may
note in passing how even here, in the mere story of the men and women
whom she met in London drawing-rooms, Harriet Martineau does not lose
herself in gossip about individuals looked at merely in their individual
relations. It is not merely the 'blighting of promise nor the forfeiture
of a career' that she deplores in the case of a Bulwer or a Brougham; it
is 'the intercepting of national blessings.' If this view of natural
gifts as a source of blessing to society, and not merely of power or
fame to their privileged possessor, were more common than it is, the
impression which such a thought is calculated to make would be the
highest available protection against those blighted promises and
forfeited careers, of which Brougham and Bulwer were only two out of a
too vast host of examples.

It is the very fulness with which she is possessed by this large way of
conceiving a life in its manifold relations to the service of the world,
that is the secret of Harriet Martineau's firm, clear, calm, and almost
neutral way of judging both her own work and character and those of
others. By calm we do not mean that she was incapable of strong and
direct censure. Many of her judgments, both here and in her _Biographic
Sketches_, are stern; and some--like that on Macaulay, for instance--may
even pass for harsh. But they are never the product of mere anger or
heatedness, and it is a great blunder to suppose that reasoned severity
is incompatible with perfect composure, or that calm is another name for
amiable vapidity.

Thoericht ist's
In allen Stuecken billig sein; es heisst
Sein eigen Selbst zerstoeren.

Her condemnation of the Whigs, for example, is as stringent and
outspoken as condemnation can be; yet it is a deliberate and reasoned
judgment, not a mere bitterness or prejudice. The Whigs were at that
moment, between 1832 and 1834, at the height of their authority,
political, literary, and social. After a generation of misgovernment
they had been borne to power on the tide of national enthusiasm for
parliamentary reform, and for all those improvements in our national
life to which parliamentary reform was no more than the first step. The
harshness and darkness of the past generation were the measure of the
hopes of the new time. These hopes, which were at least as strong in
Harriet Martineau as in anybody then living, the Whigs were soon felt to
have cheated. She cannot forgive them. Speaking o