oard."' Miss Martineau declined to carry
thrift to this ungracious extremity. She constantly had guests in her
house, and, if they were all like Charlotte Bronte, they enjoyed their
visits in spite of the arbitrary ways of their energetic hostess.

Her manner of life during these years is pleasant to contemplate;
cheerful, active, thoroughly wholesome. 'My habit,' she says, 'was to
rise at six and to take a walk, returning to my solitary breakfast at
half-past seven. My household orders were given for the day, and all
affairs settled out of doors and in by a quarter or half-past eight,
when I went to work, which I continued without interruption, except from
the post, till three o'clock or later, when alone. While my friend was
with me we dined at two, and that was of course the limit of my day's
work.' De Tocqueville, if we remember, never saw his guests until after
he had finished his morning's work, of which he had done six hours by
eleven o'clock. Schopenhauer was still more sensitive to the jar of
external interruption on that finely-tuned instrument, the brain, after
a night's repose, for it was as much as his housekeeper's place was
worth to allow either herself or any one else to appear to the
philosopher before midday. After the early dinner at Ambleside cottage
came little bits of neighbourly business, exercise, and so forth. 'It is
with singular alacrity that in winter evenings I light the lamp and
unroll my wool-work, and meditate or dream till the arrival of the
newspaper tells me that the tea has stood long enough. After tea, if
there was news from the seat of war, I called in my maids, who brought
down the great atlas and studied the chances of the campaign with me.
Then there was an hour or two for Montaigne, or Bacon, or Shakespeare,
or Tennyson, or some dear old biography.'

The only productions of this time worth mentioning are the _History of
the Thirty Years' Peace_ (1849) and the condensed version of Comte's
_Positive Philosophy_ (1853), both of them meritorious and useful pieces
of work, and both of them undertaken, as nearly all Miss Martineau's
work was, not from merely literary motives, but because she thought that
they would be meritorious and useful, and because nothing more useful
came into her head or under her hand at the moment. The condensation of
Comte is easy and rapid, and it is said by those who have looked very
closely into it to be hardly free from some too hasty renderings. It
mus