How great and worthy is the literary position of Harriet Martineau, we all know. Its retro-actionary influence in favor of the ability and freedom of her sex is what we are to indicate here. For whatever immediate purpose she writes, her words bear indirectly on the widest womanly emancipation. May this remark stimulate your curiosity, and keep you on the alert for pregnant sentences! Such sentences tell more of the progress of human thought than some of us suspect: they indicate its natural, habitual poise. "Women especially," she writes, "should be allowed the free use of whatever strength their Maker has seen fit to give them. It is essential to the virtue of society, that they should be allowed the freest moral action, unfettered by ignorance, and unintimidated by authority; for it is an unquestioned and unquestionable fact, that, if women were not weak, men would not be wicked, and that, if women were bravely pure, there would be an end of the dastardly tyranny of licentiousness." This passage will have all the more power over observant readers, because it occurs unexpectedly, and marks the opportunity seized to speak a necessary if unwelcome truth. What noble service Mrs. Jameson rendered in the field of art or letters did not leave her indifferent to the interests of her sex. She was placed in circumstances to make her see quickly and feel deeply all that relates to womanly position and development. An early martyr to the prejudices of society; married, I think at sixteen, to a man far beyond her own rank in life, who left her at the altar,--she bore the title of wife, and led the life of a celibate: but her first word for her sex was as strong and true as her last, while her own path lay between lines of living fire. Only lately did we hear of her as a lecturer and reformer; but, nearly thirty years ago, we might have cut from her pages the following words: "We are told openly by moralists and politicians, that it is for the general good of society, nay, an absolute necessity, that one-fifth part of the female sex should be condemned as the legitimate prey of the other, predoomed to die in reprobation in the streets, in hospitals, that the virtue of the rest may be preserved, and the pride and the passions of men both satisfied. But I have a bitter pleasure in thinking, that this most base and cruel conventional law is avenged upon those who made and uphold it; that here the sacrifice of a certain number of one sex to the permitted license of the other is no general good, but a general curse, a very ulcer in the bosom of society." Can you guess how brave and pure a woman was needed to write those words? All the indirect tendency of her works is in keeping with them; and we recognize the same voice, as she said in a later lecture:--