Women of History: Selected from the Writings of Standard AuthorsVarious
History
Women of History: Selected from the Writings of Standard Authors
Various
Women -- Biography
to us that the other was unable to form a conception.
England, we should think, should be proud of having given birth to Mrs
Hutchinson and her husband; and chiefly because their characters are
truly and peculiarly English, according to the standard of their times,
in which national characters were most distinguishable. Not exempt,
certainly, from errors and defects, they yet seem to us to hold out a
lofty example of substantial dignity and virtue, and to possess most of
those talents and principles by which public life is made honourable,
and privacy delightful. Bigotry must at all times debase, and civil
dissension embitter our existence; but, in the ordinary course of
events, we may safely venture to assert, that a nation which produces
many such wives and mothers as Mrs Lucy Hutchinson, must be both great
and happy.
LADY FANSHAWE.
[BORN 1625. DIED 1680.]
JEFFREY.
Lady Fanshawe was, as is generally known, the wife of a distinguished
cavalier, in the heroic age of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate, and
survived till long after the Restoration. Her husband was a person of no
mean figure in those great transactions; and she, who adhered to him
with the most devoted attachment, and participated not unworthily in all
his fortunes and designs, was consequently in continual contact with the
movements that then agitated society. Since it may be said with some
show of reason that Lady Hutchinson and her husband had too many elegant
tastes and accomplishments to be taken as fair specimens of the austere
and godly republicans, it certainly may be retorted, with at least equal
justice, that the chaste and decorous Lady Fanshawe, and her sober,
diplomatic lord, shadow out rather too favourably the general manners
and morals of the cavaliers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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