shut eyes. So much for the gorgeousness; and as to the real charge, it requires only the very plainest comparison of Miss Martineau’s own statements to correct them. She says that while Margaret Fuller and her pupils were doing so and so, another sort of elect persons, whom the first set despised, were saving the nation. The curious fact is that all this antagonism lies wholly in Miss Martineau’s imagination, and that the two sets were almost identically the same. It is easy to show that the “spoiled women” of Margaret’s classes were the very women who were fighting Miss Martineau’s battles.
The only list known to me of any of these classes is that given in Miss Fuller’s “Memoirs.”[1] It contains forty-three names. Among these are to be found the two women who taught Miss Martineau her first lessons in abolitionism on her arrival in America: Mrs. Lydia Maria Child and Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring. The list comprises the wives of Emerson and Parker and the high-minded Maria White who afterwards, as the wife of Lowell, did much to make him an abolitionist; it includes the only daughter of Dr. Channing; it comprises Miss Littlehale, now Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney; it includes many family names identified with the anti-slavery movement in Boston and vicinity from its earliest to its latest phase; such names as Channing, Clarke, Hooper, Hoar, Lee, Peabody, Quincy, Russell, Shaw, Sturgis. These
- ↑ i. 338, note.
