Miss Martineau's "Autobiography,"[2] which comprises two-thirds of this voluminous publication, is an interesting specimen of an interesting sort of book. It appeals much more to the general reader than most of the multitudinous volumes which she gave to the world during her lifetime, and we shall not be surprised if it takes its place among the limited number of excellent personal memoirs in the language. (For this purpose, however, we must add, it would need to be disembarrassed of the biographical appendage affixed to it by the editor, which, though carefully and agreeably prepared, we cannot but regard as rather a dead weight upon the book. It repeats much of what the author has related, and envelopes her narrative in a diffuse, eulogistic commentary which strikes the reader sometimes as superfluous and sometimes as directly at variance with the impression made upon him by Miss Martineau's text.) Miss Martineau was indeed, intellectually, one of the most remarkable women who have exhibited themselves to the world. She was not delicate, she was not graceful, or imaginative, or æsthetic, or some of the other pretty things that literary ladies are expected to be; but she was extraordinarily vigorous; she had a great understanding--a great reason. She gives, intellectually, a great impression of force. She was a really heroic worker, a genuine philosopher, and she made her mark upon her time. Her reader's last feeling about her is that she was thoroughly respectable. He will have had incidental feelings of a less genial kind; he will have been irritated at the coarseness of some of her judgments and the complacency of some of her claims; at her evident want of tact and repose; at a disposition to which he will even permit himself, perhaps, to apply the epithet of meddlesome. But he will have a strong sense of Miss Martineau's care for great things--her sustained desire, prompting her always to production of some kind, to help along and enlighten the human race. She was a combatant, and the whole force of her nature prompted her to discussion. Such natures cannot afford to be delicate--to be easily bruised and scratched; neither can they afford to have that speculative cast of fancy which wastes valuable time in scruples that are possibly superfluous and questions that are possibly vain. In spite of any such apologetic view of her disposition as may be put forth, however, it is probable that Miss Martineau's autobiography will give offence enough. She speaks out her mind with complete frankness upon most of the persons that she has known, subject to the single condition of her book being published after her death. Of its being postponed until the death of the objects of her criticism we hear nothing, though this would have been more to the point. Miss Martineau deals out disapproval with so liberal a hand, that among those persons concerned who are still living much resentment and disgust must inevitably ensue.