Eliza Southgate, the writer of the letters here collected, was the daughter of Robert and Mary Southgate, and was born in Scarborough, Me., September 24, 1783. She was the third in a family of twelve children. Her father came of English stock, and was born in Leicester, Mass., where his family had long been settled. Here he studied medicine, and when he had finished his course he left his native place, where there appeared to be no room for another practitioner, and settled in Scarborough. We are told that, after the primitive fashion of the time, he set out to seek his fortune on horseback, with all his worldly goods in a pair of saddle-bags. In this way he entered Scarborough, where his character and talents were not long in getting him a good position. He had picked up some law, and in a new and small community was able to make his knowledge useful, so that in course of time he was appointed a Judge in the Court of Common Pleas. He had not been long in Scarborough before he married Mary, the daughter of Richard King, a large landholder in the District of Maine. “Pretty Polly King,” as Mary was familiarly called by her friends, was the second daughter of Mr. King by his first wife. The eldest child by this marriage was Rufus—well known for the distinguished part he played in the early history of our country. A third child, Pauline, married Mr. Porter; their son Moses, whose name often occurs in these letters, was a young man of great promise. He engaged his cousin Eliza in a correspondence, after the somewhat formal fashion of the time; only her letters remain to indicate its character, but they are among her best. In her lively tilting on the well-worn subject of the education of the sexes, the lady shows herself a clever mistress of the foils, and there are not wanting indications that the combatants did not escape from the encounter heart-whole. But however this may have been, all was ended by the sudden death of Mr. Porter from a fever caught in boarding an infected vessel in the transaction of some necessary business. Scarborough was not a large town, but its position as a seaport gave it some importance, and the society was far above what is ordinarily met with in such places. The Hunnewells, Bragdons, Bacons, Emersons, Wadsworths, names that are distinguished in the social history of New England, belong to the early settlers of the neighborhood, and are still represented there. Zilpah, one of the daughters of General Peleg Wadsworth, who are frequently mentioned in these letters, married Stephen Longfellow, a cousin of Mrs. Southgate, and became the mother of the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.