The fame of these conversations spread wide through all families and social circles of the ladies attending, and the golden report they gave, led to a proposal, that Margaret should undertake an evening class, of four or five lessons, to which gentlemen should also be admitted.  This was put in effect, in the course of the winter, and I had myself the pleasure of assisting at one—­the second—­of these soirees.  The subject was Mythology, and several gentlemen took part in it.  Margaret spoke well,—­she could not otherwise,—­but I remember that she seemed encumbered, or interrupted, by the headiness or incapacity of the men, whom she had not had the advantage of training, and who fancied, no doubt, that, on such a question, they, too, must assert and dogmatize.

But, how well or ill they fared, may still be known; since the same true hand which reported for the Ladies’ Class, drew up, at the time, the following note of the Evenings of Mythology.  My distance from town, and engagements, prevented me from attending again.  I was told that on the preceding and following evenings the success was more decisive.

“Margaret’s plan, in these conversations, was a very noble one, and, had it been seconded, as she expected, they would have been splendid.  She thought, that, by admitting gentlemen, who had access, by their classical education, to the whole historical part of the mythology, her own comparative deficiency, as she felt it, in this part of learning, would be made up; and that taking her stand on the works of art, which were the final development in Greece of these multifarious fables, the whole subject might be swept from zenith to nadir.  But all that depended on others entirely failed.  Mr. W. contributed some isolated facts,—­told the etymology of names, and cited a few fables not so commonly known as most; but, even in the point of erudition, which Margaret did not profess, on the subject, she proved the best informed of the party, while no one brought an idea, except herself.

“Her general idea was, that, upon the Earth-worship and Sabaeanism of earlier ages, the Grecian genius acted to humanize and idealize, but, still, with some regard to the original principle.  What was a seed, or a root, merely, in the Egyptian mind, became a flower in Greece,—­Isis, and Osiris, for instance, are reproduced in Ceres and Proserpine, with some loss of generality, but with great gain of beauty; Hermes, in Mercury, with only more grace of form, though with great loss of grandeur; but the loss of grandeur was also an advance in philosophy, in this instance, the brain in the hand being the natural consequence of the application of Idea to practice,—­the Hermes of the Egyptians.

“I do not feel that the class, by their apprehension of Margaret, do any justice