they begin to grow hideous with age, and to transfuse it into new forms of beauty, which we may love without fear and without disgust. She comes to relieve us from our hag-ridden state, and to bring about us forms as fresh as the morning, and as beautiful as the Spring.”
It was between the publication of “Eastern Life” and her letters to Atkinson that Miss Martineau wrote and published her most elaborate and voluminous work, the “History of the Thirty Years’ Peace,” in four volumes, of which a late editorial in the Chicago Evening Journal remarks; "Nowhere else can so fair, so intelligent, and so accurate an account of men and measures in English history be found.” Apart from her other writings, this work alone would have placed Miss Martineau’s name in the front rank of the English writers of to-day.
That she still held firmly to her atheistical opinions was clearly shown by the appearance, in 1853, of her translation and
