MARIE DE RABUTIN, MARQUISE DE, a French lady, was born in 1626. When only a year old she lost her father, who was killed in the defeat of the English on the Isle of Rhé, where he commanded a company of volunteers. In 1644 she married the marquis of Sevigné, who was slain in a duel by the chevalier d'Albret, in 1651. She had by him a son and a daughter, to the education of whom she afterwards religiously devoted herself. Her daughter was married in 1669 to the count of Grignan, who conducted her to Provence. Madame de Sevigné confided herself by writing frequent letters to her daughter. She fell at last the victim to her maternal tenderness. In one of her visits to Grignan, the fatigued herself so much during the sickness of her daughter, that she was seized with a fever, which carried her off on the 14th of January 1666. We have two portraits of Madame de Sevigné; the one by the comte de Buffi, the other by Madame de la Fayette. The first exhibits her defects; the second her excellencies. Buffi describes her as a lively gay coquette, a lover of flattery, fond of titles, honour, and distinction: M. de la Fayette as a woman of wit and good sense, as possessed of a noble soul, formed for dispensing benefits, incapable of debasing herself by avarice, and blessed with a generous, obliging, and faithful heart. Both these portraits are in some measure just. That she was vain-glorying, appears evident from her own letters, which, on the other hand, exhibit undoubted proofs of her virtue and goodness of heart.

This illustrious lady was acquainted with all the wits of her age. It is said that she decided the famous dispute between Perrault and Boileau concerning the preference of the ancients to the moderns, thus, "The ancients are the finest, and we are the prettiest." She left behind her a most valuable collection of letters, the best edition of which is that of 1775, in 8 vols 12mo.

"These letters (says Voltaire) are filled with anecdotes, written with freedom, and in a natural and animated style; are an excellent criticism on studied letters of wit, and still more on those fictitious letters which aim at the epistolary style, by a recital of false sentiments and feigned adventures to an imaginary correspondent." It were to be wished that a proper selection had been made of these letters. It is difficult to read eight volumes of letters, which, though inimitably written, present frequent repetitions, and are often filled with trifles. What makes them in general perhaps so interesting is, that they are in part historical. They may be looked on as a relation of the manners, the ton, the genius, the fashions, the etiquette, which reigned in the court of Louis XIV. They contain many curious anecdotes nowhere else to be found: But these excellencies would be still more striking, were they sometimes stripped of that multitude of domestic affairs and minute incidents which ought naturally to have died with the mother and the daughter. A volume entitled Sevigniana was published at Paris in 1756, which is nothing more than a collection of the fine sentiments, literary and historical anecdotes, and moral apophthegms, scattered throughout these letters.