Mrs. Somerville, who was born in 1780, says that when she was getting on with mathematics her father, Admiral Fairfax, said to her mother, “We must put a stop to this or we shall have Mary in a strait-jacket one of these days.”
When Hannah More and her friend, Miss Harrison, began teaching poor girls in barns and brick kitchens, they were told they would ruin agriculture, that if servants learned to read they would read their mistresses’ letters, and if they learned to write they would forge their mistresses’ names.
In a Young Lady’s Album.
The American author, James Russell Lowell, had as happy a knack as has ever been known of writing album verses. When he was in this country, Professor Max Müller’s daughter, Beatrice, asked him to give her a few lines, and this is what he wrote—
“O’er the wet sands an insect crept,
Ages ere man on earth was known,
And patient Time, while Nature slept,
The slender tracing turned to stone.
’Twas the first autograph; and ours?
Prithee, how much of prose or song,