Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/68

50 with courteous expressions toward “the accomplished gentleman said to be the author of the article in question;” and the only thing about the whole communication that suggests a woman’s pen is the delicate adroitness with which she turns against Mr. Bancroft, in closing, two lines from one of his own juvenile effusions: —

A few days later, Mr. Bancroft found a defender, as Miss Fuller indicates, in a correspondent signing “H.,” and giving Salem as his residence. He in turn is courteous and complimentary, — probably not being at all aware that it is a young woman of twenty-four to whom he is replying, — and says of the first communication that it is written “with ability and candor, but I think without fully investigating the subject.” Nevertheless, as he can only cite Gibbon and Middleton’s Cicero, while she had brought up Plutarch and Velleius Paterculus, the heavier ordnance was certainly with the defender of Brutus. But it was quite a triumph to be gravely answered; and the father and daughter in that quiet Groton farm-house must have taken great delight in cutting out for preservation those two momentous extracts from the “Daily Advertiser.”

It often happens that young people, when banished from society to what seems solitude, find compensation in being anew introduced to parents, brothers, and sisters. This was eminently true of