especially as 'full of affectations and preachments.' Their only
service, and it was not inconsiderable, was the information which they
circulated as to the condition of slavery and of the country under it.
We do not suppose that they are worth reading at the present day, except
from a historical point of view. But they are really good specimens of a
kind of literature which is not abundant, and yet which is of the utmost
value--we mean the record of the sociological observation of a country
by a competent traveller, who stays long enough in the country, has
access to the right persons of all kinds, and will take pains enough to
mature his judgments. It was a happy idea of O'Connell's to suggest that
she should go over to Ireland, and write such an account of that country
as she had written of the United States. And we wish at this very hour
that some one as competent as Miss Martineau would do what O'Connell
wished her to do. A similar request came to her from Milan: why should
she not visit Lombardy, and then tell Europe the true tale of Austrian
rule?

But after her American journey Miss Martineau felt a very easily
intelligible desire to change the literary field. For many years she had
been writing almost entirely about fact: and the constraint of the
effort to be always correct, and to bear without solicitude the
questioning of her correctness, had become burdensome. She felt the
danger of losing nerve and becoming morbidly fearful of criticism on
the one hand, and of growing narrow and mechanical about accuracy on the
other. 'I longed inexpressibly,' she says, 'for the liberty of fiction,
while occasionally doubting whether I had the power to use that freedom
as I could have done ten years before.' The product of this new mental
phase was _Deerbrook_, which was published in the spring of 1839.
_Deerbrook_ is a story of an English country village, its petty feuds,
its gentilities, its chances and changes of fortune. The influence of
Jane Austen's stories is seen in every chapter; but Harriet Martineau
had none of the easy flow, the pleasant humour, the light-handed irony
of her model, any more than she had the energetic and sustained
imaginative power of Charlotte or Emily Bronte. There is playfulness
enough in _Deerbrook_, but it is too deliberate to remind us of the
crooning involuntary playfulness of _Pride and Prejudice_ or _Sense and
Sensibility_. _Deerbrook_ is not in the least a story with a moral; it
is