WOMEN AS INSPIRERS 383 



terials he had accumulated in connection with it. Then 

 her resolution and cheerful disposition sustained and re- 

 freshed him, and never more so than when, during the 

 last twelve years of his life, his bodily strength was broken 

 and his spirit, though languid, yet ceased not from mental 

 toil. The truth is that Sir "William's marriage, his com- 

 paratively limited circumstances, and the character of his 

 wife supplied to a nature that would have been contented 

 to spend its mighty energies in work that brought no re- 

 ward but in the doing of it, and that might never have 

 been made publicly known or available, the practical force 

 and impulse which enabled him to accomplish what he 

 actually did in literature and philosophy. It was this in- 

 fluence, without doubt, which saved him from utter absorp- 

 tion in his world of rare, noble and elevated but ever- 

 increasingly unattainable ideas. But for it the serene sea 

 of abstract thought might have held him becalmed for life ; 

 and, in the absence of all utterance of definite knowledge 

 of his conclusions, the world might have been left to an 

 ignorant and mysterious wonder about the unprofitable 

 scholar. ' n 



i Memoir of Sir WflUam Hamilton, by John Veitch, p. 136 et seq., 

 Edinburgh, 1869. 



It is frequently said that women, unlike men, are indifferent to 

 fame. This may be true so far as they are personally concerned; 

 but it is certainly not true of them in regard to their husbands, or 

 the men for whom they have a genuine affection. This is abundantly 

 proved by the lives of Mme. Huber, Mme. Pasteur, Caroline Herschel 

 and Lady Hamilton, not to name others who have been mentioned 

 in the foregoing pages. After Sir William Hamilton, at the age 

 of fifty-six, had been stricken by hemiplegia on the right side, as 

 the result of over-work, his faithful wife became for twelve years 

 eyes, hands and even mind for him. She read and consulted books 

 for him, and helped him to prepare his lectures and the works which 

 have given him such celebrity. "Everything that was sent to the 

 press and all the courses of lectures were written by her, either to 

 dictation or from copy." And when we remember that the lec- 

 tures and books were of the most abstruse character and that Lady 



