Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

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tionary blood. Thus equipped by inheritance with a
capacity for independent thinking, she improved it to
the utmost by a girlhood of earnest study under the
ablest teachers of the land. Even as a school-girl her
poems and essays elicited much admiring comment.
Coming to New-York in the year I845 with quite
a reputation as a writer in varied lines as well as that
of an able and successful teacher, she engaged in her
favorite employment of instruction of young ladies.
Endowed with a personality of great magnetism and
graceful charm, she soon gathered around her the
choicest spirits of her new home and of neighboring
towns, as well as of visiting strangers of distinction
from beyond the sea. Her rooms became a favorite
rallying-point for persons eminent in every line of
successful achievement,- the leading writers, artists,
scientists, and dramatists both of the Old World and
the New,-as well as a home where the disappointed
and hard-pressed found solace and rest.
The educating, refining influence of such a social
center in this then crude, uncultured mercantile metropolis can scarcely be overestimated. It was emphatically a triumph of "high thinking and plain
living"; for Mrs. Botta always retained the French
simplicity of salon entertainment, even when the
ample means of later days would have warranted a
more lavish expenditure, and when the practice was
universal of luxurious table-cheer. It was, moreover,
a triumph of broad and liberal thinking; for the largest
mental hospitality was a marked feature of these reunions. As in our own club, no one was ever made
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