We will pursue the pamphlet no further, having set ourselves right. There is not an argument, or statement, or allusion in it that is not open to rebuke. It fails even in such small details as when a professor of Literature with a becoming sense of its uses, and that Professor the authoress of Forest and Game Law Tales, and of many volumes of Stories on Political Economy, should gracefully and becomingly think it as against Mr. Dickens, “pity, as a matter of taste, that a writer of fiction should choose topics in which political philosophy and morality were involved.” It fails when accusing us of “burlesque” and “irony,” because we put plain things “in the palpable way which a just-minded writer would scrupulously avoid,” and have, God knows, with a heart how full of earnestness, tried to make the suffering perceived that must have been involved in all these accidents. It fails even when against this “philo-operative cant,” its writer must needs quote Sydney Smith. “We miss Sydney Smith, it is said, in times like these--in every time when a contagious folly, and especially a folly of cant and selfish sensibility, is in question. This very case, in a former phase came under his eye”--and then we have two notes of what he said against the Ten Hours’ Bill: sayings with which, it happens, that the writer of these papers perfectly agrees. When a case really parallel to this, affecting, not the laws of labour, but the carrying on of trade in a way leading sometimes to cruel deaths came under his eye, we did not miss Sydney Smith indeed! The author of the paper upon climbing boys was the last person for Miss Martineau to quote. “We come now,” begins one of his paragraphs, “to burning little chimney-sweepers;” and the same paragraph ends by asking, “What is a toasted child, compared to the agonies of the mistress of the house with a deranged dinner?” Palpably put, and with a bitter irony, we fear! We have done. We hope we have not been induced to exceed the bounds of temperate and moderate remonstrance, or to prostitute our part in Literature to Old Bailey pleading and passionate scolding. We thoroughly forgive Miss Martineau for having strayed into such unworthy paths under the guidance of her anonymous friend, and we blot her pamphlet out of our remembrance. COMING SOUTH A CENTURY AGO.