Miss Martineau, whose voluminous work is ranked by Anna Robeson Burr as among the great autobiographies of the world, does not condescend to naïveté; but she never forgets, or permits her reader to forget, what a superior person she is. When Miss Aiken ventures to congratulate her upon her “success” in London society, she loftily repudiates the word. Success implies endeavour, and she (Harriet Martineau) has “nothing to strive for in any such direction.” When she sails for the United States, it is with the avowed purpose of “self-discipline.” She has become “too much accustomed to luxury,” and seeks for wholesome hardships. It sounds a trifle far-fetched. Byron--an incomparable traveller--admits that folks who go “a-pleasuring” in the world must not ask for comfort; but even Byron did not visit the East in order to be uncomfortable. He was not hunting a corrective for St. James Street and Piccadilly. There is no finer example in the world of the happiness of writing an autobiography than that afforded us by Miss Martineau. Her book is a real book, not an ephemeral piece of self-flattery. Her enjoyment of it is so intense that it impedes her progress. She cannot get on with her narrative because of the delight of lingering. Every circumstance of an uneventful childhood invites her attention. Other little girls cry now and then. Mothers and nurserymaids are aware of this fact. Other little girls hate to get up in the morning. Other little girls are occasionally impertinent to their parents. But no one else has ever recorded these details with such serious and sympathetic concern. A petulant word from an older sister (most of us have lived through something of the kind) made her resolve “never to tell anybody anything again.” This resolution was broken. She has told everybody everything, and the telling must have given her days, and weeks, and months of undiluted pleasure. Miss Martineau’s life was in the main a successful one. It is natural that she should have liked to think about it, and write about it. But Mrs. Oliphant, a far more brilliant woman, was overburdened, overworked, always anxious, and often very unhappy. Arthur Young was a melancholy, disgruntled man, at odds with himself, his surroundings, and the world. The painter, Haydon, lived through years so harassed by poverty, so untempered by discretion, so embittered by disappointments, that his tragic suicide was the only thing which could have brought his manifold miseries to an end. Yet Mrs. Oliphant took comfort in setting forth her difficulties, and in expressing a reasonable self-pity. Arthur Young relieved his mind by a well-worked-out system of intensive grumbling. Even Haydon seems to have sought and found a dreary solace in the recital of his woes. The fragment of autobiography is painful to read, but was evidently the one poor consolation of its writer’s life.