girded. But she felt strongly that correspondence ought to be private and confidential, and that it was a hardship that celebrities should be debarred from unreserved correspondence, and so she felt bound to do what she could to protect their freedom by protesting in her own person against the satisfaction which is so often and so readily given to a curiosity which she thought unworthy.

Perhaps in one way her reputation will be the gainer by her self-denial. Her deliberate judgments are often so outspoken and severe that one rather shrinks from guessing how far her extempore severity may have carried her in confidential intercourse, written or oral. She reprobated almost too strongly the spirit of detraction as it showed itself in one like De Quincey, who consoled himself for his own failure by a disinterested curiosity and communicativeness about the failings of others, to whom he wished no evil, though they had succeeded. But conscientiousness like Miss Martineau's has temptations of its own; people who attend as much as is prudent or permissible to what they like and dislike have no excuse for sitting in judgment on their neighbors; if they are reasonable they seek and shun as it suits them, and leave others to do the same. Miss Martineau always thought of duty before pleasure: the one thing not to be borne" was seeing a piece of work that wanted doing which she could do, and leaving it undone. And this temper is always rare; those who are animated by it see work undone or ill-done within the reach of other hands, and they seldom see such sights with patience. In default of singularly perfect patience they find them selves always in the attitude of approving or disapproving, and life is not long enough to approve and disapprove with invariable regard to the principles of morality and the merits of each individThe temptation to something like censoriousness is stronger when every virtue but simplicity and sincerity and single-mindedness has been a laborious conquest. Those who have made great efforts do not find it easy to make allow ance for the weakness of others; because they know that all have some power of effort, and they remember what their own efforts cost, they are persuaded that others might do as much if they would,

and that it is selfish irresolution or distraction that keeps them back. It is hardly a compensation for this perpetual attitude of criticism that the critic is often generous, and always in intention just. One feels after all that the great majority of even distinguished and benevolent people will not bear being looked at all round in the hard white light of some one else's conscience; and it is difficult to see why we should inoculate ourselves with an indiscriminate appetite for truth.

In Miss Martineau the appetites for truth and justice were inbred together, and the narrative of her early years remind us more than once of Aristotle's profound saying, "That between friends there is no need of justice"-which implies that where the need of justice is felt upon one side or the other the parties can hardly be friends. The whole narrative of her youth is painful and instructive especially from its resemblance to what we know of the early life of great Catholic devotees. Of course there was one decisive difference. Miss Martineau did not inherit a tradition too vast and imposing to be easily criticised, so complex as to provide endless exercise for the intellect and imagination, and full of food for the emotions. Apart from this, the resemblance was very close: healthy natures develop many ways, and no two are really alike. The variety of healthy aptitudes and appetites is endless, and so is the variety in their relative strength; but all strong natures which are inwardly diseased, and yet have no perverted impulses, are marked with a common seal. They have no rest within, they are driven to aspiration; they have no natural spontaneous adequate activity, and all contact with their surroundings is a torture to them. They are full of fears and yearnings, and their inner life, uncomfortable as it is, appears to them from the first the true life, the only life from which they have any hope. And when at last the outer life, after many struggles, attains its due development, it is the translation of the inner; while to most the inner life on earth is little more than a very broken series of fleeting idealized reflections of the outer.

Harriet Martineau was born at Norwich, June 12, 1802, the sixth of a family of eight. Her father was a manufac

turer, a cadet of a line of Huguenot surgeons who had flourished at Norwich ever since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; her mother, who seems to have entered more into her life, was English. Both were conscientious and indefatigable in providing for their children's good, but they held in its extremest form the old-fashioned theory that children must be brought up to fall into place as they can, and that their convenience matters less than their elders', which could not but make the impression of constant injustice on a sensitive child. Even now children who are brought up with a large measure of the "cheerful tenderness" which Harriet Martineau desiderated, if they are at all precociously clear-headed, find it impossible to acquiesce in the judgment of their elders, who have to manage them as they can without understanding them. One, perhaps the most serious, of Miss Martineau's infant troubles was certainly within the reach of better knowledge. She suffered horribly from indigestion until she was considered old enough to have tea for breakfast, and throughout life milk disagreed with her; but milk was the traditional food for children, and she had to live upon it till she was thirteen. From eight to thirteen, though a resolute child, she was never able to keep her resolution to spend a single day without crying. Her Aunt Kentish, whom she learnt to know and love at Bristol at the age of sixteen, was the first person of whom she was not afraid. And her fear was as much of things as of persons. A clock whose wooden hammer she could see fall before she heard the stroke, was awful enough to make her miserable for months. A dream which ended in nothing more alarming than her seeing her mother break sugar and give her a lump, was at the time a source of yet acuter terror. She found endless difficulties in getting out of bed, in taking medicine, in speaking to a stranger-all forms of the distressing malady which is commonly called shyness, from the symptom that is noticed first. She never asked for sympathy; she was too shy; and besides, she was convinced that nobody cared for her-except God, of whom she was never afraid. She had the constant desire to kill herself and go to heaven, and force people to care for her. It was

not only vindictiveness or misery which made her religious. At the age of two or three she used to preach to whoever would listen, "Never ky for trifles," "Dooty first, and pleasure afterwards." She had an instinctive veneration for ministers, and a craving for notice from them, which survived for more than fifty years, though she had long convinced herself that the character and judgment of the professional teacher of religion were decidedly rather below than above the average. Her religion soothed her feelings long before it influenced her conduct; she confessed her faults and felt forgiven, and compensated her utter want of self-respect by supposing that her sufferings proved her a favorite of the Heavenly Father. This feeling grew upon her till she got into a habit of castle-building about sufferings and sacrifices, as children who are at ease and less active than they should be, build castles about imaginary pleasures and successes. The habit is in most cases a wasteful one, and Miss Martineau judged herself very severely for it. She thought, which is likely enough, that it brought on her deafness rather earlier. The deafness was probably the result of the same constitutional weakness which kept her all her life without the sense of smell and made her lose the sense of taste very early. Perhaps a more important result of her castle-building was to exhaust all that was unpractical in her imagination and leave her free, when her mind had found its appropriate activity, to fix her whole attention upon limited rational aims.

It was not for want of endeavor that her religion did not bear practical fruit in her childhood. At the age of eight she took herself in hand seriously, stimulated by the example of Ann Turner, a friend of her own age who came to stay at Norwich. But she found then, and the experience was destined to become familiar, that her direct efforts at selfimprovement and self-management had less effect than putting herself under the operation of favorable influences. The observation is a striking proof of her religious genius; nothing marks the difference between the saintly and the secular temper more clearly than that to the one righteousness is a gift, to the other virtue is a heritage or a conquest. To the truly

religious, the value of self-discipline is that it increases the capacity of " corresponding to grace," and it is not unlikely that the constant effort of aspiration and the constant baffled struggle after self-control did more than Miss Martineau recognizes to prepare her for her opportunities as they came. The first was much enforced companionship with a crippled child, a discipline of patience against which she never murmured, though she felt the strain. She may have borne the discipline the better because on all personal subjects she was naturally reticent. She never spoke of her troubles or perplexities, and actually remained up to the age of nineteen under a latent impression that a "spring gun was painted pea-green, and only used in spring," having seen the word as a child, and having guessed at the meaning instead of asking it. The only direction in which she could break through the shyness which long continued to grow on her, was to ask visitors for a maxim, which she copied into a little volume, her earliest attempt at bookmaking.

In her early years Norwich was at the height of its self-decreed literary reputation as the Athens of England, and she was favorably placed for profiting by such advantages as Norwich had to bestow; her mother had the entrée of the literary suppers, and despised their frequenters. Although such literary coteries are hotbeds of conceit and false pretension, one is almost inclined to regret their suppression. The centralisation of intellectual activity in the capital makes serious ra tional reflection in one's own and one's neighbor's affairs increasingly difficult. People try to follow the general movement of ideas, and find it harder and harder to keep their footing on their own ground, and to form opinions with deliberate attention upon their own experience, which opinions, if carefully formed, are precisely the kind which are most comfortable to the holder, and most serviceable to the community, and most easily improved by further knowledge. It was no misfortune to Miss Martineau to be brought up in a circle where every one who had any power of thinking or speaking tried it, without having to solve the preliminary question whether it was adequate to deal with the universe. Nor was it a misfortune that her domestic

training was rather hard; if she had been better understood she would probably have missed the mastery of all household matters on which she lived to congratulate herself; for she had no natural aptitude for them, she mastered them methodically, learning first what had to be done, and then painfully practising how to do it, and this discipline she would have escaped had she not been tasked as harshly by her mother as by her own conscience. A discriminating and sympathetic treatment would have recognised prematurely that she was naturally unfit for these things, and fit for something better. But though she regretted what was the fault of her constitution as though it had been the fault of her training, she valued as it deserved the teaching she received at Norwich and at Bristol, and was grateful for the consideration with which she was sent to the latter place. With strong affections she was never happy at home, and in her girlhood she was more than unhappy; she was in a state in which almost everything had to be broken to her, partly because she was apt to object, and partly because she was so hypersensitive that everything wounded her. At Bristol she was comparatively at ease, and was considered one of the good and clever girls of the school, and when she came home she was both laughed at and respected for her extreme conscientiousness. This was fostered by the influence of Dr. Carpenter the elder, who, under very uncongenial circumstances, cultivated the ascetic and sacerdotal temper, and succeeded in inoculating her with asceticism, which expressed itself in sabbatarianism and a ferocious. economy of time.

Her literary life began early with contributions to the Monthly Repository, then edited by Mr. Aspland, when her maiden efforts so moved her eldest brother that he called her "dear" for the first time, and exhorted her to leave other women to darn stockings. Her first considerable work was a collection of devotions for young persons, which one is rather surprised to find had lost its meaning and interest for her in the few years which passed between the first edition and the second. It is a favorable specimen of the attempt which all denominations were then making to talk themselves into piety and earnestness.

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