* * Mrs. APHRA BEHN, A celebrated poetess of the last age, was a gentlewoman by birth, being descended, as her life-writer says, from a good family in the city of Canterbury.

Though many of the productions of the gifted poetess will soon be forgotten, there is no doubt that some will live.

"He said to me," Lord Peterborough wrote to Lady Mary, "what I had taken the liberty of saying to you, that he wondered how the town would apply these lines to any but some noted common woman; that he would yet be more surprised if you should take them to yourself; he named to me four remarkable poetesses and scribblers, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Heywood, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Behn, assuring me that such only were the objects of his satire.

" Madame de Staël had come with a heart full of enthusiasm; in her address to Napoleon, she had called him a "god descended to earth;" she had come an enthusiastic poetess; she departed an offended woman.

At Hartford lives Mrs. Sigourney, the graceful American poetess.

Our ingenious poetess sent him a suitable answer to this truly ridiculous and Dutchman like epistle.

Every woman when she loves is an inspired poetess; the divine frenzy has seized her, and poetic utterances of ecstasy issue from her trembling lips.

SAPPHO, a lyric poetess of Greece of the 7th century B.C., and a contemporary of Alcæus; was a woman of strong passions and of questionable morality, but of undoubted genius, her lyrics being among the masterpieces of antiquity, though only two of her odes and some short fragments of others remain; of her history little is known, and what is known is far from reliable.

(ib.) Parthenia, healed from the poison, returns her right Beauty new shining like the Queen of night, Appearing fresher after she did shroud Her gawdy forehead in a pitchy cloud: Love triumphs in her eyes; (III, end.) and the pastoral poetess Sapho promises an 'epithalamy' for the bridal pair,

"Why is it," asked the persistent poetess, "that you always insist that we write on one side of the paper only?

This personage was Madame de Staël, the daughter of Necker, the renowned poetess of "Corinne" and "Delphine.

"He didn't have none!" AMBITION Oliver Herford sat next to a soulful poetess at dinner one night, and that dreamy one turned her sad eyes upon him.

He even published Mrs. Manley's dishonour, and from that time our sprightly poetess was considered, by the sober part of the sex, quite abandoned to all shame.

The talented Westphalian Catholic poetess ANNETTE VON DROSTE-HÜLSHOFF (1797-1848) has a place apart in her generation, not only for the fine religious poems of her Christian Year (similar in plan to Keble's cycle), but also for her nature-lyrics and songs of common life, which are marked by minute realistic detail and refreshing originality of observation and sentiment.

That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne, speaks of the "dignity of divinity, which informs the most passionate and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with such grandeur as would seem impossible to such passion.

Our amiable poetess, in a letter to Dr. Talbot, Bishop of Durham, has given some farther particulars of her life.

This unfortunate poetess, the circumstances of whose life, written by herself, have lately entertained the public, was born in the year 1712.

Could she, the brilliant poetess, be expected to possess the English domestic virtues which his father valued above all things in a wife?

Afterwards he was asked whether he had chanced to see the most distinguished English poetess of the day.