passed; she manifested, while yet a child, a great talent for drawing, and when a change in her circumstances rendered it necessary for her to seek some mode of subsistence, she determined on becoming a professional artist. Under the teaching of Frederick Cruikshank, and afterwards of Henri Scheffer, of Paris, where she had access to the studio of his celebrated brother, Ary Scheffer, she attained great proficiency as a portrait painter, in which line of art she has taken a very high stand. Her portraits are generally what may indeed be called "speaking likenesses," full of thought, feeling, and expression. The good position which Miss Gillies quickly attained at the Royal Academy, she has steadily maintained and improved. The old society of painters in water colours, has elected her a member, and to the exhibitions of this institution she has of late years been a constant and valued contributor. She has also exhibited some good paintings in oil, besides her portraits, which shew a high capability for subject pictures.
GILMAN, CAROLINE,
One of those estimable women who are doing good in whatever way duty opens before them, be it to write, teach, or work, with unfailing zeal and cheerfulness. She has given the reminiscences of her early days in her own pleasant vein; and from it we extract these characteristic passages.
"I am asked for some 'particulars of my literary and domestic life.' It seems to me, and I suppose at first thought it seems to nil, a vain and awkward egotism to sit down and inform the world who you are. But if I, like the Petrarchs, and Byrons, and Helmanses, greater or less, have opened my heart to the public for a series of years, with all the pulses of love, and hatred, and sorrow, so transparently unveiled, that the throbs may be almost counted, why should I or they feel embarrassed in responding to this request? Is there not some inconsistency in this shyness about autobiography?
I find myself, then, at nearly sixty years of age, somewhat of a patriarch in the line of American female authors—a kind of past-master in the order.
The only interesting point connected with my birth, which took place October 8th., 1794, at Boston, Massachusetts, is that I first saw the light where the Mariner's Church now stands, in the North Square. My father, Samuel Howard, was a shipwright; and, to my fancy, it seems fitting that seamen should assemble on the former homestead of one, who spent his manhood in planning and perfecting the noble fabrics which bear them over the waves. All the record I have of him is, that on every State Thanksgiving-Day he spread a liberal table for the poor; and for this, I honour his memory.
My father died before I was three years old, and was buried at Copp's Hill. My mother, who was an enthusiastic lover of nature, retired into the country with her six children, and placing her boys at an academy at Woburn, resided with her girls, in turn at Concord, Dedham, Watertown, and Cambridge, changing her residence almost annually, until I was almost ten years old, when she passed away, and I followed her to her resting-place, in the burial-ground at North Andover.
My education was exceedingly irregular—a perpetual passing from
