the advantages which such means would afford her.
In personal appearance Miss Blackwell is rather below the middle size, lady-like In manners, and very quiet, almost reserved in company. That her example is destined to work out a great and beneficial change in the medical practice of America, we confidently hope; and that England will soon follow this change, we will not doubt. Is it not repugnant to reason, as well as shocking to delicacy, that men should act the part of midwives? Who believes this is necesary? that woman could not acquire all the requisite physiological and medical knowledge, and by her sympathy for the sufferer, which man cannot feel, become a far more congenial helper?
God has sanctioned this profession of Female Physicians; He "built houses" for the Hebrew midwives, and he will bless those who go forward to rescue their sex from subjection to this unnatural and shocking custom of employing men in their hour of sorrow. We trust the time is not far distant when the women of the Anglo-Saxon race will be freed from such a sad servitude to the scientific knowledge of man, which neither God nor nature sanctions.
BLAKE, KATHARINE,
Wife of William Blake, the artist, was born in humble life, and first noticed by the young painter for the whiteness of her hand and the sylph-like beauty of her form. Her maiden name was Boutcher, not name to set in ryhme, but her lover inscribed his lyrics to the "dark-eyed Kate." He also drew her picture; and finding she had good domestic qualities, he married her. They lived long and happily together. A writer who knew them intimately, thus describes her:—
"She seemed to have been created on purpose for Blake; she believed him to be the finest genius on earth; she believed in his verse; she believed in his designs; and to the wildest flights of his imagination she bowed the knee, and was a worshipper. She set his house in good order, prepared his frugal meal, learned to think as he thought, and, indulging him in his harmless absurdities, became as it were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. She learned—what a young and handsome woman is seldom apt to learn—to despise gaudy dresses, costly meals, pleasant company, and agreeable invitations; she found out the way of being happy at home, living on the simplest of food, and contented in the homeliest of clothing. It was no ordinary mind which could do all this; and she whom Blake emphatically called his 'beloved' was no ordinary woman. She wrought off in the press the impressions of his plates—she coloured them with a light and neat hand—made drawings much in the spirit of his compositions, and almost rivalled him in all things, save in the power which he possessed of seeing visions of any Individual living or dead, whenever he chose to see them."
William Blake died in 1828, without any visible pain, his faithful wife watching over him to the last. She died a few years afterwards.
BLAMIRE, SUSANNA,
Was born of a respectable family in Cumberland, at Cardem Hall, near Carlisle, where she resided till her twentieth year, when her sister marrying a gentleman from Scotland, she accompanied them
