au's general attitude toward
individuals which inspires one with a certain mistrust. She was
evidently always judging and always uttering judgments. Her business in
life was to have opinions and to promulgate them, and as objects of
opinion she seems to have regarded persons very much as she regarded
abstract ideas--attributing to them an equal unconsciousness of
denunciation. This eagerness to qualify her fellow members of society
would have been perhaps a great virtue if Miss Martineau's powers of
observation had been of extraordinary fineness; but in spite of an
occasional very happy hit, we hardly think this to have been the case.
Sometimes, evidently, she went straight to the point, and often,
independently of the justice of her appreciation, this is expressed
with an extremely vigorous neatness. But frequently her descriptions of
people strike us as both harsh and superficial, and more especially as
_heated_, even after the lapse of years. She goes out of her way to
pronounce very unflattering verdicts upon men and women who have
apparently had little more connection with her life than that they have
been her contemporaries. This is apart from the rightful spirit of an
autobiography, which, it seems to us, should deal only with people who
have been real factors in the writer's life. The latter pages of Miss
Martineau's first volume contain a series of portraits, some brief,
some more extended, of which it must be said that their very incisive
lines make them extremely entertaining. Miss Martineau's style is
always excellent for strength and fulness of meaning, and at times she
has a real genius for terseness. Lord Campbell "was wonderfully like
the present Lord; was facetious, in and out of place; politic;
flattering to an insulting degree, and prone to moralizing in so trite
a way as to be almost as insulting." That has almost the condensation
of Saint-Simon. There is a very vivid, satirical portrait in this same
chapter of a certain Lady Stepney, who wrote silly novels of the
"fashionable" type which Thackeray burlesqued, and boasted that she
received L700 a piece for them; and there are sketches of Campbell,
Bulwer, Landseer, and various other persons, which if they are wanting
in graciousness, are not wanting in spirit. Miss Martineau gives _in
extenso_ her opinion of Macaulay, and a very low opinion it seems to
be. It is, however, very much the verdict of time--save in regard to
the "dreary indolence" of which