eed, intellectually,
one of the most remarkable women who have exhibited themselves to the
world. She was not delicate, she was not graceful, or imaginative, or
aesthetic, or some of the other pretty things that literary ladies are
expected to be; but she was extraordinarily vigorous; she had a great
understanding--a great reason. She gives, intellectually, a great
impression of force. She was a really heroic worker, a genuine
philosopher, and she made her mark upon her time. Her reader's last
feeling about her is that she was thoroughly respectable. He will have
had incidental feelings of a less genial kind; he will have been
irritated at the coarseness of some of her judgments and the
complacency of some of her claims; at her evident want of tact and
repose; at a disposition to which he will even permit himself, perhaps,
to apply the epithet of meddlesome. But he will have a strong sense of
Miss Martineau's care for great things--her sustained desire, prompting
her always to production of some kind, to help along and enlighten the
human race. She was a combatant, and the whole force of her nature
prompted her to discussion. Such natures cannot afford to be
delicate--to be easily bruised and scratched; neither can they afford
to have that speculative cast of fancy which wastes valuable time in
scruples that are possibly superfluous and questions that are possibly
vain. In spite of any such apologetic view of her disposition as may be
put forth, however, it is probable that Miss Martineau's autobiography
will give offence enough. She speaks out her mind with complete
frankness upon most of the persons that she has known, subject to the
single condition of her book being published after her death. Of its
being postponed until the death of the objects of her criticism we hear
nothing, though this would have been more to the point. Miss Martineau
deals out disapproval with so liberal a hand, that among those persons
concerned who are still living much resentment and disgust must
inevitably ensue. Downright and vigorous as she is in spirit, there is
no mistaking the degree of her censure, and as (whatever else she may
be) she is not a flippant writer, it has every appearance of being
deliberate and premeditated. We do not pretend to decide upon the
propriety of her hard knocks, or to point out the particular cases in
which they might have been a little softer; but we cannot help saying
that there is something in Miss Martine