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 the Scots for the performance of the conditions: the younger son of Seton was also a prisoner in Edward's hands, having been taken in a sally.

No sooner had Edward obtained the hostages, than he insisted on the immediate surrender of the town, threatening Sir Alexander, that if he refused, his two sons should immediately be hung in front of the ramparts. The governor was thunderstruck, and in his agony, was on the point of sacrificing his country's honour to his paternal tenderness, when he was roused and supported in his duty by his wife, the mother of these two sons Lady Seton came suddenly forward, and called upon her husband to stand firm to his honour and his country. She represented, that if the savage monarch did really put his threat into execution, they would become the most wretched of parents, but their sons would have died nobly for their country, and they themselves could wear out life in sorrow for their loss; but that, if he abandoned his honour, their king, their country, their consciences, nay, their sons themselves, would regard them with contempt; and that they should not only be miserable, but entail lasting disgrace on those they sought to save. Never did Spartan or Roman matron plead with the eloquence of the most exalted virtue, more forcibly against the weakness of her own or her husband's mind. And when she saw, across the water, preparations actually making for the death of her sons, and beheld her husband, at the dreadful spectacle, again giving way, she drew him from the horrid scene, and thus saved his honour, though at the sacrifice of their children. The tyrant put them to death. This was in July, 1332.

SETURNAN, MADAME, of Cologne, excelled in the arts, and acquired a wide reputation. She was a painter, musician, engraver, sculptor, philosopher, geometrician, and a theologian. She understood and spoke nine languages.

SEVIGNE, MARIE DE RUBUTIN CHANTAL, MARCHIONESS OF, of the Baron de Chantal, was born, in 1627, at Bourbilly, in Burgundy, and was early left an orphan. Her maternal uncle, Christopher de Coulanges, brought her up, and she was taught by Menage and Chapelain. At the age of eighteen she married the Marquis de Sévigné, who was killed in a duel seven years afterwards. Left with a son and daughter, she devoted herself entirely to their education. To her daughter, who, in 1669, married the Count de Grignan, governor of Provence, she was particularly attached; and to her was addressed the greater part of those letters which have placed the Marchioness de Sévigné in the first rank of epistolary writers. This illustrious lady was acquainted with all the wits and learned men of her time; and she is said to have decided the famous dispute between Perrault and Boileau, concerning the preference of the ancients to the moderns, saying, "the ancients are the finest, and we are the prettiest."

"Her letters," says Voltaire, "filled with anecdotes, written with freedom, and in a natural and animated style, are an excellent criticism upon studied letters of wit; and still more upon those