Page:Wives and mothers in the olden time.djvu/19



first edition of this work being exhausted, I have been asked to publish a second, which should bring it within the reach of a greater number of readers. This has been done, not by shortening, but by omitting one of the lives ; which I hope, however, will appear later in a second volume, with a new and equally interesting one.

When I first obtained from M. 1'Abbé Lagrange the permission to translate his beautiful life of St. Paula into English, a short summary of this biography had appeared from another hand, with which I was unwilling to interfere. That little volume, however, had a limited circulation ; so that I thought the time was come when I might give the English-reading public a complete translation of a work which in many ways is so valuable an addition to our liagio- graphies. For the life of this noble Roman lady is full of instruction to ourselves, and especially to the wives, mothers, and daughters of the present century. In the touching letter written by the venerable Bishop of Orleans to the Author, and inserted in the preface of the original work, he speaks in the following manner of the valuable example St. Paula affords to women of every class : I felt, while reading this life so full of holiness and good works, and in this respect so different from the worldly, empty, and useless existences of so many amongst us how much St. Paula owed, even in her virtues, to that large, liberal Roman and Christian education which she had received, and to the care with which she had studied both Latin and Greek literature. One sees clearly to what an extent solid mental culture