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result-the lifelong estrangement of brother and sister.

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Pursuing the same path, undeterred by the indignant remonstrances of her friends, and apparently without any misgivings, Miss Martineau published, in 1853, a translation of Comte's Philosophie Positive, the literary merits of which won the highest praise, not only from English critics, but from the philosopher himself, as adding, by its extreme transparency of language, and its masterly re-arrangement and condensation of matter, considerable value to the original work. Her connection with the Daily News began in 1852 and lasted to the end of her life. For several years she wrote for this paper as many as six articles a week: altogether her contributions number sixteen hundred certainly a surprising mass of work, remembering that, for the most part, it was accomplished under sentence of death. In 1854 her health again broke down; she was discovered to be suffering from enlargement of the heart, and warned that death might take place at any moment. She survived this intimation, however, nearly two-and-twenty years: yet, though often during this period brought down to the very edge of the grave, she never seems to have faltered in her unbelief. When not paralyzed by suffering, she was busy with her pen, training her domestics, and devising benevolent plans for her neighbours and friends: for the rest, her account is that she was 'free from anxiety of every kind, and amused by the constant interest of regarding life and its affairs from the verge of the horizon of existence.'

In attempting a summary of the character of this remarkable woman

it may be confessed that she remains a phenomenon; for that a woman with so many fine moral qualities should deliberately and obstinately separate herself and her conduct from the thought of God, and the life to come, is a fact almost as strange as it is sad. We frankly and heartily recognize and admire the noble aspects of her life in its purely human relations: her sympathy with the oppressed and suffering, her independence and courage, her unselfishness in public affairs, her unfailing industry, her care for and submission to her imperious mother, her cheerful patience under protracted suffering. These qualities in her might well rebuke many a one whose creed includes all the obligations of the Christian religion. On the other hand, her character was defective on the sensitive side: she never knew, could never have known, a great love or a great sorrow. Her isolation in early years led to excessive self-reliance in later life, until her independence became arrogance. We have already noticed a hardness in her judgment of others; there was also a glorying in her strength and a love of power that alienated her from the meekness and lowliness of Christ. Yet it is no wonder, considering her beneficent diligence, and the ardour and selfsacrifice with which she followed Duty, that Nathanael Hawthorne should refuse to credit her own protestations of disbelief in God and immortality, and should exclaim : 'And this woman is said to be atheistical ! I will not think so, were it only for her sake. What! only a few weeds to spring out of her mortality, instead of her intellect and sympathies flowering and fruiting for ever!'

EDITORIAL NOTE.

As the modesty of the able writer of the foregoing article has induced

him to occupy so much less space than was due to his subject and his

own power of treating it, it seems right to append a few supplementary observations; especially as another autobiography like that of Harriet, Martineau cannot appear during the present generation at least. Besides, the reviews of such a book as this, as indicating the moral and spiritual tone of the more cultivated mind of the country, are quite as important as the volume itself; and to notice these did not come within the plan of Mr. Vine's Paper.

It is plain from the comments of the leading secular journals of the day that this book is an utter failure as a contribution to the hagiography of unbelief. Miss Martineau's personality-so noteworthy, and, in many respects, so superior-was yet so abnormal, that it would be grossly unscientific to base upon it any broad, practical generalization whatever. Harriet

Martineau was sui generis. Her physical and mental constitution was a curious combination of strength and weakness, of defect and excess; her training and her course of life were altogether too peculiar and exceptional to have much significance otherwise than as a very extraordinary specimen in the mysterious museum of human individuality: partly of unusual development, and partly of pathological eccentricity. Unquestionably, the unlovely parts of her character were greatly aggravated, and, indeed, originally developed, through the defects of her physical organization, by injudicious training and infelicitous influences. As to her faults, she has secured us from the charge, by precluding the danger, of uncharitable misconstruction, by drawing her own moral portrait with rare firmness and skill, and even by an elaborate præ morte examination of her own spiritual anatomy. She has, moreover, done this with admirable naïveté and openness ; evidently not having the slightest suspicion that her defects came at all

under that category. Not that she fancied herself altogether faultless; but the very qualities which other people could not but perceive to be faults, she prided and plumed herself on as excellencies. As to the gravest defects of her character there is an all but absolute unanimity of judgment in the leading secular Reviews.

Foremost amongst these was that eagerness of detraction which fastened, as with a hungry instinct urged on by a lawless necessity, upon the weaknesses of the strongest, the follies of the wisest, the failings of the noblest of her contemporaries; on fancied blemishes where they were not to be found. With the obtrusive exception of those who did her genius special homage: Lord Durham, for example; or those with whose extravagant, destructive dogmas she had special sympathy,-Carlyle, to wit,-she could scarcely be in the company of any notability of her time, in Church, politics, literature or art, without attempting to puncture some vulnerable part, and deposit there the egg of unkindly criticism. Witness her contemptuous caricature of good Bishop Stanley, Stanley, Dean Stanley's father, and her correction of the universal judgment with regard to the intellectual eminence of Archbishop Whately. In fact, she distributed her scalding scorn with a catholicity of condemnation, which forbade man or woman to pity others or to envy them the distinction of her vituperation and invective. From Queen Victoria to Mazzini scarcely any one of mark, save her own admirers, escaped her sinister and sneering comments. Her extreme deafness necessarily put her to serious disadvantage in taking the intellectual or moral measure of those whom she met incidentally or by invitation, at dinner party or morning call. Many a hiatus in conversation she had to fill up by conjecture; but such was her confi

dence in her own penetration that it never occurred to her to question her own competence to estimate the ability and character of man or woman from a few half-heard, half-guessed utterances. She flattered herself that she could turn her ear-trumpet into a stethoscope, wherewith she might listen to the secret flutterings of her neighbours' hearts and detect every hidden mischief in their moral organization.

Another serious defect, to which none but her worshippers can be blind, was an immensely exaggerated notion of her own intellectual stature and strength, and of her literary, social and political importance. Harriet Martineau was unchallengeably endowed with keen and vigorous mental faculties; wielded a puissant pen, and had command of a style well worth studying. The rapid relegation of her best works to oblivion, old book-shops, or the back or top shelves of public libraries, is by no means owing to any lack of literary merit. The charm of her style consists in its admirable ease, clearness, simplicity, natural grace, unstrained strength. In these respects her Tales illustrative of Political Economy are purely delightful. But, after all, she never was the great luminary she thought herself to be, on the testimony of her adorers. Her intellectual status was on a far lower plan than that of her brother James. Her whole psychology is of a distinctly inferior type to his. But her self-exaggeration grew out of her overweening self-reliance; the genesis of which Mr. Vine has fully explained.

Her cynical and deadly opposition to Christianity she herself traces in its origin to her Unitarian education. And no doubt from that it took its rise. She had been taught that Unitarianism was the religion of the New Testament; and that orthodox and popular Christianity was an irrational

fiction which could gain no countenance from the New Testament, except by dint of unscholarly translation and unskilful interpretation. When she betook herself to the personal study of the New Testament, it was as clear to her as daylight that Unitarianism can extort no testimony in its favour from the New Testament Scriptures, except by a relentless system of verbal torture; whilst the doctrines of the orthodoxy she was taught to hold in intellectual contempt and abhorrence she found to be substantially those of Christ and His Apostles. Hence she rejected both the one and the other with impatient disgust, and set herself to evolve a creed of her own from the dogma of Philosophical Necessity, which Priestley had rendered fashionable in Unitarian circles. This line of speculation inevitably led her hardy, onward-bearing intellect to Atheism and Materialism. The Autobiography of her contemporary, Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, casts strong light on that of Harriet Martineau. Both were brought up in Unitarianism; both were able writers; Miss Martineau by far the abler. The social position of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck's parents was not considerably removed from that of Miss Martineau's, though the former were the wealthier. Mrs. Schimmelpenninck gives a painful picture of the hollowness of the highest intellectual society of Unitarianism amidst which she grew up; including Priestley, Darwin, etc. But afterwards she happily came in contact with vital Christianity amongst the Moravians and the Methodists, and was saved. Poor Harriet Martineau knew almost as little as she ever cared to know of experimental Christianity.

The jauntiness, 'gaiety,' as she calls it, with which she felt it becoming in an Atheist to meet death, Mr. Vine has characterized with just severity. As he suggests,

she grotesquely overacted the pitiable part she set herself to play. What is there to evoke a gaiety so irrepressible and uncontrollable, and at the same time so edifying that the public must be summoned to behold it, in the utter and eternal extinction of a capacious intellect and a benevolent heart? But her jubilation at the supposed, the hoped for, complete and final victory of the grave over herself and whomsoever she might love or honour, has in it all the loudness, insistence and iteration of bravado. One is alternately reminded of the belated truant, hurrying after nightfall along the tomb

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bordered churchyard path, whistling aloud to keep his courage up,' and of the hard-nerved convict who has resolved and pledged himself to his comrades to 'die game.' The closing part she publicly rehearses on her self-constructed literary platform has not even the pathetic dignity of heathen death-That, like the Roman in the Capitol-I may adjust my mantle ere I fall.'-She meets with a ghastly smile of reciprocation or of mimicry the fascinating monster, as he comes to claim his unfaltering devotee, and make her his own for

ever.

BULGARIA BEFORE THE WAR: *
BY W. NICHOLS.

BULGARIA, as our readers know too
well, lies between the Turkish bank
of the Danube and the Balkan range,
and has the Black Sea on its eastern
edge. The country, with the excep-
tion of a few large marshes and
swamps, is high, dry and healthy, and
ascends gradually for some distance
from the lofty cliffs which border the
Danube, and then rises more rapidly
to the summit of the Balkans. These
mountains, (Balkan is Turkish for
'mountain,') far from being grandly
savage in appearance, present a com-
fortably rounded outline, and are
frequently cultivated nearly to the
top; affording, where free from
woods, excellent pasturage in summer
for herds of cattle, sheep and goats.
Large forests still exist on hill and
plain; but, except on the higher and
less accessible mountains, the timber
is of little value,-the trees having
mostly been lopped and maimed into

the condition of 'pollards,' with hollow and rotten trunks. On the southern slopes there may be mines, but they have yet to be discovered; the real wealth of the country consisting in its fine climate and large stretches of virgin soil, its waving seas of corn and its blushing banks of roses, to which many a gallon of attar owes its unrivalled perfume.

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The time-honoured Roman wooden plough, the aratrum that delighted the soul of Virgil and inspired his Georgic muse, is still the only one in use in Bulgaria, and is dragged through the ground by a perfect herd of oxen.' The farmers do not trouble themselves to harrow the land or to free it from weeds, but scatter the seed broadcast over its surface, generally with a result which justifies their easy-going theory of agriculture. Melons and watermelons are grown in profusion; large

* Bulgaria before the War during seven Years' Experience of European Turkey and its Inhabitants. By H. C. Barkley. London: John Murray. 1877.

plots of them may be seen near every village:

As far as I myself am concerned,' says Mr. Barkley, a good tuck-out on Swede turnips would be preferable to the best melon, and far more digestible: but in this the old saying that "one man's meat is another man's poison" proves true; for not only have I seen natives, old and young, eat them till they swelled visibly before my eyes, with no ill result, but I have seen a fastidious English lady in Turkey demolish a big one just before going to bed, and yet, strange to say, not only has she been alive next morning, but apparently quite well and refreshed with sleep.

'With the water-melon it is different. They are so soft and watery that when the outside rind is taken off one as big as my head, it cannot weigh more than a few ounces, and ninety per cent. of its contents is liquid. On a cool day a water-melon is distasteful to most people, unless they have by long habit acquired a relish for them; but in a broiling sun, when one is hot and feverish, their coolness and lusciousness are most refreshing, and I plead guilty to having often eaten three or four at a sitting.'

Near Varna and Rustchuck there are thousands of acres of vineyards, which produce excellent grapes, and are usually fenced in and guarded, in the summer months, in Eastern style, by watchmen. The grapes, though so good, are plentiful enough to be very low in price, and the owners of vineyards are generally open-handed with the generous fruit and liberal in allowing access to the grounds. Mr. Barkley, however, tells us of an exception and its result:

'A friend of mine was one day shooting in the vineyards at Rustchuck, when he was stopped by an old Turk and told that trespassers were not allowed, and that he must clear off at once. My friend turned to comply, but before leaving said in Turkish, "What manner of man are you? I have shot in these vineyards for years without a word being said to me, and to-day I have passed over many miles and spoken to many owners of vineyards, and You are the only one who has raised the slightest objection. The vineyard is yours, and you have the right to object to my being here; so I shall leave your

ground, but I never received such treat

ment from an Osmanli before."

'The Turk, who up to this time had been squatting on the ground, jumped up, and with a marvellous display of energy began protesting: "Tchellaby, you shall not say so others have shown you hospitality, and I will not be behind them. Go where you like, eat what you like, carry away all you like, and all the vineyard is yours to do as you like with." The Englishman thanked him, and it ended in the two squatting down and having a feast on grapes.'

The Bulgarians are, for the most part, big, strong and healthy-looking; a hard-working, plodding race; whose wives are equally industrious; and, steadily refraining from gadding, keep their homes clean and comfortable, and their children well clothed and in good condition. 'Peasants,' in the sense of poor agricultural labourers, are very scarce indeed.. Almost every Bulgarian is a yeoman farmer, cultivates his own land, has capital in the shape of oxen, horses, sheep, etc., and so presents to the eyes of strangers an appearance of greater wealth and better standing than his actual yearly income from all sources would justify. He seldom attains much riches except by having an influential Turkish partner in the background; an arrangement by which he is sheltered from many extortions, but incurs, with increase of funds, increase of enemies. 'I think it was the late Mr. Nassau Seniorwho said that until he went to the East he never knew what was meant in the Psalms of David by the constant reference to enemies." People in England have no "enemies" in the sense in which it is used in the East but there every man has enemies, who backbite, slander and intrigue against him, though they may never have even seen him.'

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Of honour and truthfulness Bulgar and Turk alike seem to possess. 'All are not a very small modicum. only equally untruthful, but hold in contempt those that are truthful.'

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