"Accident first made me an authoress," says Mrs. Jameson, in one of her captivating books. Something higher, deeper, better, qualified her to be an authoress, and ensured for her, as such, a position second to hardly one of her contemporaries in grace of style, correctness, and refinement of taste, keenness of observation, and freshness of thought. Acquaintance with such a writer would have been an invaluable argument and support to Charles Perrault, when he indited his Apologie des Femmes, in answer to Boileau's spiteful satire, and there maintained the supremacy of true womanly opinion in matters of taste, saying, in his preface: "On sait la justesse de leur discemement pour les choses fines et délicates, la sensibilité qu'elles ont pour ce qui est clair, vif, naturel et de bon sens, et le dégoût subit qu'elles temoignent à l'abord de tout ce qui est obscur, languissant, contraint, et embarrassé." Mrs. Jameson stands unsurpassed among the literary women of England for critical culture; for instinctive accuracy of taste, and ability to give a reason for the faith that is in her, with elegance and precision of language. And it is beautiful to mark in this capacious, deep, highly-cultivated and ever-active intellect, so utter an absence of, and so hearty a disrelish for, whatever is akin to the satirical and the censorious. This gracious nature holds no tie with carping, crabbed, captious ways and means. "I can smile," she says, "nay, I can laugh still, to see folly, vanity, absurdity, meanness, exposed by scornful wit, and depicted by others in fictions light and brilliant. But these very things, when I encounter the reality, rather make me sad than merry, and take away all the inclination, if I had the power, to hold them up to derision." And she contends that no one human being has been made essentially better by satire, which excites only the lowest and worst of our propensities; the spirit of ridicule she abhors, because in direct contradiction to the mild and serious spirit of Christianity—and at the same time she fears it, because wherever it has prevailed as a social fashion, and has given the tone to the manners and literature, it has marked the moral degradation and approaching destruction of the society thus characterised;—and furthermore, she despises it, as the usual resource of the shallow and the base mind, and, when wielded by the strongest hand with the purest intentions, an inefficient means of good. "The spirit of satire, reversing the spirit of mercy which is twice blessed, seems to me," she says, "twice accursed; evil in those who indulge it—evil to those who are the objects of it." In her every volume the jaded sufferer under literary fever and fretfulness is sure, in Wordsworth's language, of
One enclosure where the voice that speaks
In envy or detraction is not heard;
Where malice may not enter; where the traces
Of evil inclinations are unknown.
In the writings of women generally is remarked a tone of greater
