ists between noble souls, in spite of diversity in ideas--in what
Carlyle calls "the logical outcome" of the faculties. This "Life of
Sterling" is a touching monument of the capability human nature possesses
of the highest love, the love of the good and beautiful in character,
which is, after all, the essence of piety. The style of the work, too,
is for the most part at once pure and rich; there are passages of deep
pathos which come upon the reader like a strain of solemn music, and
others which show that aptness of epithet, that masterly power of close
delineation, in which, perhaps, no writer has excelled Carlyle.

We have said that we think this second "Life of Sterling" justified by
the first; but were it not so, the book would justify itself.

II. WOMAN IN FRANCE: MADAME DE SABLE. {31}

In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library
entirely composed of works written by women, in various languages, and
this library amounted to nearly 32,000 volumes. We will not hazard any
conjecture as to the proportion of these volumes which a severe judge,
like the priest in Don Quixote, would deliver to the flames, but for our
own part, most of these we should care to rescue would be the works of
French women. With a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine
literature is made up of books which could have been better written by
men--books which have the same relation to literature is general, as
academic prize poems have to poetry: when not a feeble imitation, they
are usually an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the
swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire. Few English women have
written so much like a woman as Richardson's Lady G. Now we think it an
immense mistake to maintain that there is no sex in literature. Science
has no sex: the mere knowing and reasoning faculties, if they act
correctly, must go through the same process, and arrive at the same
result. But in art and literature, which imply the action of the entire
being, in which every fibre of the nature is engaged, in which every
peculiar modification of the individual makes itself felt, woman has
something specific to contribute. Under every imaginable social
condition, she will necessarily have a class of sensations and
emotions--the maternal ones--which must remain unknown to man; and the
fact of her comparative physical weakness, which, however it may have
been exaggerated by a vicious civilizatio