The _Head of the Family_ has some merits. . . . But there is too much affliction and misery and frenzy. The heroine is one of those creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird tied to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be ‘shyed’ at (_i.e._ pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the end of all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is never the worse for all the blows it has had—nay, the better—and that now, with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body, it is going to be quite happy. No, fair ladies, you know that it is not so—_resigned_, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness out of such wrecks. In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as moribund. ‘The Radical party is evidently effete,’ she writes to M. Victor Cousin; the probable ‘leader of the Tory party’ is Mr. Gladstone. ‘The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short, governed,’ she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says that the state of things in France fills ‘me with the deepest anxiety on one point,—the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our salvation as a nation turn. Are our higher classes able to keep the lead of the rest? If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear Charles Buller—_our_ turn must come. Now Cambridge and Oxford must really look to this.’ The belief in the power of the Universities to stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as ‘one of the dissolvents of the age—as mischievous as his extravagances will let him be’; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as ‘pernicious’; and talks of John Stuart Mill as a ‘demagogue.’ She was no _doctrinaire_. ‘One ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed. It is no use to give the meat before you give the hunger.’ She was delighted at a letter of St. Hilaire’s, in which he said, ‘We have a system and no results; you have results and no system.’ Yet she had a deep sympathy with the wants of the people. She was horrified at something Babbage told her of the population of some of the manufacturing towns who are _worked out_ before they attain to thirty years of age. ‘But I am persuaded that the remedy will not, cannot come from the people,’ she adds. Many of her letters are concerned with the question of the higher education of women. She discusses Buckle’s lecture on ‘The Influence of Women upon the Progress of Knowledge,’ admits to M. Guizot that women’s intellectual life is largely coloured by the emotions, but adds: ‘One is not precisely a fool because one’s opinions are greatly influenced by one’s affections. The opinions of men are often influenced by worse things.’ Dr. Whewell consults her about lecturing women on Plato, being