Although these drawbacks prevent us from ranking him, as a writer, in the highest class—for a writer of the highest class impresses his readers by the force of his character as much as by the affluence of his conceptions and the beauties of his style—still Mr. Martineau ranks high among contemporary prose writers for the sweetness, clearness, pliancy and unity of his style, his happy felicities of imagery, his unostentatious intellectual honesty, and his command of all the rhetorical aids of metaphor, sarcasm and figurative illustration. His style is also strictly vital, the exact expression of his nature as well as opinions; but its melody is flute-like rather than clarion-like; is so consistently ornate and so tuned on one key, that commonplaces and originalities are equally clad in the same superb uniform, and move to the music of the same slow march; and the sad earnestness and languor, which we have mentioned as characterizing his will, steal mysteriously out from his exquisite periods, and pass into the reader’s mind like an invisible essence. Almost every professor of rhetoric would say that Mr. Martineau is a better writer than the Bishop of Exeter, a church dignitary for whom Mr. Martineau’s liberal mind has a natural antipathy. Mr. Martineau has evidently a larger command of words and images, more taste, more toleration, more intellectual conscientiousness and comprehension, a better metaphysician, a more trustworthy thinker, with less mosaic work in his logic, and less casuistry in his ethics. But behind all the Bishop of Exeter’s sentences is a great, brawny, hard-fisted, pugilistic, arrogant _man_, daring, confident, indomitable, with as much will as reason, and with all his opinions so thoroughly penetrated with the life-blood of his character that they have all the force of bigotry and prejudice. He is equally unreasonable and uncreative as a thinker, but his unreason has a vigor that Mr. Martineau’s reason lacks. Wielding with his strong arm some piece of medieval bigotry, he goes crashing on from sentence to sentence, angrily pummeling and buffeting his opponents—a theological “ugly customer,” who, when the rush of his coming is heard afar off, makes the adversaries he is approaching glance instinctively to the direction—“look out for the engine when the bell rings!” Mr. Martineau’s large understanding would be benefited by some of the Bishop’s will; and one is driven to the conclusion, that, a man of purely independent thought, who abides in conceptions of his own, entirely apart from authority, must be a genius of the first order to escape from that weakness of will which distinguishes the most adventurous of Mr. Martineau’s abstract and uninvigorating speculations.