James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

[78] had from the first a rare amount of “muscular Christianity” -must have been a conscientious self-care-taker — must have lived wisely and prudently,--in short, must have kept herself well “in hand,” or she would have gone down in some of the ugly ditches, or stuck in some of the hurdles she has had to leap in this desperate race of a quarter of a century. Some New York paragraphist tells of having encountered her on Broadway, a short time since,--not as usual, walking with a hurried and haughty tread, the elastic step of an Indian princess, of the school of Cooper,--but pausing, after a manner quite as characteristic, to talk to a lovely baby in its nurse's arms; and, our amiable Jenkins relates, her face then and there shone with the very rapture of admiration and unforgotten maternal tenderness, melting through its mask of belligerent pride and harshness, and in that wonderful transfiguring glow,seemed to wear the very look of the time when it first hung over a little cradle, or nestled down against a little baby-face, in the happy long ago. Yet it had looked on many a dear coffined face since then.

Fanny Fern has been the subject of many piquant and amusing anecdotes, some of them, perhaps most of them, having a foundation in fact,--for she is a person of too much spirit and character not to have noteworthy things happening to her and round about her rather frequently. Hers is a stirring, breezy life, to which anything like a dead calm is impossible. She is too swift and well freighted a craft not to leave a considerable wake behind her. She sails with all her canvas spread, by a chart of her own, so occasionally dashes saucily athwart the bows of steady-going old ships of the line, or right under the guns of a heavy man-of-war. As an author and woman, she consults neither authority, nor precedent, fashion, nor policy. As woman and author, she has always defied and despised that petty personal criticism, that paltry gossip which is the disgrace of American journalism;