wn in educing her intellectual faculties than in
cultivating her affections. She learned French and music thoroughly, and
attained to such proficiency in the classics that she could not only
write Latin but think in Latin. She took a great delight in reading,
and, of course, read omnivorously, with a special preference for
history, poetry, and politics. Her inquisitive and abnormally active
mind early began its inquiries into the mysteries of religious faith,
but as these were not conducted in a patient or reverent spirit, it is
no wonder, perhaps, that they proved unsatisfactory. She got hold of the
works of Dugald Stewart, Hartley, and Priestley; plunged boldly into the
maze of metaphysics, and grappled unhesitatingly with the mysterious
subjects of fore-knowledge and free-will. But in philosophy as in
religion, her immense egotism led her astray. She accepted nothing for
the existence of which she could not account by causes intelligible to
her own mind. Naturally she became a Necessarian, and adopted
strenuously the dogma of the invariable and inevitable action of fixed
laws. We may be allowed, perhaps, to think of this singular woman as
yearning and aspiring after a lofty ideal throughout a sensitive and
timorous childhood; and in wayward musings and visionary reflections
finding that consolation which should have been, but was not, provided
by maternal love. As she grew older, and grew stronger both in mind and
body, she grew bolder; aspiration gave way to self-satisfied conviction.
Morbid self-reproach was replaced by an extravagant self-consciousness,
and thenceforth she went on her solitary way, acting up always to a high
standard of moral rectitude, but putting aside the faiths and hopes and
judgments of the many as baubles beneath the notice of a mature and
well-balanced intellect.

Her tastes for literary pursuits she has herself ascribed to the extreme
delicacy of her health in childhood; to the infirmity of deafness,
which, while not so complete as to debar her from all social
intercourse, yet compelled her to seek occupations and pleasures not
dependent upon others; and to the affection which subsisted between her
and the brother nearest her own age, the Rev. James Martineau, so well
known for his fine intellectual powers. The death of the father having
involved the family in the discomfort of narrow circumstances, the pen
she had hitherto wielded for amusement she took up with the view of
gaining an inde