ation or
invention in a high sense there is not a trace. Such a quality was not
in the gifts of the writer, nor could it in any case have worked within
such limitations as those set by the matter and the object of the
series.

Literary success was followed in the usual order by social temptation.
Miss Martineau removed from Norwich to London, and she had good reasons
for making the change. Her work dealt with matters of a political kind,
and she could only secure a real knowledge of what was best worth saying
by intercourse with those who had a better point of view for a survey of
the social state of England than could be found in a provincial town
like Norwich. So far as evening parties went, Miss Martineau soon
perceived how little 'essential difference there is between the extreme
case of a cathedral city and that of literary London, or any other
place, where dissipation takes the turn of book-talk instead of dancing
or masquerading.' She went out to dinner every night except Sundays, and
saw all the most interesting people of the London of five-and-forty
years ago. While she was free from presumptuousness in her judgments,
she was just as free from a foolish willingness to take the reputations
of her hour on trust. Her attitude was friendly and sensible, but it was
at the same time critical and independent; and that is what every frank,
upright, and sterling character naturally becomes in face of an
unfamiliar society. Harriet Martineau was too keen-sighted, too aware of
the folly and incompetent pretension of half the world, too consciously
self-respecting and proud, to take society and its ways with any
diffidence or ingenuous simplicity. On the importance of the small
_litterateur_ who unreasonably thinks himself a great one, on the airs
and graces of the gushing blue-stockings who were in vogue in that day,
on the detestable vulgarity of literary lionising, she had no mercy. She
recounts with caustic relish the story about a certain pedantical lady,
of whom Tierney had said that there was not another head in England that
could encounter hers on the subject of Cause and Effect. The story was
that when in a country house one fine day she took her seat in a window,
saying in a business-like manner (to David Ricardo): 'Come now, let us
have a little discussion about Space.' We remember a story about a
certain Mademoiselle de Launay, afterwards well known to the Paris of
the eighteenth century, being introduced at Ve