She gathered the fruit for the jam, and shelled the peas; she sewed her sampler, "working the alphabet from A to Z, as well as the ten numbers, on canvas;' in short, she was trained, as many a Scotch girl for generations after her was trained, in the homeliest narrow round of duties; yet with so much movement of intelligence in the minds around her, not more technically "educated" than her own, but full of mother- wit and independent original thought, as to neutralise the crushing effect of that narrowness. Her amusements were of a less ordinary kind. It must be added that she was the only child in the house, her brother being absent at school, and in consequence very lonely. "I was no longer amused in the garden, but wandered about the country. When the tide was out I spent hours on the sands, looking at the star-fish and sea-urchins, or watching the children digging for sand-eels, cockles, and the spouting razor-fish. I made a collection of shells, such as were cast ashore, some so small that they appeared like white specks in patches of black sand. There was a small pier on the sands for shipping limestone brought from the coal-mines inland. I was astonished to see the surface of those blocks of stone covered with beautiful impressions of what seemed to be leaves; how they got there I could not imagine, but I picked up the broken bits, and even large pieces, and brought them to my repository. I knew the eggs of many birds, and made a collection of them. . . . In the rocks at the end of our garden there was a shingly opening in which we used to bathe, and where at low tide I frequently waded among masses of rock covered with sea-weeds. With the exception of dulse and tangle, I knew the names of none, though I was well acquainted with and admired the beautiful plants. I also watched the crabs, live shells, jelly-fish, and various marine animals, all of which were objects of curiosity and amusement to me in my lonely life. ... When the bad weather began I did not know what to do with myself. Fortunately we had a small collection of books, among which I found Shakespeare, and read it at every moment I could spare." We wonder if this was such a bad education after all-so much worse than that which we have progressed to, than that which we may progress to in the future? Or whether those thoughtful workings of little heads, those musings not communicable, the silent, self-development of untaught but not unlearning childhood, have not something in them as good or better than direct instruction? The little girl had much to struggle against, however, in the shape of sewing, then considered the first duty of woman. "I wonder you let Mary waste her time in reading; she never shews more than if she were a man," was the reproach of a rigid aunt to the gentler mother; but as Mary soon after made a shirt as a test of her skill, and did it well, these criticisms, we trust, relaxed in severity. Mrs Chapone's 'Letters to Young Women' were in the home library, and she dutifully betook herself to the course of study recommended in that decorous manual. She learned the use of the globes at the same time, and would study the stars for hours at the window of her bedroom when the simple household was asleep. A little later, when the girl had entered her teens, "I taught myself Latin enough from such books as we had to read Cæsar's 'Commentaries.' Thus her lonely youth went on, happy enough we may be sure, with little episodes of Edinburgh, the dancing-school, and a more mundane existence. It was at a Burntisland tea-party that the first beginnings of the study of her life dawned upon her. While the older ladies played cards, a younger one present invited Mary Fairfax to go and see some fancy-work she was doing. The patterns for this fancy-work were in an illustrated book of fashions-nothing more weighty. "At the end of the page I read what appeared to me to be simply an arithmetical question; but, on turning the page, I was surprised to see strange-looking lines mixed with letters-chiefly X's and Y's-and asked, 'What is that?' 'Oh,' said Miss Ogilvie, 'it is a kind of arithmetic; they call it Algebra, but I can tell you nothing about it."" Let no one henceforward despise the humble magazine of the Mode. In this undignified way the young student became aware of a science unknown, which she was soon to master. She went home determined to "look if any of our books could tell me what was meant by Algebra." The nearest approach to it was a book on navigation, which the girl set to work on instantly, and from which she derived, she tells us, a dim view of several subjects which were useful to me afterwards," but which left her unsatisfied and uninformed is to that new language of X's and Y's of which her eager mind had ad one tantalising glimpse. "The rest of the summer," she adds, I spent in playing on the piano, and learning Greek enough to read Xenophon and part of Herodotus," an acquirement caught up by the way like a flower on the roadside. How her drawing-master (no less a person than the painter Nasmyth) recommended Euclid as the foundation of perspective as well as of other science; how the pretty shy girl felt that to "go to a bookseller and ask for Euclid would be impossible !" and how finally she coaxed her brother's tutor, "a simple good. natured kind of man," to make this alarming purchase for her, she goes on to tell with the most charming modest pleasure in the story of these early difficulties. How hap py she was over this acquisition! When all the household affairs were over, and her sewing got through-and as she had to make all her own clothes, even ball-dresses, this sewing must have been no inconsiderable item-Mary sat up in her room near the window where ignorant but eager she had watched the stars, and pored over her treasure far into the night; until there came to be complaints on the immoderate use of candles, and orders were issued that her light should be taken away. "I had, however, already gone through the six books of Euclid, and now I was thrown on my memory, which I exercised by beginning at the first book and demonstrating a certain number of problems every night till I could nearly go through the whole." At a later period she changed her habits so far as to transfer these hours of abstruse study to the morning, when, she tells us, "I rose at daybreak, and after dressing wrapt myself in a blanket from my bed on account of the excessive coldhaving no fire at that hour-and read algebra or the classics till breakfast-time." Nor had this career of labour and self-devotion any gentle stimulus of approbation, or that proud and pleased wonder with which a tender household so often regards the studiousness of one of its members. Of Mary's drawings the Fairfaxes were proud, but they were shocked by the severer studies. "We must put a stop to this or we shall have Mary in a strait-jacket one of these days," said her sailorfather, troubled by his prodigy; and her mother took away her candle! But nothing seems to have daunted the young student. She had diversions too, enough to keep a mind of twenty cheery, in spite of any such little obstacles in its way, and danced and flirted, and received her maiden's due of admiration and gentle homage such as no woman despises. We know nothing prettier, indeed, than the brief paragraphs in which this old, old philosopher, a member of all the learned societies in Europe, bearing such a weight of years and honours as few have had the chance of, tells how the pretty Scotch girl enjoyed herself far off in the remote sweet days of her youth in that friendly old-fashioned Edinburgh which existed at the beginning of this century. The old woman tells her tale with a halfamused indulgent smile, almost caressing, half-shaking her grey locks at, that sprightly pretty Mary, who somehow in a sweet confusion of identity is, and yet is not, herself. One feels as if she must have doubted now and then for a moment which Mary she was, the young or the old. dice her unusual studies called forth. During her widowhood, for instance, she had a lover who sent her a volume of sermons, "with a page turned down at a sermon on the duties of a wife!" and when her engagement to her cousin became known, one of his sisters wrote to her expressing a hope that "I would give up my foolish manner of life and studies, and make a respectable and useful wife!" When she became Mrs Somerville, however, all these little pricks of opposition came to an end, and her happy and sunshiny career, full of pleasant change and bright society, contains no longer anything but the records of success which, though very pleasant to hear of, are not so interesting as the foregoing struggle. Granted that the struggle of self-instruction does not end in superficial and limited knowledge, and there is no comparison between the interest of it and that of more easily acquired education-in Mrs Somerville's case it is evident this frequent result was avoided, and her attainments were as solid and well founded as they were brilliant; and no romance could be more seductive than the story of her philosophical training, so little attractive to human nature when attained in more legitimate and easy ways. In due time she married-not, it would appear, very happily; though indeed, after a woman has been married for a century or so to a second husband, it is but natural that she should have blurred over the memory of the first, and give him but a shadowy place in her recollection. For one thing, however, he had "a very low opinion of the capacity of my sex," and himself cared nothing for science; and it was only after his death, in the freedom of her widowhood, emancipated from all the bonds of obedience which restrain a girl, that she was able to give herself freely to the studies she loved, and for the first time to have some real help in pursuing them. Five years after the death of her first husband she married the second, her cousin Dr Somerville, the genial and sympathetic companion of the rest of her life, and from this time was neither hampered nor discouraged in her a good housekeeper, and the carefurther career. She tells, however, with a mixture of fun and indignation, how much wrath and preju We will not attempt to follow her through her successes: as we have already said, they were more complete and unquestionable than those of any other modern woman. They made no change in her, notwithstanding her frank and unaffected pleasure in them. She remained the same simple, natural, genial, and domestic soul, through all the triumphs of a scientific career which seems to have had no failures in it, fullest of mothers, though a renowned savante—if it is necessary to give a feminine turn to the word peace with my Maker when my last hour comes, which cannot now be far distant. 66 -and at the same time a pretty woman, fond of society and enjoying it fully. By natural right a scienAlthough I have been tried by tific woman ought to be ugly, but Mrs Somerville did not answer to the whole has been happy. In my many severe afflictions, my life upon the ideal in this point. She reyouth I had to contend with prejudice mained (and this goes to our na- and illiberality; yet I was of a quiet tional heart) as Scotch as when she temper and easy to live with, and I danced in the Edinburgh Assembly never interfered with or pried into Rooms, or wandered about the Binn other people's affairs. However, if irritated by what I considered unjust critiat Burntisland. "In speaking, she cism or interference with myself, or had a very decided but pleasant any one I loved, I could resent it fiercely. Scotch accent, and when aroused I was not good at argument; I was apt and excited would often unconscious- to lose my temper; but I never bore ly use not only native idioms, but ill-will to any one, or forgot the manquaint old Scotch words." She was ners of a gentlewoman, however angry doubtful about her own style in I may have been at the time. But I writing, saying that "she was only such kindness as I have done. I never must say that no one ever met with a self-taught, uneducated Scotch- had an enemy. I have never been of woman, and feared to use Scotch a melancholy disposition; though de idioms inadvertently." Is there pressed sometimes by circumstances I any of her countrymen so disloyal always rallied again; and although I as not after this to love the name seldom laugh, I can laugh heartily at wit or on fit occasion. The short time of Mary Somerville? He can have I have to live naturally occupies my no right in that case to call himself thoughts. In the blessed hope of a kindly Scot. meeting again with my beloved children, and those who were and are dear to me on earth, I think of death with composure and perfect confidence in the mercy of God. Yet to me, who am afraid to sleep alone on a stormy night, unless some one is near, it is a fearful or even to sleep comfortably any night thought that my spirit must enter that new state of existence quite alone. We are told of the infinite glories of that state, and I believe in them, though it is incomprehensible to us; but as I do the exquisite loveliness of the visible comprehend in some degree, at least, world, I confess I shall be sorry to leave it. I shall regret the sky, the sea, with all the changes of their colouring; the earth with its verdure and flowers; but far more shall I grieve to leave animals who have followed our steps affectionately for years, without knowing for certain their ultimate fate, though I firmly believe that the living principle is never extinguished. Mrs Somerville lived till she was ninety-three, an almost incredible age, spending the latter part of her life in Italy, among the most beautiful scenes in the world. In this long sweet lingering twilight of existence she continued to work and study, sometimes on a terrace by the sea at loveliest Sorrento, with Naples and its bay, and all the islands of the blessed there, before her eyes; sometimes at Spezia, and for a long time at Florence. Here are two extracts from the last pages of her simple and touching history, in which there appears such a tranquil résumé of life, and such a cheerfulsolemn anticipation of the hereafter, as we should all be glad to have in the evening of our days, even if not half so prolonged as hers. "I have lately entered my eightyninth year, grateful to God for the innumerable blessings He has bestowed on me and my children; at peace with all the earth, and I trust I may be at "The Blue Peter has been long flying at my foremast" (she adds, three years later), "and now that I am in my ninety-second year, I must soon expect the signal for sailing. It is a solemn mercy voyage, but it does not disturb my tran- These are the last words of Mary Somerville's recollections. She got her signal of sailing privately, as it sometimes comes to the favourites of heaven. He gives it to His beloved sleeping. A worthy life could not have had a more perfect conclusion. We promised the reader to reconcile him to the literary craft by the books at present on our table. We shall do more-we will make his heart swell with sympathy over one of the most tender and touching of love tales. The Journal et Correspondance de André-Marie Ampère * is one of those books which, perhaps, it is half profane to publish, but which, once published, become to every sympathetic reader not books, but incidents and persons he has known as part of his own recollections. It is of the genre of the 'Recit d'une Sœur,' and probably but for the extraordinary success of that work, would never have seen the light; but it is much shorter, more reticent and modest in its revelations, and has much more dramatic unity in its brief and complete record of one episode in a great and worthy life. The eminent mathematician and philosopher does not appear to us as does the woman whose pure and simple career we have just discussed, in the course of his training, or the development of his genius. We see incidentally how he struggled up to the first step in the ladder of reputation, but this struggle is so entirely subordinate to a dearer object that it interests us in a secondary degree; for Ampère worked not in the first place for knowledge, like Mary Somerville, nor for fame and advancement, like many another-but for Julie; his wife, and his child, and the means of supporting them, and enjoying their tender society, were his inspiration. To make sure of a little home in Lyons, where he could give his lessons, and study the chimie, which ruined ses pantalons and burnt holes in his waistcoats, to Julie's despair-with her by his side and their boy-was the motive which pushed him to ever greater and greater efforts, which impelled his brain to ceaseless work, and kept his hands black (also to Julie's despair) with burns and staining acids. Let us allow that to pursue science for the love of science is perhaps a nobler motive. The men who go furthest in all sublime paths of learning are perhaps though we do not affirm it-men who have no Julie. When Andrea del Sarto, musing in Mr Browning's beautiful poem upon the higher elevation of Rafael and Agnolo, reflects, "but then they had no wife," it is like enough that the excuse for his own shortcoming was valid. here again a compensating human sentiment comes in. The love of art or of science is grand but cold, and not comprehensible to all of us; but the love of the little home, the dependent family, the child, the woman, how deeply comprehensible they are! Therefore the struggle of André Ampère will go to many a heart which has little sympathy with science and it is, though an episode in the history of science, in itself pure poetry, the oldest and most everlasting of all arts. * Journal et Correspondance de André-Marie Ampère. Hetzler & Cie., Paris. But |
