Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/316

302 success, threw the whole into the fire. But she gave not up the undertaking, and with redoubled diligence began another translation, which was printed in 1688, and was well worth the great pains it cost her.

Hitherto this extraordinary couple had worked separately, and never united their labours. This was proposed to them by the president Harlai, their patron, who put into their hands the Moral Reflections of Marcus Antoninus, for a French translation, to which they added curious remarks, and a Life of the Author, which in a great measure makes up the loss of that which the emperor himself is known to have written. It was published in 1691.

Soon after, M. Dacier lost his father; the inheritance, though chiefly his concern, seemed to require a conduct of which he thought his wife more capable than himself. She readily postponed her beloved occupations to go to Castres upon her husband's affairs, and the letters she wrote from thence are said to be a surprizing assemblage of exactness in the detail of her proceedings, of the tenderest sentiments of love increased by absence, and of erudition in her remarks on what occurred to her in reading, to which she devoted her leisure hours. M. Dacier was not wanting to make the public some amends, by a translation of Aristotle's Art of Poetry, with Notes; and it was in that kind of solitude he formed the grand design of a new translation of Plutarch's Lives, intending to sound the inclinations of the public with a volume containing six; two he had finished before his wife's return, when they privately agreed to divide the other between them; and secretly entertained themselves with the incertitude of the public, and the diversity of opinions to which each particular life was to be