ork. As she became less religious she
became more superstitious, and indulged in curious crazes. She lived
latterly at the Lakes, and died on 27th June 1876. Harriet Martineau was
the object of rather absurd obloquy from Conservative critics as an
advanced woman in her day, and of still more absurd eulogy by Liberal
sympathisers both in that day and since. Personally she seems to have
been amiable and estimable enough. Intellectually she had no genius; but
she had a good deal of the versatile talent and craftsmanship for which
the literary conditions of this century have produced unusual stimulus
and a fair reward.

There was something (though not so much as has been represented) of the
masculine element about Miss Martineau; a contemporary Miss M. was
delightfully feminine. Mary Russell Mitford, born at Alresford, the town
of Wither, on 16th December 1786, was the daughter of a doctor and a
rascal, who, when she was a child, had the incredible meanness to
squander twenty thousand pounds which she won in a lottery, and later
the constant courage to live on her earnings. She published poems as
early as 1810; then wrote plays which were acted with some success; and
later, gravitating to the _London Magazine_, wrote for it essays only
second to those of Elia--the delightful papers collectively called _Our
Village_, and not completed till long after the death of the _London_ in
1832. The scenery of these is derived from the banks of the Loddon, for
the neighbourhood of Reading was in various places her home, and she
died at Swallowfield on 10th January 1855. Latterly she had a civil-list
pension; but, on the whole, she supported herself and her parents by
writing. Not much, if anything, of her work is likely to survive except
_Our_ _Village_; but this is charming, and seems, from the published
_Life_ of her and the numerous references in contemporary biography, to
express very happily the character and genius of its author--curiously
sunny, healthy, and cheerful, not in the least namby-pamby, and
coinciding with a faculty of artistic presentation of observed results,
not very imaginative but wonderfully pleasing.

To these authors and books, others of more or less "single-speech" fame
might be added: the vivid and accurate Persian tale of _Hajji Baba_ by
James Morier, the _Anastatius_ of Thomas Hope, excellently written and
once very much admired, the fashionable _Granby_ and _Tremaine_ of
Lister, the famous _Frankenstein_