but I can feel that they exist. A want of soundness, of habits of patient investigation, of completeness, of arrangement, are felt throughout the book, and, for all its fine descriptions of scenery, breadth of reasoning, and generous daring, I cannot be happy in it, because it is not worthy of my friend; and I think a few months given to ripen it, to balance, compare, and mellow, would have made it so.”[1]
And when Miss Fuller came to touch the vexed question of the anti-slavery movement in America, as treated by Miss Martineau, she simply wrote thus: —
“I do not like that your book should be an ‘abolition’ book. You might have borne your testimony as decidedly as you pleased; but why leaven the whole book with it? This subject haunts us on almost every page. It is a great subject, but your book had other purposes to fulfill.”[2]
This was the head and front of Miss Fuller’s offending. But Miss Martineau’s reference to this letter gives her the opportunity for one of those curious examples of failing memory and unfailing self-confidence which were pointed out, by the reviewers of her “Autobiography,” at the time of its publication. She describes the communication as a letter which Miss Fuller “declares she sent her,” but she can only recall having received a very different letter and one “quite unworthy of the writer.”[3] Yet Miss Martineau had herself
