ttle farm of two acres, and
she gave them interesting and cheerful courses of lectures in the winter
evenings. All this time her eye was vigilant for the great affairs of
the world. In 1852 she began to write leading articles for the _Daily
News_, and in this department her industry and her aptitude were such
that at times she wrote as many as six leading articles in a week. When
she died, it was computed that she had written sixteen hundred. They are
now all dead enough, as they were meant to die, but they made an
impression that is still alive in its consequences upon some of the most
important social, political, and economical matters of five-and-twenty
important years. In what was by far the greatest of all the issues of
those years, the Civil War in the United States, Harriet Martineau's
influence was of the most inestimable value in keeping public opinion
right against the strong tide of ignorant Southern sympathies in this
country. If she may seem to some to have been less right in her views of
the Crimean War, we must admit that the issues were very complex, and
that complete assurance on that struggle is not easy to everybody even
at this distance of time.

To this period belong the Biographic Sketches which she contributed to a
London newspaper. They have since been collected in a single volume, now
in its fourth edition. They are masterpieces in the style of the
vignette. Their conciseness, their clearness in fact, their definiteness
in judgment, and above all, the rightly graduated impression of the
writer's own personality in the background, make them perfect in their
kind. There is no fretting away of the portrait in over-multiplicity of
lines and strokes. Here more than anywhere else Miss Martineau shows the
true quality of the writer, the true mark of literature, the sense of
proportion, the modulated sentence, the compact and suggestive phrase.
There is a happy precision, a pithy brevity, a condensed
argumentativeness. And this literary skill is made more telling by the
writer's own evident interest and sincerity about the real lives and
characters of the various conspicuous people with whom she deals. It may
be said that she has no subtle insight into the complexities of human
nature, and that her philosophy of character is rather too little
analytical, too downright, too content with averages of motive, and too
external. This is so in a general way, but it does not spoil the charm
of these sketches, b