Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/174

 *couraging way which is common to men who have gifted women to deal with—"You seem to be repeating yourself. You must take care not to repeat yourself." Poor little soul! She never "repeated" herself,—she just died. No one can tell how her husband's thoughtless phrase may have teazed or perplexed her sensitive mind in a critical condition of health, and helped to hasten the fatal end.

Edward Fitzgerald's celebrity as a scholar is not, and never will be wide enough to blot out from remembrance his brutal phrase on hearing of the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning—

"Mrs. Browning is dead. Thank God we shall have no more Aurora Leighs!"

While, far more creditable to Algernon Charles Swinburne than his own praise of himself now unfortunately affixed to the newly collected edition of his works, is the praise he bestows on this noble woman-genius in his preface to her great poem. I quote one line of it here—

"No English contemporary poet by profession has left us work so full of living fire."

For once, and in this particular instance, Accursëd Eve in literature has, in such a verdict, won her merited literary honours.

But as a rule honours are withheld from her, and the laurel is filched from her brows by Coward Adam ere she has time to wear it. One flagrant case is well known, of a man who having lived entirely on a woman's literary earnings for years, went about in the clothes her pen had paid for, among the persons to whom, through her influence, he had been introduced, boasting that he assisted her to write