Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/825

Rh the banishment of the philosophers from Rome, may be found in Scaliger's Appendix Virgiliana, and other collections; but has usually been printed at the end of the Satires of Juvenal, to whom it has been falsely attributed by some. She was the first Roman lady who taught her sex to vie with the Greeks in poetry. Her language is easy and elegant, and she seems to have had a happy talent for satire. She however wrote in many other ways, with great applause. Some elegies likewise, attributed to Tibullus, which abound in striking beauties, and are even worthy of the great poet they were erroneously given to, are now restored to Sulpicia. They are addressed to a young man (perhaps Calenus, a Roman knight, who was afterwards her husband) under the name of Cerinthus, which was that of a beautiful slave from Chalcis, mentioned by Horace, and applied only to the handsome. She is mentioned by Martial and Sidonius Apollinaris, and is said to have addressed to her husband, Calenus, a poem, on conjugal love. That the Romans should have produced not one poetess before Sulpicla, to put them more on a level with the Greeks, is matter of no small astonishment. She was certainly a woman of great genius, learning and beauty.

married first Thomas Hamilton, a Scottish nobleman; and after his death, the Count De la Suze. This second marriage proved very unfortunate to her, and occasioned her infinite vexations. The count had conceived such