she must have felt that marriage with him would bind her to a narrow field of duty and demand of her a degree of self-renunciation quite fatal to her best development. In those days marriage with a strong man from whom one differed in one's views of things always meant that the wife's personality must perish.

It was while discussing the pros and cons of this alliance with Pierrepont Edwards, her cousin, a man whose personal character was, however, as far as possible removed from that of his distinguished father, Jonathan Edwards, the theologian,

- that Mr. Buckminster one summer's afternoon surprised Elizabeth in the arbour of the house at New Haven where she was staying as guest, and dealt her an unmanly blow. The tutor had come for his final answer, and finding his fiancée in confidential intercourse with a man whom he

hated and distrusted, he retreated in a fit of terrible anger but without speaking a single word.

After waiting a reasonable time Elizabeth wrote to Mr. Buckminster, who seems in the meantime to have accepted a call to Portsmouth, N. H., to tell him the subject of her conversation with her cousin on that fateful day. And she added that she had intended her answer to his suit to be "Yes." The minister's reply was the announcement of his approaching marriage to the daughter of the Reverend Mr. Stevens, of Kittery, near Portsmouth. Naturally Elizabeth said no more.

Buckminster was in 1779 ordained clergyman of the North Church in the old town by the sea. There, three years later, he brought home his wife, and May 26, 1784, his first son a brilliant lad even

in his early youth

was born.

Mrs.

Buckminster appears to have been a lady of very elegant and cultivated mind, but she died when her child was very young and so disappears from view.

Her

No such peaceful end was, however, to crown Elizabeth Whitman's life. On the contrary, this flower of our Revolutionary New England was to be ruthlessly trampled upon by a fate which has visited few other women so harshly. Not that the loss of her lovers was a blow from which her buoyant nature could not recover. letters at this period of her life are those of a light-hearted, fanciful, and altogether healthful woman. One dated May 10, 1779, the year of Buckminster's heartless desertion, and addressed to a young poet friend, reads as follows: "I have spent the evening in company before walking half a mile. It is now one o'clock. Judge, then, if I can pretend to

find fault with you at present? No, really: I am too tired and too goodhumoured; but for your encouragement I will tell you that I have a sheet full of hints and sketches in that way which I have taken down when I felt most disposed to be severe, and I intend to work them into a sort of satire at the first opportunity." [She herself wrote good verse.] "I heard last night from Mr. Dwight that he will soon take a journey to camp. He will certainly either go or return by way of New Haven, so you will be able to consult him yourself. I fervently wish you may, for I know of no person so capable of advising you. I shall depend upon seeing you before you set out on your tour." The "Mr. Dwight" so pleasantly referred to here was the honoured president of Yale, busy about this time in altering Watts's Hymns with Joel Barlow, the

good friend to whom this letter is addressed.

This young man was the husband of Ruth Baldwin, with whom Elizabeth had recently been on a visit. The only authentic Elizabeth Whitman letters in existence are those merely friendly ones addressed to the Barlows during this period of our heroine's life, between her twenty-ninth and thirty-second year. She had first met Joel Barlow and Ruth Baldwin, to whom the poet was even then engaged to be married, at a Christmas party in New Haven in 1778. At a game of forfeits, Joel and Elizabeth were ordered to play the part of man and wife for the whole evening. This game they carried out with great spirit, adopting the nine Muses as their children. Melpomene, Barlow's favourite because he was already well-known as a poet, is caricatured in the correspondence