rsailles by a silly great
lady who had an infatuation for her. 'This,' the great lady kept saying,
'is the young person whom I have told you about, who is so wonderfully
intelligent, who knows so much. Come, Mademoiselle, pray talk. Now,
Madame, you will see how she talks. Well, first of all, now talk a
little about religion; then you can tell us about something else.'

We cannot wonder that Miss Martineau did not go a second time to the
house where Space might be the unprovoked theme of a casual chat.
Pretension in every shape she hated most heartily. Her judgments in most
cases were thoroughly just--at this period of her life at any rate--and
sometimes even unexpectedly kindly; and the reason is that she looked at
society through the medium of a strong and penetrating kind of common
sense, which is more often the gift of clever women than of clever men.
If she is masculine, she is, like Mrs. Colonel Poyntz, in one of
Bulwer's novels, 'masculine in a womanly way.' There is a real spirit of
ethical divination in some of her criticism of character. Take the
distinguished man whose name we have just written. 'There was Bulwer on
a sofa,' she says, 'sparkling and languishing among a set of female
votaries--he and they dizened out, perfumed, and presenting the nearest
picture to a seraglio to be seen on British ground--only the
indifference or hauteur of the lord of the harem being absent.' Yet this
disagreeable sight does not prevent her from feeling a cordial interest
in him, amidst any amount of vexation and pity for his weakness. 'He
seems to be a woman of genius inclosed by misadventure in a man's form.
He has insight, experience, sympathy, letters, power and grace of
expression, and an irrepressible impulse to utterance, and industry
which should have produced works of the noblest quality; and these have
been intercepted by mischiefs which may be called misfortune rather than
fault. His friendly temper, his generous heart, his excellent
conversation (at his best), and his simple manners (when he forgot
himself), have many a time 'left me mourning' that such a being should
allow himself to sport with perdition.' Those who knew most about Bulwer,
and who were most repelled by his terrible faults, will feel in this
page of Miss Martineau's the breath of social equity in which charity is
not allowed to blur judgment, nor moral disapproval to narrow, starve,
and discolour vision into lost possibilities of character. And we