thinks, "in the present state of things, excite either a smile or a stare in fashionable company." But she afterwards says, "French you are not only permitted to learn, but you are laid under the same necessity of acquiring it as your brother is of acquiring the Latin." Mrs. Barbauld's demands, however, are not extravagant, as she thinks that "a young person who reads French with ease, who is so well grounded as to write it grammatically, and has what I should call a good English pronunciation will by a short residence in France gain fluency and the accent." This "good English pronunciation" of French is still not unfamiliar to those acquainted with Anglicized or Americanized regions of Paris. Among the maturer books of Mary Potter was Worcester's "Elements of History," then and now a clear and useful manual of its kind, and a little book called "The Literary Gem" (1827), which was an excellent companion or antidote for Worcester's History, as it included translations from the German imaginative writers just beginning to be known, Goethe, Richter, and Körner, together with examples of that American literary school which grew up partly in imitation of the German, and of which the "Legend of Peter Rugg," by William Austin, is the only specimen now remembered. With this as a concluding volume, it will be seen that Mary Potter's mind had some fitting preparation for her husband's companionship, and that the influence of Bryant in poetry, and of Austin, the precursor of Hawthorne, in prose, may well have lodged in her mind the ambition, which was always making itself visible in her husband, towards the new work of creating an American literature. It is in this point of view that the young wife's mental training assumed a real importance in studying the atmosphere of Longfellow's early days. For the rest, she was described by her next-door neighbor in Brunswick, Miss Emeline Weld, as "a lovely woman in character and appearance, gentle, refined, and graceful, with an attractive manner that won all hearts."{15}