if any of the Swedish novelist's books, excellently translated as they were by Mary Howitt, have taken root in this country, or are read by the present generation. Lady Blessington is chiefly remembered on account of her friendship with Byron, whose conversations she recorded, and over whom, according to Moore, she had a good influence. Byron wrote of their first meeting to Moore :—" Your other allies, whom I have found very agreeable personages, are Milor Blessington and opouse, travelling with a very handsome companion, in the shape of a French count (to use Farquhar's phrase in The Beaux's Stratagem) who has all the air of a Cupiclon dech.arine, and is one of the few specimens I have seen of our ideal of a Frenchman before the Revolution, an old friend with a new face, upon whose like I never thought that we should look again. Miladi seems highly literary, to which, and your honour's acquaintance with the family, I attribute the pleasure of having seen them. She is also very pretty, even in a morning—a species of beauty on which the sun of Italy does not shine so frequently as the chandelier." Lady Blessington's history is a curious illustration of the growth of a "bubble reputation." We watch its expansion and development; we see it glowing with the brightest colours. Then, after a time, it dwindles, and the rainbow-hues grow dim; finally it bursts, and ends in oblivion. The beautiful Irishwoman reigned for nineteen years the queen of a circle that included all the great statesmen, authors, and poets of the day ; as Haydon said, "Everybody goes to Lady Blessington's." Living far beyond her income both in her married life and widowhood, the crash came at last, and she fled to Paris, whither d'Orsay, Byron's "Cupidon dechafne," despoiled of his weapons, his bow broken, and feathers trailing in the mud, had already preceded her. Deserted in her downfall by those who had flattered her success, we hear little of sym- pathy shown to her at this crisis, except a brief record that Thaekeray was much affected at the sale which immediately took place at Gore House, so lately the scene of brilliant banquets and receptions. As Lady Blessington had written, "People are seldom tired of the world till the world is tired of them." Who now reads her novels, The Two Friends, or The Victims of Society, or Lionel Deerhurst, or Marmaduke Herbert ? Landor and Barry Cornwall wrote kindly epitaphs on her; they remembered her beauty, her hospitality, her generosity, they buried her faults in her grave ; but in spite of their praises her writings are forgotten, her beauty and her books are alike dust. Sydney, Lady Morgan, is a better specimen of a fashionable bel-esprit. The " wild Irish girl" was born in the last century. Croker tried to ferret-out the exact date of her birth ; be seems to have had a craze for proving the ages of authoresses, as Fanny Burney suffered in the same way from his venomous pen, but he failed to find the right date ; and all we know for certain is that Miss Owenson was a governess in 1798. Her beauty and wit and her novels brought her into fashion, and after numerous offers of marriage, she accepted Sir Charles Morgan in 1812. One of those earlier love-affairs afforded a theme for her novel of the Wild Irish Girl. Her biographer, Mr. Hepworth Dixon, relates that a young man named Richard Everard had fallen violently in love with Sydney Owenson (as she then was). His father, thinking the match most unwise, neither of them having any money and the young man no profession, called on Miss Owenson to persuade her to break it off ; but, as occasionally happens, "he who came to scoff remained to pray," and, to quote Mr. Dixon, "Sydney Owenson spoke so wisely and conducted herself so pleasantly, that the father actually became desirous of doing himself what he had forbidden his son to think of." This episode she detailed in the novel, and the heroine being identified with the authoress, Sydney was known in society till her marriage by the sobriquet of " Glorvina." In spite of repeated attacks from °miter in the Quarterly, Lady Morgan's books were very successful. Sir Walter Scott wrote of her Irish novel, O'Downel, in his diary, "I have amused myself very pleasantly during the last few days by reading over Lady Morgan's novel, which has some striking and beautiful pas- sages of situation and description, and, in the comic part, is very rich and entertaining." Her book on Italy made a great sensation, though the Quarterly hurled coarse abuse at it. Byron, who was not prejudiced in Lady Morgan's favour, wrote of it, "Her work is fearless and excellent on the subject of Italy—pray tell her so—and I know the country." She was ambitious, and perfectly aware of her own powers of fascination. There are pleasant touches of feminine vanity in her reminiscences quoted by Mr. Barnett Smith. She notes that "poor dear Jane Porter" had mentioned laving been "taken for me the other night, and talked to as such, by a party of Americans ! She is tall, lank and lean, and lackadaisical, dressed in the deepest black, with rather a battered black gauze hat, and the air of a regular Melpomene. I am the reverse of all this, et sans vanitO, the best-dressed woman wherever I go." Later on, she mentions a flirtation with Jeffrey : "When he comes to Ireland, we are to go to Donnybrook Fair together; in short, having cut me down with his tomahawk as a reviewer, he smothers me with roses as a man ; and so he comes to see me. I always say of my enemies before we meet, Let me at them!" Lady Morgan lived to a great age ;—one by one she ,lost father, husband, friends ; the greatest loss among the +latter was Thomas Moore. "It has struck home," she wrote ; "I did not think I should over shed tears again, but I have."
Mary Somerville was a contemporary of Lady Morgan, and !is mentioned by her ; in fact, the two stars must often have shone simultaneously, as both were acquainted with the best society in London. Mrs. Somerville's life, though uneventful from a sensational point of view, is the record of a brilliant scientific success. It was of her that her intimate friend Maria Edgeworth wrote : "While her head is among the stars, her feet are firm upon the earth." The -exquisite voice of Jenny Lind is hushed for ever, and no art can recall the triumphs of Rachel; but Mary Somer. wille's contributions to scientific research are not forgotten, the pillar of fame that she reared so modestly rests on deep foundations. In reading the " Recollections " of her life, we must be struck by the enormous faculty for acquiring knowledge that resulted in such great effects. In her girl. hood, she taught herself Euclid and Algebra, Latin and Greek, botany, geology, and astronomy, besides wrestling over mathematical problems, and devoting hours to music and painting. In middle life, her daughter says : "It would be almost incredible were I to describe how much my mother contrived to do in the course of the day. When my sister and I were small children, although busily engaged in writing -for the Press, she used to teach us for three hours every morning, besides managing her house carefully, reading the newspapers (for she was always a keen, and, I must add, a liberal politician) and the most important new books on all subjects, grave and gay. In addition to all this, she freely -visited and received her friends." At the age of eighty-two, she began a new work, On Molecular and Microscopic Science, and completed it in seven years ; and till her death, in 1872, she was able to continue her favourite studies. Mary Car- penter devoted her life to social questions, and she is an example of the results that can be obtained by the energy and perseverance of one individual. As Dr. Martineau pointed out in the inscription for her monument, she was -" foremost among founders of Reformatory and Industrial Schools," and she deserves a niche beside Howard and Eliza- beth Fry, for she entered deeply into the questions of prison 'reform and convict life. She showed her disposition early, -for when she was only seven years old, her mother wrote of her: "Mary's mind is constantly occupied by some magnifi- cent scheme or other her attention is occupied by ,aome plan for converting the heathen, or turning her doll's !frocks into pelisses !' Lady Hester Stanhope, niece and adopted daughter of the great Pitt, is another specimen of womanhood. She must always be a strangely picturesque 'figure, in her deserted monastery on Mount Lebanon, where she lived for five-and-twenty years, dressed as a Turk, half- mad, half-mystical, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war with the neighbouring tribes, who alike dreaded and revered her as a prophetess.
The great novelists known as George Eliot and George Sand, and the great artists, Jenny Lind and Rachel, fill up the tale of renowned women. Though there is nothing new or original in Mr. Barnett Smith's book, yet the short memoirs are pleasant and readable, each subject in her way was re- markable for character and talent, some pre-eminent in imaginative power, others in personal qualities, or the more enduring gifts of intellect and heart.
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