d lands and dim cradles of the race. All is sterling and real;
we are aware that the elevated reflection and the meditative stroke are
not due to mere composition, but did actually pass through her mind as
the suggestive wonders passed before her eyes. And hence there is no jar
as we find a little homily on the advantage of being able to iron your
own linen on a Nile boat, followed by a lofty page on the mighty pair of
solemn figures that gaze as from eternity on time amid the sand at
Thebes. The whole, one may say again, is sterling and real, both the
elevation and the homeliness. The student of the history of opinion may
find some interest in comparing Miss Martineau's work with the famous
book, _Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires_, in which
Volney, between fifty and sixty years before, had drawn equally
dissolvent conclusions with her own from the same panorama of the dead
ages. Perhaps Miss Martineau's history is not much better than Volney's,
but her brisk sense is preferable to Volney's high _a priori_
declamation and artificial rhetoric.

Before starting for the East, Miss Martineau had settled a new plan of
life for herself, and built a little house where she thought she could
best carry her plan out. To this little house she returned, and it
became her cherished home for the long remainder of her days. London,
during the years of her first success, had not been without its usual
attractions to the new-comer, but she had always been alive to the
essential incompleteness, the dispersion, the want of steadfast
self-collection, in a life much passed in London society. And we may
believe that the five austere and lonely years at Tynemouth, with their
evening outlook over the busy waters of the harbour-bar into the stern
far-off sea, may have slowly bred in her an unwillingness to plunge
again into the bustling triviality, the gossip, the distracting
lightness of the world of splendid fireflies. To have discerned the Pale
Horse so near and for so long a space awakens new moods, and strangely
alters the old perspectives of our life. Yet it would imply a
misunderstanding of Harriet Martineau's character to suppose that she
turned her back upon London, and built her pretty hermitage at
Ambleside, in anything like the temper of Jean Jacques Rousseau. She was
far too positive a spirit for that, and far too full of vivid and
concentrated interest in men and their doings. It would be unjust to
think of Har