while
holding forth serenity as the greatest good within the reach of man; but
he has nevertheless infused into the mind of the English nation a
sincerity, earnestness, healthfulness, and courage which can be
appreciated only by those who are old enough to tell what was our
morbid state when Byron was the representative of our temper, the
Clapham church of our religion, and the rotten-borough system of our
political morality.' We have no quarrel with this account of the
greatest man of letters of our generation. But Carlyle has only been one
influence among others. It is a far cry indeed from _Sartor Resartus_ to
the _Tracts for the Times_, yet they were both of them protests against
the same thing, both of them attempted answers to the same problem, and
the _Tracts_ perhaps did more than _Sartor_ to quicken spiritual life,
to shatter 'the Clapham church,' and to substitute a mystic faith and
not unlovely hope for the frigid, hard, and mechanical lines of official
orthodoxy on the one hand, and the egotism and sentimental despair of
Byronism on the other. There is a third school, too, and Harriet
Martineau herself was no insignificant member of it, to which both the
temper and the political morality of our time have owed a deep debt; the
school of those utilitarian political thinkers who gave light rather
than heat, and yet by the intellectual force with which they insisted on
the right direction of social reform, also stirred the very impulse
which made men desire social reform. The most illustrious of this body
was undoubtedly John Mill; because to accurate political science he
added a fervid and vibrating social sympathy, and a power of quickening
it in the best minds of a scientific turn. It is odd, by the way, that
Miss Martineau, while so lavish in deserved panegyric on Carlyle,
should be so grudging and disparaging in the case of Mill, with whom her
intellectual affinities must have been closer than with any other of her
contemporaries. The translator of Comte's _Positive Philosophy_ had
better reasons than most people for thinking well of the services of the
author of the _System of Logic_: it was certainly the latter book which
did more than any other to prepare the minds of the English philosophic
public for the former.

It is creditable to Miss Martineau's breadth of sympathy that she should
have left on record the tribute of her admiration for Carlyle, for
nobody has written so harshly as Carlyle on the subj