has recorded all the slights and severities of her youth? Not that we think Miss Martineau to have been much worse off than other children of her day; but as she has chosen with signal ill-taste to revenge herself upon her family in her autobiography, we have at least a better opportunity of knowing all about it. "To one person," she writes, "I was indeed habitually untruthful, from fear. To my mother I would in my childhood assert or deny anything that would bring me through most easily,"—a confession which, to say the least, reflects as little to her own credit as to her parent's. Had Mrs. Martineau been as stern an upholder of the truth as was Mrs. Wesley, her daughter would have ventured upon very few fabrications in her presence. When she tells us gravely how often she meditated suicide in these early days, we are fain to smile at hearing a fancy so common among morbid and imaginative children narrated soberly in middle life, as though it were a unique and horrible experience. No one endowed by nature with so copious a fund of self-sympathy could ever have stood in need of much pity from the outside world.
