had the best of teaching at home. She has traveled
extensively. Her future will be devoted to literary
work in the Northwest. She is one of the most earnest and enthusiastic devotees of metrical composition
FLORENCE BYRNE CARTWRIGHT.
on the Pacific Coast, and she has a qualification which few other authors possess, that of taking infinite pains and observing the strictest rules of form, and at the same time producing a careless effect. Her talent runs particularly to old French forms, which appeal to her from their difficulty and novelty, but her favorite style is the sonnet, and her delight in that form never wearies. She has written everything from the simple triolet to the sestina and chant-royal. Her first rondeau was published in the "Californian" in 1882, and her first sestina in the "Overland" in November. 1883.
A sestina appearing in "Harper's Magazine" in May, has been much copied.
CARY, Miss Alice, poet, born near Cincinnati, Ohio, in April, 1820, died in New York City, lath February, 1871. The family to which she belonged claimed kindred with Sir Robert Cary, who was a doughty knight in the reign of Henry V of England, and with Walter Cary, who fled with the Huguenots from France to Fngland after the revocation by Louis XIV of the Edict of Nantes. His son Walter, educated in Cambridge, came to
the Colonies soon after the landing of the Mayflower and settled in Bridgewater. Mass., only sixteen miles from Plymouth Rock. He then opened a grammar school, probably the first one in America. He was the father of seven sons. One of the seven, John, settled in Windham. Conn.,
and of his five sons, the youngest. Samuel, was the
great-grandfather of Alice and Phoebe Cary. Samuel was graduated from Yale College, studied medicine and practiced in Lyme. His son, Christopher, at the age of eighteen entered the Revolutionary army. After peace was declared, Christopher received a land grant, or warrant, and settled in Hamilton county, Ohio. His son, Robert, was the father of the famous Cary Sisters, and of several other children, all of whom were persons of poetic temperament and fine intellectual powers. Alice
Cary began to show her poetical talent at an early
age. She wrote poetry when she was eighteen, much of which was published. Her mother, a woman of English descent, died in 1835, and her father married a second time and maintained a separate home near the cottage in which Alice, Phoebe and Elmira lived. In 1850 Alice and Phoebe decided to remove to New York City. They had
won a literary reputation, and they had means to
carry out their ambitious projects. Alice made her first literary venture in a volume of poems, the
work of herself and her sister Phoebe, which was
published in Philadelphia in 1850. Its favorable reception had much to do in causing the sisters to leave "Clovernook" and settle in New York. In 1851 Alice brought out the first series of her "Clovernook Papers," prose sketches of character, which won immediate success. Several large editions were sold in the United States and Great Britain. A second series, issued in 1853 was equally successful. In 1854 she published "The Clovernook Children," a juvenile work, which was very successful. Alice published her first volume of verse in 1853, entitled "Lyra and Other Poems." It met with ready sale, and a second and enlarged edition was published in 1855. which contained
"The Maiden of Tlascala," a long narrative poem. Her first novel, "Hagar," published as a serial in the Cincinnati "Commercial," was issued in a volume in 1852. Another novel, "Married, not Mated." appeared in 1856, and her last novel, "The Bishop's Son," was published in 1867. Her
ALICE CARY.
"Pictures of Country Life appeared in 1859. Alice Cary contributed many articles to "Harper's Magazine," to the "Atlantic Monthly," to the New York "Ledger" and the "Independent."
