elevated, and too
large and generous, to be commonplace; a splendid sincerity, a
magnificent love of truth. And that all these fine qualities, which
would mostly be described as manly, should exist not in a man but a
woman, and in a woman who discharged admirably such feminine duties as
fell to her, fills up the measure of our interest in such a character.

* * * * *

Harriet Martineau was born at Norwich in 1802, and she died, as we all
remember, in the course of the summer of 1876. Few people have lived so
long as three-quarters of a century, and undergone so little substantial
change of character, amid some very important changes of opinion. Her
family was Unitarian, and family life was in her case marked by some of
that stiffness, that severity, that chilly rigour, with which Unitarians
are sometimes taxed by religionists of a more ecstatic doctrine. Her
childhood was very unhappy; the household seems to have been unamiable,
and she was treated with none of that tenderness and sympathy for which
firm and defiant natures are apt to yearn as strongly as others that get
the credit of greater sensibility. With that singular impulse to suicide
which is frequent among children, though rarer with girls than boys, she
went one day into the kitchen for the carving-knife, that she might cut
her throat; luckily the servants were at dinner, and the child
retreated. Deafness, which proved incurable, began to afflict her
before she was sixteen. A severe, harsh, and mournful kind of
religiosity seized her, and this 'abominable spiritual rigidity,' as she
calls it, confirmed all the gloomy predispositions of her mind. She
learned a good deal, mastering Latin, French, and Italian in good time;
and reading much in her own tongue, including constant attention to the
Bible, with all sorts of commentaries and explanations, such as those of
us who were brought up in a certain spiritual atmosphere have only too
good reasons never to forget. This expansion of intellectual interest,
however, did not make her less silent, less low in her spirits, less
full of vague and anxious presentiment. The reader is glad when these
ungracious years of youth are at an end, and the demands of active life
stirred Harriet Martineau's energies into vigorous work.

In 1822 her father died, and seven years later his widow and his
daughters lost at a single blow nearly all that they had in the world.
Before this even