Oh! bear me near the sounding fall, That pours with murmurs from the rock;

Beside me lay my harp and shell, And the shield which shelter'd my sires in war.

Come thou mildly over the deep,
O friendly gale! that movest slow;
And bear my shade upon thy wings,
With speed unto the Nobles' Isle.*

Where are the heroes that lived of
old,
Who, sleepless, listen to their songs?
Open your hall, Ossian and Dâlo;
By night the bard is no more!

But oh! before my shade depart
To the final abode of bards on high,
Give me once more my harp and
shell,

Then, loved harp and shell, adieu!

1.

2.

3.

4.

MISS MARTINEAU's name is very widely known-more widely, we think, than her works. Almost all those who have formed a judgment for themselves allow that she is a woman of genius, and we believe that her most bitter enemies have never raised a whisper against her personal character; yet among the better classes of society, and especially among women, her writings are looked upon with peculiar suspicion and dislike. Some part of her unpopularity she has no reason to regret; for she has incurred it knowingly, and must have been prepared for the malice and slander of the idolaters of almsgiving, or the pious promoters of pauper marriages: much of it has arisen from the systematic attacks which some of our contemporaries have long been in the habit of making upon her weak points, or even upon the pretended incon. gruity of her views with the assumed proprieties of her sex: but besides all this, there is a large residue of honest disapprobation to be accounted for, and we think that she has in most of her former works naturally provoked it, and in some justly incurred it.

In her first publication, Tales illustrative of Political Economy, Miss Martineau displayed a rare power of delineating character, and of presenting a succession of vivid and interesting pictures of the everyday occupations of life. Her skill in reducing to the concrete, the scientific propositions of Smith, Malthus, and Macculloch, showed that her ingenuity was as remarkable as her imagination; but there is a fundamental error in the attempt to combine creative art with instruction. We hope that most of her readers entered too heartily into the interest of her tales to tolerate the list of practical inferences, ὁ μυθος δηλοι's which she thought proper to append to each. Didactic poetry is no poetry except where it forgets to teach. The Georgics, of which the true subject is the praise of a country life, would form a perfect poem if it were possible to remove from them the agricultural precepts with which they are encumbered. The laws of supply and demand are peculiarly capable of being expressed in general formulæ, and proportionally liable to confusion when they are entangled with indivi

NO. CCXCII, VOL, XLVII,

dual cases. What should we say of Tales illustrative of the Rule of Three? They are not, indeed, mere fictions of the moment. Who does not rememberthe long and interesting statements of conditions which enlivened thearithmetic books of our childhood? the imaginary walls that were built by so many men in so many days, that other problematical walls, by help of more men, might be built in fewer days? above all, the ever-recurring horsedealer, who, at the rate of a farthing for the first nail in his horse's shoe, and a halfpenny for the second, realized we know not how many thousands, the established hero of geometrical progression? It is not, how. ever, for the sake of science that we deprecate the attempt to popularize it by representing it in practical operation. A tale of Miss Martineau's is worth more than many argumentative essays, and we regret that they should involve an error in their original conception. The scientific instruction which is conveyed by them is, after all, contained principally in the conversations, which the characters are more or less awkwardly made to hold with each other, on poor-laws, corn-duties, and currency restrictions-matters utterly inappropriate to fiction, as they are independent of individual feeling and character. In a good fiction every part ought to be objective to the writer, and subjective to the dramatis persona; the introduction of the absolutely objective places the hero in the same category with the author-that is, it makes him external to the plot. This rule is incontrovertible; but the converse of it is very often adopted in the practice of novelists. Sir Lytton Bulwer, for instance, constantly dwells upon reflections or feelings which are subjective to himself, and therefore external to his fictitious characters. Sir Walter Scott and Miss Austin seldom or never violate the rule. The most glaring examples of the absurdity of doctrinal fiction may be found in the theological volume of Tremaine, and in Sterne's publication of his sermons under the character of his own Yorick.

If, however, Miss Martineau had confined herself to the illustration of admitted or demonstrable propositions, none could have been offended, though some might have been tired; but, un

M

luckily, the questions on which she writes are in many cases still undecided; and it cannot be agreeable to a disputant who has enough to do in maintaining his ground against argument, to find his opinions dramatically personified in characters who are represented as combining every kind of meanness and folly with the primary crime of heretical illiberality. We think Miss Martineau in most of her politico-economical views clearly right, in a few utterly wrong; but we can conceive ourselves to have differed from her far more frequently, and are by no means flattered by the moral and intellectual character of the fictitious representatives whom she would in that case have assigned to us.

After all, the faults of the Tales are trifling in comparison with their great and varied excellencies; and we believe that the authoress would in a short time have outlived the partial dislike which they occasioned against her literary character. Her next work of importance had far graver faults and peculiarities, which made it more obnoxious to the higher classes of English society. She went to America with an evident determination to find good results, and to attribute them to the institutions, which, by an a priori process, she had already determined to be good. Now this was in itself no more than the spirit of partisanship in which Mrs Trollope idolized the paternal government of Austria, or the honest enthusiasm with which Lord Londonderry admired the parades and jewels of the Czar. We might regret that Miss Martineau should so far diminish the weight of her authority; but we could not deny that her opinions, however hastily adopted, were in themselves natural and plausible. But, unfortunately, there runs through all her eulogies of America, a meaning bitterness which shows that she delights in preferring it to England. We will not enter on the vast question of the relative superiority of the two countries: let her retain her opinion; it is not ours; and we might perhaps claim some toleration for doubts as to the prospects of America, which were felt by Niebuhr, which are admitted by De Tocqueville, which are almost universal among educated Englishmen, and which seem on her own showing to spread in America itself, wherever knowledge and refinement extend. We are sorry that

Nation

Miss Martineau should be intolerant, but we blame her for being anti-national: on this point we can listen to no argument. If England were the meanest of nations, it would be our duty to abide by her, to borrow institutions, if necessary, from America or from Japan, but not to speak of her with contempt or with alienation. Σπαρτην έλαχες, ταυτην κοσμει. ality is too sacred a thing for sophistry or speculation. England is more to us than any theory of despotism or pantisocracy, and we have no right to make our patriotism dependent on the improbable casualty that our government should embody ideal perfection, When Miss Martineau gives a zest to her six volumes by sneers directed against her country, and even hunts out stray instances of steam-boat rudeness, for the purpose of showing that the perpetrators were Englishmen, we think that her opponents are excusable for some warmth of criticism, and her admirers for disapproval and regret.

In

But of all her work on America, the most objectionable part was the inconsiderate chapter on religion. She advocates no particular sect or class of opinions, but an unbounded indifferentism to all-a many-coloured heresy for the sake of heresy. formertimes heresy was like treason, "when it prospered, no one called it" heresy; but Miss Martineau has discovered that its spread in all directions is a proof of the advance of truth. We are satisfied that she is historically wrong: schism has often proceeded from religious earnestness, but multifarious refinements of belief never-the sophists of Socrates' time were essentially heretics, but they cared too little about the truths they undermined to become separatists-the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Socinians of the 16th century were indeed heretics to each other, and to the church which they left; but their primary object was never to establish speculative propositions, but to form for themselves a saving rule of faith, The meaning of this loose phraseology must be collected from the general views of religion which accompany it. The clergy of all denominations are attacked-hopes of a new reformation are expressed, and every kind of fixed institution is considered as pernicious, (which impedes the separation of the pure spiritual essence of Christianity from its outward forms and symbols.