we believe, a sort of focus of this amiable form of Dissent), she
passed, with her advance in life, from a precocious and morbid youthful
piety to the furthest limits of skepticism. The story is an interesting
one, and it forms both the first and the last note that she strikes; but
we doubt whether (even among persons as little "theological" as herself)
her reflections on this subject will serve to exemplify her judgment at
its best. Her skepticism is too dogmatic and her whole attitude toward
the "superstition" she has cast off too much marked by a small eagerness
for formulas in the opposite direction, and a narrow complacency in the
act of ventilating her negations. She cannot keep her hands off
affirmations about a future state, and she lacks that imaginative
feeling (so indispensable in all this matter) which suggests that the
completest form of the liberty which she claims as against her
theological education is tacit suspension of judgment. In general Miss
Martineau is certainly not superficial, but here, in feeling, she is.
This however is the penalty of having been narrowly theological in one's
earlier years; it always leaves a bad trace somewhere, especially in
reaction. The chapters in which Miss Martineau describes these early
years are admirable; they place before us most vividly the hard
conditions of her childish life, and they describe with singular
psychological minuteness the unfolding of her character and the growth
of her impressions. They have a remarkable candor, and it certainly
cannot be said that the author's portrait of her youthful self is a
flattered one. We doubt whether, except Rousseau, any autobiographer
ever had the courage to accuse himself of so ungraceful a fault as
infant miserliness. "I certainly was very close," says Miss Martineau,
"all my childhood and youth." Her account of the circumstances which led
to and accompanied her first steps in literature, of the first money she
earned (she was in sore need of it), and of the growth of her form and
development of her powers, and her confidence in them--all this is
extremely real, touching, and interesting. She succeeded almost from the
first, but her success was the result of an amount of unaided exertion
which excites our wonder. What fairly launched her was the publication
of her "Tales in Illustration of Political Economy," and there was
something really heroic in the way that as a poor young woman with
"views" of her own and withou