HEROINES OF HISTORY. Illustrated. EDITED BY MARY E. HEWITT. "A perfect woman nobly plann'd, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet of spirit still and bright, With something of an angel light."-WORDSWORTH. NEW YORK: CORNISH, LAMPORT & CO, PUBLISHERS, No. 8, PARK PLACE KD15678 HARVARD Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1852, by CORNISH, LAMPORT & Co., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. Stereotyped by Vincent Dill, Jr., No. 29 Beekman Street, N. Y. TREFAGE. In the following pages, I have endeavored to present to the reader, as far as the limits of a single volume would permit, from a variety of sources, sketches of the lives of women, rendered illustrious by their heroism and their" virtues. To carry out this intention, then, to the letter, I ought, perhaps, to have omitted the sketch of Semiramis, who is described by one of her historians, as "a monster, possessed of every vice;" but she lived so far back in the ages of the world, that this account of her appears, to us, to be merely suppositious, and I have chosen to introduce her here, as an example of the indomitable courage and bravery, of purpose and action, sometimes displayed by woman, when placed in a situation to call them forth. That Semiramis lived in an idolatrous age, and was, like those of the time in which she flourished, a believer in the pagan doctrine of fatalism, will account for her seemingly puerile abandonment of her ambitious career, and cowardly submission to what she believed to be the incontrovertible decree of Destiny. M. E. H. |