484 HARRIET MARTINEAU. his nephew, Trevelyan, " no head." Lord Althorp was " one of nature's graziers.; " Lord Brougham was a creat- ure obscene and treacherous ; Earl Russell and the whole Whig party were a set of conceited incapables ; Thack- eray, the satirist of snobs, was himself a snob; N. P. Willis, a lying dandy; Eastlake an artist of "limited" understanding; and so she deals out her terrible gossip, which might have been harmless enough spoken at a tea- table to a confidential friend, but was not proper to be printed during the lifetime of the individuals named, nor during the lifetime of their immediate descendants. Things go by contraries in this world. We often find high Tories who, in their practical dealings with their fellow-men, are perfectly democratic ; and it is well known that some of the most positive democrats this country has ever produced have been, in their personal demeanor, haughty and inhuman. It is much the same with philan- thropists and misanthropists. A person may snarl at mankind in a book and be the soul of kindness in his own circle, and he may deluge the world with benevolent "gush," without having learned to be agreeable or good- tempered in his own home. Miss Martineau, however, has been to no one so unjust as to herself; for she has not had the art to make her readers feel and realize the disadvantages under which she labored. She was deaf; she had no sense of smell, and only a very imperfect sense of taste. She could hear, it is true, by the aid of a trumpet, but she was cut off from all that higher, easier, constant intercourse with her kind which people enjoy who rarely know what silence is, and who hear human speech of some kind at almost every moment when they are awake. And she had a childhood which disarms censure. During the first thirty years of her life, she scarcely enjoyed one day of health or peace, all in consequence of her mother's neglect. The child,
