With what simplicity Meta Hollers, the wife of Klopstock, in her German-English, describes to Richardson, the novelist, the manner in which she passes her day with her poet! she tells him that “she is always present at the birth of the young verses, which begin by fragments, here and there, of a subject with which his soul is just then filled.  Persons who live as we do have no need of two chambers; we are always in the same:  I with my little work, still! still! only regarding sometimes my husband’s face, which is so venerable at that time with tears of devotion, and all the sublimity of the subject—­my husband reading me his young verses, and suffering my criticisms.”

The picture of a literary wife of antiquity has descended to us, touched by the domestic pencil of genius, in the susceptible CALPHUENIA, the lady of the younger PLINY.  “Her affection for me,” he says, “has given her a turn to books:  her passion will increase with our days, for it is not my youth or my person, which time gradually impairs, but my reputation and my glory, of which she is enamoured.”

I have been told that BUFFON, notwithstanding his favourite seclusion of his old tower in his garden, acknowledged to a friend that his lady had a considerable influence over his compositions:  “Often,” said he, “when I cannot please myself, and am impatient at the disappointment, Madame de Buffon reanimates my exertion, or withdraws me to repose for a short interval; I return to my pen refreshed, and aided by her advice.”

GESNER declared that whatever were his talents, the person who had most contributed to develope them was his wife.  She is unknown to the public; but the history of the mind of such a woman is discovered in the “Letters of Gesner and his Family.”  While GESNER gave himself up entirely to his favourite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and poetry, his wife would often reanimate a genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, and often exciting him to new productions, her sure and delicate taste was attentively consulted by the poet-painter—­but she combined the most practical good sense with the most feeling imagination.  This forms the rareness of the character; for this same woman, who united with her husband in the education of their children, to relieve him from the interruptions of common business, carried on alone the concerns of his house in la librairie.[A] Her correspondence with her son, a young artist travelling for his studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively terms “a gathered mind.”  Imagine a woman attending to the domestic economy, and to the commercial details, yet withdrawing out of this business of life into the more elevated pursuits of her husband, and at the same time combining with all this the cares and counsels which she bestowed on her son to form the artist and the man.

[Footnote A:  Gesner’s father was a bookseller of Zurich; descended from a family of men learned in the exact sciences, he was apprenticed to a bookseller at Berlin, and afterwards entered into his father’s business.  The best edition of his “Idylls” is that published by himself, in two volumes, 4to, illustrated by his own engravings.—­ED.]