Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/536

522 fully blends in them, and by the simple and natural manner in which she relates them. In spite of her rapid and flowing stile, nothing is forgotten in her details and descriptions. Mary did not only possess a most refined taste; she had also to boast a mind of sensibility. The English muse seems to have inspired her, all her subjects are sad and melancholy. She appears to have designed to melt the hearts of her readers; always speaks to the soul, calls forth all its feelings, and very frequently throws it into the utmost consternation."

Her second work is a collection of Æsopian Fables, which, she says, she engaged in at the solicitation of an Earl William, the flower of chivalry and courtesy. This earl, whom Le Grand, the translator of some of the fables into French prose, supposes to have been earl William de Dampiere, M. la Rue shews must have been William Longsword, natural son of Henry II. and created earl of Salisbury by Richard Cœur de Lion.

There are three MS. copies of this work in the British Museum. Though these fables are called Æsopian, few of them are really so. It is supposed she made her translation from an heterogeneous collection, not now in being; because, out of 108 fables in her work, there are only 39 which are similar to those we have of that ancient writer. "Her fables are written with all that acuteness of mind, that penetrates the very inmost recesses of the human heart; and, at the same time, with that beautiful simplicity peculiar to the ancient romance language. It appears that Fontaine has imitated her, rather than the fabulists of either Greece or Rome, and some fables he has taken completely from her.

A third work of Mary's, is a translation, in French Verse, of a history or tale of St. Patrick's Purgatory. Whether