The last contributor, we mention, was Mrs Rowe, who supplied “a variety of inimitable poems.” “She was,” says Dunton, “the richest genius of her sex. She knew the purity of our tongue, and conversed with as much briskness and gaiety as she wrote. Her style is noble and flowing, and her images vivid and shining.” Mrs Rowe, at this time, was not more than twenty years of age; but she had cultivated music, painting, and poetry from her childhood. She afterwards studied French and Italian, and enjoyed the friendship of some of the most eminent literati of her day. She died in 1737, and, shortly after her death, Dr Isaac Watts published her “Devout Exercises of the Heart.” A year or two afterwards, appeared her miscellaneous works, in prose and verse, in two volumes octavo. These were the principal writers who assisted Samuel Wesley, Richard Sault, and John Dunton in the publication of their _Athenian Gazette_. The history of the Athenian Society was afterwards written by Charles Gildon, and published in a folio of thirty-six pages. Gildon was a native of the same county as Samuel Wesley, and about the same age. He was educated at Douay for a popish priest, but, not liking the priestly office, he plunged into dissipation, and added to his financial embarrassments by an imprudent marriage at the age of twenty-three. Necessity obliged him to turn author, and he produced a variety of works in prose and verse. He died in 1723. Pope gave him a place in his “Dunciad;” but Dunton says he was well “acquainted with the languages, and wrote with a peculiar briskness which the common hacks could not boast of.” Gildon tells us that the whole design of the Athenian Society was “not only to improve knowledge in divinity and philosophy, in all their parts, as well as philosophy in all its latitude, but also to commend this improvement to the public in the best method that can be found out for instruction. In their Gazettes may be found the marrow of what great authors have writ on curious subjects. The society have set learning in so fair a light, that, won with its beauty, every one must with eagerness embrace it. All the knotty points of philosophy, divinity, mathematics, &c., are formed into queries by the inquisitive, and answered by the society, who are not only men of parts, but also industrious to the highest degree. They are men of sense, and piety, and patience. Horace never had half the fatigue with the poetaster, as they must have had with both male and female impertinencies. One correspondent wishes to know whether any two men have the same number of hairs on their heads; another wishes to know whether it be lawful to eat black puddings; and another whether the devil takes a human form in foreign countries. There are hundreds of such questions asked and answered. Indeed queries came in so fast, that in the third number of the _Gazette_ the public were requested to send no more till those already sent had received replies.”