the Negro race for moral and intellectual greatness; and by his own cruel fate in a French dungeon, reconciled us to the lingering death of Napoleon at St. Helena,—if only on the principle of retributive justice:—
"—————nec lex æquior ulla est,
Quam necis artifices arte perire suâ."
About this time, also, she produced the beautiful series of tales for children, entitled The Playfellow,—including "The Settlers at Home," "The Peasant and the Prince," "Feats on the Fiord," and "The Crofton Boys,"—a collection which placed her in a high rank as a writer for the young.
At this period, Miss Martineau fell into ill-health, of which her Life in the Sick Room affords the details. This went on for several years; till, all hope of recovery by orthodox means having been abandoned, she determined to make trial of the curative powers of Mesmerism. The result of the experiment, as related by herself in the columns of the Athenæum, was the perfect restoration of her mental and physical energies. Of this she gave evidence, more suo, by the production of her Forest and Game Law Tales, three volumes in which the effect of these enactments in ancient and modern times is discussed, and their special bearing on the classes of society more immediately affected by them. In 1846, she wrote a pretty tale, The Billow and the Rock; and in this year started on an expedition to the East, in company with her brother, the Rev. James Martineau, and other friends. This resulted in the publication of Eastern Life Past and Present, a work in which her impressions are recorded in her usual graphic and vigorous style, albeit impaired to some extent by a certain tone of speculative scepticism which shocked religious readers to no small extent. This culminated, a year or two later, in downright Atheism, as expounded in her Letters on the Laws of Man's Social Nature and Development, being a correspondence between herself and Mr. H. G. Atkinson, a Mesmerist, and published in 1851. This book is duly pronounced by good, religious people "shallow and illogical in reasoning"; based, it would seem, solely on a profound faith in her correspondent's infallibility as a teacher, to which faith all higher and purer beliefs are sacrificed; a book that could injure no one "whose judgment was not warped by a similar influence." Since, then, "her arguments refute themselves/' and her statements are "too silly to do any harm," why do pious folk wax angry about the book?—
"Tantæne animis cælestibus iræ?"
Well, so it is, and always will be. A certain wise man once, on being questioned as to his "religion," replied that he was of the religion of all wise men; and on being further pressed as to the nature of that religion, said that that was just what wise men kept to themselves. It is perhaps to be regretted that Miss Martineau was not "wise" in the same sense. Anyway, the conclusions, long established, are:—(1) That the question of the existence, or the non-existence of a God, by the à priori mode, or any other, is best left alone; and (2) that so far as your estimation by society is concerned, it is better (as some Frenchman has said) to believe in a God with a hundred arms, and a hundred legs, than none at all!
Just at this time Charles Knight was in want of some able hand to take up his History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, which he
