As it was, no personal attachment disturbed the frame of peace and resignation in which her fate found her; no sweet earthly dew of tenderness for husband or child left behind, dimmed the pure brilliancy of that hope, that shone like a star through the ruined temple of the soul's frail tenement. So passed she away, calmly and humbly, as she had lived.

Th' unbroken heart's first fragrance unto Heaven."

Florence Nightingale.

"Live for something. Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storm of time can never destroy. Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy, on the hearts of thousands you come in contact with year by year. You will never be forgotten. No. Your name, your deeds, will be as legible on the hearts you leave behind, as the stars on the brow of evening. Good deeds will shine as the stars of heaven."

CHALMERS.

Florence Nightingale.

BORN 1820.

Few persons have pursued the counsel given by Dr. Chalmers, which we have prefixed to this notice, with more undeviating practice, than our present heroine.

Always a difficult task to the biographer to discuss a living celebrity, the path is smoothed in the case of Miss Nightingale, by the universal concurrence in one of her characteristics, philanthropy. It is admitted unquestionably, that she fulfilled not only the glorious mission of rescuing suffering valour, from reckless mismanagement and neglect, but that she taught, by heroic self-devotion to the cause of duty, her own sex that there was a nobler object in woman's existence, than to "sit in glory, the elegant deity of a drawingroom." The result still working, proves the energy the agent, and the imperishable nature of good. There

of

is therefore less danger in Miss Nightingale's instance, than in many others, of praise becoming exaggerated into hyperbole, or criticism degenerating into detraction.

Born in 1820, at Florence, "Firenze la bella," she not only derived the name, but partook also of the taste, incident to the capital of Tuscany, over which still linger the memories of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini, and Andrea del Sarto; an illustrious brotherhood, whose genius appears to have found a ready response in one who was the child equally of affluence, as of intellect. Her father, the son of William Shore, of Tapton, assumed the name of Nightingale, after the death of his maternal uncle, under whose will, he inherited large estates at Embley Park, in Hampshire, and Lea Hurst, in Derbyshire. By his marriage in 1818, with Frances, the child of William Smith, Esq., M.P. for Norwich, he had two daughters, of whom Florence was the younger, and as her disposition from the earliest years, manifested an admiration of the beautiful and noble, so the scenes of her childhood's education were eminently calculated to foster feminine accomplishment. Her father superintended her studies in classics and mathematics; she acquired many modern languages, with ease and fluency; became proficient in music, and was so desirous of extending her information by travel, as even to visit Egypt, where her attendance on the sick