his influence, like his writings, has survived a century; and the foundations of whatever prosperity we have since erected are laid in the disinterested and magnanimous patriotism of Swift.

Mr Croker studied law at Lincoln's Inn, but getting into parliament for the borough of Downpatrick (1807), he struck into that path of public life which he was fitted to turn to the best advantage. In 1809 he took a prominent part in defending the Duke of York during the parliamentary investigation into the conduct of His Royal Highness, and shortly afterwards he was made Secretary to the Admiralty, an office which he held for nearly twenty-two years, until 1830, when he retired with a pension of £1500 per annum. In 1809 he published anonymously The Battles of Talavera, a poem in the style of Scott, and which Sir Walter reviewed in the second volume of the Quarterly Review. In the same style Mr Croker commemorated the Battle of Albuera, 1811. This seems to have been the last of his poetical efforts. He was now busy with the Quarterly Review. Criticism, properly so called, he never attempted. His articles were all personal or historical, confined to attacks on Whigs and Jacobins, or to the rectification of dates and facts regarding public characters and events. He was the reviewer of Keats's Endymion in 1818, to which Byron playfully alluded:

Who killed John Keats?
I, says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly,
'Twas one of my feats.

Mr Croker made considerable noise. We refer to
those on Macaulay's History and Moore's Memoirs.
In the case of the former, Mr Rogers said Croker
attempted murder, but only committed suicide.'
With Moore the reviewer had been on friendly
terms. They were countrymen and college ac-
quaintances; and when Lord John Russell pub-
lished the poet's journals for the benefit of his
widow, a generous man, who had known the
deceased, would have abstained from harsh com-
ments. Croker applied the scalpel without mercy;
Lord John ventured a remark on the critic's 'safe
malignity;' and Croker retaliated by shewing that
Moore had been recording unfavourable notices of
him in his journal at the very time that he was
cultivating his acquaintance by letters, and solicit-
ing favours at his hands. Lord John's faults as
an editor were also unsparingly exposed; and on
the whole, in all but good feeling, Croker was
triumphant in this passage-at-arms.
No man
with any heart would have acted as Croker did,
but he was blinded by his keen partisanship and
pride. He was a political gladiator bound to do
battle against all Whigs and innovators in litera-
ture. Mr Disraeli has satirised him under the
name of 'Rigby' in his novel of Coningsby. Mr
Croker, however, did service to literature by his
annotated edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson,
and his publication of the Suffolk Papers, the
Letters of Lady Hervey, and Lord Hervey's
Memoirs of the Court of George II.
He wrote
Stories from the History of England for Children,
which had the merit of serving as a model for
Sir Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather, and he
collected some of his contributions to the Review,
and published them under the title of Essays on
the Early Period of the French Revolution. At
the time of his death he was engaged in preparing
an edition of Pope's works, which has since
passed into the abler hands of the Rev. Whit-

But this deadly article is only a piece of abuse of
three pages, in which Keats is styled a copyist of
Leigh Hunt, more unintelligible, almost as
rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tire-
some and absurd than his prototype.' Lady
Morgan's Italy is despatched in the same trench-worth Elwin.
ant style. But one of Mr Croker's greatest 'feats'
in this way was mortifying the vanity of Fanny
Burney or Madame D'Arblay, who wished to have
it believed that she was only seventeen when her
novel of Evelina was published. She is said to
have kept up the delusion without exactly giving |
the date; but the reviewer, knowing that she was
born at Lynn, in Norfolk, had the parish-register
examined, and found that the fair novelist was
baptised in June 1752, and consequently was
between twenty-five and twenty-six years of age
when Evelina appeared, instead of being a pro-
digy of seventeen. Mr Croker's success in this
species of literary statistics led him afterwards to
apply it to the case of the Empress Josephine and
Napoleon; he had the French registers examined,
and from them proved that both Josephine and
Napoleon had falsified their ages. This fact, with
other disparaging details, the reviewer brought
out in a paper which appeared on the occasion of
the late emperor's visit to England-no doubt to
mortify the new Napoleon dynasty. In the same
spirit he assailed Soult when he visited this
country-recounting all his military errors and
defeats, and reminding him that the Duke of
Wellington had deprived him of his dinner at
Oporto in 1809 and at Waterloo in 1815. The
duke is said to have been seriously displeased with
the reviewer on account of this mistimed article.
Two of the later contributions to the Review by

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

6

The following notice of MISS MARTINEAU appeared in Horne's Spirit of the Age: Harriet Martineau was born in the year 1802, one of the youngest among a family of eight children. Her father was a proprietor of one of the manufactories in Norwich, in which place his family, originally of French origin, had resided since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. She was indebted to an uncle, a surgeon in Norwich, for her education. She has herself ascribed her taste for literary pursuits to the extreme delicacy of her health in childhood; to the infirmity (deafness) with which she has been afflicted ever since, which, without being so complete as to deprive her absolutely of all intercourse with the world, yet obliged her to seek occupations and pleasures within herself; and to the affection which subsisted between her and the brother nearest her own age, the Rev. James Martineau, whose fine mind and talents are well known. The occupation of writing, first begun to gratify her own taste and inclination, became afterwards to her a source of honourable independence, when, by one of the disasters so common in trade, her family became involved in misfortunes. She was then enabled to reverse the common lot of unmarried daughters in such circumstances, and cease to be in any respect a

the never-ending variety of a fishery. But, then, there room. A series of tales, illustrative of the evils must not be too much sea. The strongest eyes and springing from the Game Laws (1845), are marked nerves could not support the glare and oppressive vast- by Miss Martineau's acuteness and fine clear ness of an unrelieved expanse of waters. I was aware style, but are overcoloured in tone and sentiof this in time, and fixed myself where the view of the ment. Another short tale, The Billow and the sea was inferior to what I should have preferred if I Rock, 1846, founded on the incidents of Lady had come to the coast for a summer visit. Between my Grange's captivity, is interesting, without any window and the sea is a green down, as green as any field in Ireland; and on the nearer half of this down, attempt at conveying a political lesson. In 1848 haymaking goes forward in its season. It slopes down appeared Eastern Life, Past and Present, three to a hollow, where the Prior of old preserved his fish, volumes-a very interesting book of travels, but there being sluices formerly at either end, the one open- disfigured by wild speculative opinions on Scriping upon the river, and the other upon the little haven ture history and character, and on mesmerism below the Priory, whose ruins still crown the rock. and clairvoyance. A volume on Household EduFrom the Prior's fishpond, the green down slopes cation appeared in 1849, and the History of Engupwards again to a ridge; and on the slope are cows land from 1816 to 1846, in 1850. This is an grazing all summer, and half-way into the winter. Over admirable account of the thirty years' peace. In the ridge, I survey the harbour and all its traffic, the 1851 Miss Martineau published a collection of view extending from the light-houses far to the right, letters between herself and Mr H. G. Atkinson, to a horizon of sea to the left. Beyond the harbour lies another county, with, first, its sandy beach, where On the Laws of Man's Nature and Development -a work which met with universal condemnation. there are frequent wrecks-too interesting to an invalid -and a fine stretch of rocky shore to the left; and Miss Martineau's friend, Charlotte Brontë, grieved above the rocks, a spreading heath, where I watch sadly over this declension on the part of one troops of boys flying their kites; lovers and friends whom she admired as combining the highest taking their breezy walk on Sundays; the sportsman mental culture with the nicest discharge of with his gun and dog; and the washerwomen con- feminine duties. The book, she said, was 'the verging from the farmhouses on Saturday evenings, to first exposition of avowed atheism and materialcarry their loads, in company, to the village on the yet ism she had ever read-the first unequivocal further height. I see them, now talking in a cluster, as declaration of disbelief of God or a future they walk each with a white burden on her head, and life.' Hundreds, she said, had deserted Miss now in file, as they pass through the narrow lane; and, Martineau on account of this book, but this finally, they part off on the village-green, each to some the authoress has denied. 'I am not aware,' says neighbouring house of the gentry. Behind the village and the heath stretches the railway; and I watch the train Miss Martineau, ' of having lost any friends whattriumphantly careering along the level road, and puffing ever by that book, while I have gained a new forth its steam above hedges and groups of trees, and world of sympathy? In fact, most persons rethen labouring and panting up the ascent, till it is lost garded this singular lady as sui generis, and between two heights, which at last bound my view. would never dream of binding her by the 'fixed But on these heights are more objects; a windmill, and settled rules.' Her next performance was a now in motion, and now at rest; a lime-kiln, in a translation and condensation of the Positive picturesque rocky field; an ancient church tower, barely Philosophy of Augustus Comte, two volumes, 1853. visible in the morning, but conspicuous when the setting M. Comte's work is a complete account of science sun shines upon it; a colliery, with its lofty wagon-way and scientific method, as developed at the time and the self-moving wagons running hither and thither, he wrote, beginning with mathematics, and ending as if in pure wilfulness; and three or four farms, at with social physics or sociology; but it is also, says various degrees of ascent, whose yards, paddocks, and dairies I am better acquainted with than their inhab- Mr Brimley, a fierce polemic against theology itants would believe possible. I know every stack of and metaphysics, with all the notions and sentithe one on the heights. Against the sky I see the ments that have their root in them'-a 'strict stacking of corn and hay in the season, and can detect limitation of the human faculties to phenomenal the slicing away of the provender, with an accurate eye, knowledge.' Hence the system 'not only fails to at the distance of several miles. I can follow the soci- provide an aim for the action of man and of able farmer in his summer evening ride, pricking on in society; but if an aim were conceded to it, has the lane where he is alone, in order to have more time no moral force to keep men steady, no counteractfor the unconscionable gossip at the gate of the next ing power to the notorious selfishness and sensufarmhouse, and for the second talk over the paddock- ality against which we have to be ever on our fence of the next, or for the third or fourth before the guard.' In 1854 Miss Martineau published a porch, or over the wall, when the resident farmer comes out, pipe in mouth, and puffs away amidst his chat, till Complete Guide to the Lakes. Many years since the wife appears, with a shawl over her cap, to see what she fixed her residence in the beautiful Lake can detain him so long; and the daughter follows, with country, at Ambleside, where she managed her her gown turned over head-for it is now chill evening little farm of two acres with the skill of a prac-and at last the sociable horseman finds he must be tical agriculturist, and was esteemed an affectiongoing, looks at his watch, and with a gesture of surprise, ate friend and good neighbour. She was a regular turns his steed down a steep broken way to the beach, contributor of political and social articles to the and canters home over the sands, left hard and wet by Daily News and other journals. In 1869 she the ebbing tide, the white horse making his progress reproduced in one volume all the short memoirs, visible to me through the dusk. Then, if the question royal, political, professional, scientific, social, and arises, which has most of the gossip spirit, he or I? there literary, which she had written for the Daily News is no shame in the answer. Any such small amusement from her first connection with the paper in 1852. is better than harmless-is salutary-which carries the These form a very interesting and instructive work sick prisoner abroad into the open air, among country-high-toned in principle, and felicitous in exprespeople. When I shut down my window, I feel that my

mind has had an airing.

For four years she was an inmate of this sick

sion. She is occasionally unjust, as in the case of Macaulay, and inaccurate in others, but she is never dull. Miss Martineau also contributed articles to

lofty in valour and in patriotism, was felt to exist in its
full virtue while we had the Napiers in our front, con-
spicuous in the eyes of an observing world. We have
every reason to hope that the type will not be lost,
whatever may be the destiny of Europe as to war or
peace.
We have many gallant men left, as we
always have had, and always shall have; but there
never have been any, and there never can be any like
the Napiers. They were a group raised from among
the medieval dead, and set in the midst of us, clothed
in a temperament which admitted all the ameliorating
influences of our period of civilisation. They were a
great and never-to-be forgotten sight to our generation;
and our posterity will see them in the mirror of tradition
for ages to come. We are wont to say that tradition is

Once a Week and other periodicals. It was impos-own century. The noble old type of the British knight, sible for her to be idle so long as a shred of health remained. She died on the evening of the 27th June 1876, having entered on her 75th year. Immediately after her death the Daily News printed an autobiography sent to that journal by Miss Martineau when she believed she was near death in 1855. It is a remarkably frank, unaffected production. As a writer of fiction, she says of herself: None of her novels or tales have, or ever had, in the eyes of good judges or in her own, any character of permanence. The artistic aim and qualifications were absent; she had no power of dramatic construction; nor the poetic inspiration on the one hand, nor critical cultivation on the other, without which no work of the imagina-old and has left off work; but it is not often now that tion can be worthy to live. Two or three of her Political Economy Tales are perhaps her best achievement in fiction-her doctrine furnishing the plot which she was unable to create, and the brevity of space duly restricting the indulgence in detail which injured her longer narratives, and at last warned her to leave off writing them. It was fortunate for her that her own condemnation anticipated that of the public. To the end of her life she was subject to solicitations to write more novels and more tales; but she for the most part remained steady in her refusal.'

Of her book on Society in America, while claiming credit for it as a trustworthy account of the political structure and relations of the Federal and State Governments, she says: On the whole, the book is not a favourable specimen of Harriet Martineau's writings, either in regard to moral or artistic taste. It is full of affectations and preachments.' As to religion, she describes herself as being, in early life, an earnest Unitarian. But she says that her Eastern Life, Past and Present'-which she ranks as the best of her writings-shewed that at that time (1849) she was no longer a Unitarian, or a believer in revelation at all.' With regard to the Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, she observes: This book brought upon its writers, as was inevitable, the imputation of atheism from the multitude who cannot distinguish between the popular and the philosophical sense of the word -between the disbelief in the popular theology which has caused a long series of religious men to be called atheists, and the disbelief in a First Cause a disbelief which is expressly disclaimed in the book.'

Miss Martineau thus accounts for her choice of rural instead of London life: She felt that she could not be happy, or in the best way useful, if the declining years of her life were spent in lodgings in the morning and drawing-rooms in the evening. A quiet home of her own, and some few dependent on her for their domestic welfare, she believed to be essential to every true woman's peace of mind; and she chose her plan of life accordingly.'

The Napiers.

Two generations of Englishmen have rejoiced in the felt and lively presence of a family who seemed born to perpetuate the associations of a heroic age, and to elevate the national sentiment at least to the point reached in the best part of the military period of our civilisation, while our mere talkers were bemoaning the material tendencies and the sordid temper of our people in our

tradition has such a theme as the Napiers. It will not willingly be let die till tradition itself is dead.

The Royal Marriage Law (1857)

There was a strong hope that when our young Queen Victoria, who was at full liberty as sovereign to please herself in marriage, had made her choice, this wretched and demoralising Marriage Act, always reprobated by the wisest and best men of the time, would be repealed. There were then none left of the last generation who could be pointed at, or in any way affected by such a repeal; and it was thought that it would be wise to do the thing before there was a new generation to introduce difficulty into the case. The opportunity has almost ceased to be children, at least the elder ones. Meantime been allowed to slip from us. The royal children have there is, as we all know, a strong and growing popular distrust in our own country and in others of the close dynastic connections which are multiplying by means of the perpetual intermarriages of a very few families. The political difficulties recently, and indeed constantly experienced from the complication of family interests involving almost every throne in Europe, are a matter of universal feeling and conversation. There is no chance for the physical and intellectual welfare of coming generations when marriages take place among blood relations; and there is no chance for morality and happiness when, under legal or state compulsion, young people love in one direction and marry in another. No evils that could possibly arise from marriages out of the royal pale can for a moment compare with the inevitable results of a marriage law like ours, perpetuated through other generations, than the unhappy one that is gone. Royalty will have quite difficulties enough to contend with, all through Europe, in coming times, without the perils consequent on this law. Its operation will expose all the intermarried royal families in Europe to criticism and ultimate rejection by peoples who will not be governed by a coterie of persons diseased in body through narrow intermarriage, enfeebled in mind-strong only in their prejudices, and large only in their selfthe thrones of Europe—or at least the royal palaces of esteem and in requirements. There is yet time to save England-from the consequences of a collision between the great natural laws ordained by Providence, and the narrow and mischievous artificial law ordained by a wilful king of England. That king is in his grave, and the last of his children is now gone to join him there. Let the time be laid hold of to bury his evil work in the tomb which is now to be sealed over him and his for ever; and the act will be gratefully acknowledged by a long line of future princes and princesses, who will be spared the bitter suffering of those who have gone before. It can never be, as was said by wise men eighty years ago, that royal personages who are declared of age at eighteen will have no will of their own, in such a matter as marriage, at five-and-twenty. Marriage is too solemn and sacred a matter to be treated as a piece of state politics; and the ordinance which is holy in the freedom

of private life may be trusted with the domestic welfare away, till the wish for intercourse was gone. The young of prince and peasant alike.

Postal Reform-Anecdote of Coleridge.

From History of the Thirty Years' Peace (1816-1846). Coleridge, when a young man, was walking through the Lake district, when he one day saw the postman deliver a letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman turned it over and examined it, and then returned it, saying that she could not pay the postage, which was a shilling. Hearing that the letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage, in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the postman was out of the house, she shewed Coleridge how his money had been wasted, as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There was an agreement between her brother and herself, that as long as all went well with him, he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter, and she had thus tidings of him without expense of postage.

Most people would have remembered this incident as a curious story to tell; but there was one mind which wakened up at once to a sense of the significance of the fact. It struck Mr Rowland Hill that there must be something wrong in a system which drove a brother and sister to cheating, in order to gratify their desire to hear of one another's welfare. It was easy enough in those days to collect a mass of anecdotes of such cheating. Parents and children, brothers and sisters, lovers and friends, must have tidings of each other, where there is any possibility of obtaining them; and those who had not shillings to spend in postagewho could no more spend shillings in postage than the class above them could spend hundreds of pounds on pictures-would resort to any device of communication, without thinking there was any harm in such cheating, because no money was kept back from government which could have been paid. There was curious dotting in newspapers, by which messages might be spelled out. Newspapers being franked by writing on the covers the names of members of parliament, a set of signals was arranged by which the names selected were made to serve as a bulletin. Men of business so wrote letters as that several might go on one sheet, which was to be cut up and distributed. The smuggling of letters by carriers was enormous. After all expenditure of time and ingenuity, there remained, however, a terrible blank of enforced silence. We look back now with a sort of amazed compassion to the old crusading times when warrior-husbands and their wives, gray-headed parents and their brave sons, parted with the knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear even of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth of silence. And we feel the same now about the families of polar voyagers. But, till a dozen years ago, it did not occur to many of us how like this was the fate of the largest classes in our own country. The fact is, there was no full and free epistolary intercourse in the country, except between those who had the command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle class who did not feel the cost of postage a heavy item in their expenditure; and if the young people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at the year's end was rather a serious matter. But it was the vast multitude of the lower orders who suffered like the crusading families of old, and the geographical discoverers of all time. When once their families parted off from home, it was a separation almost like that of death. The hundreds of thousands of apprentices, of shopmen, of governesses, of domestic servants, were cut off from family relations as if seas or deserts lay between them and home. If the shilling for each letter could be saved by the economy of weeks or months at first, the rarity of the correspondence went to increase the rarity; new interests hastened the dying out of old ones; and the ancient domestic affections were but too apt to wither

girl could not ease her heart by pouring out her cares and difficulties to her mother before she slept, as she can now when the penny and the sheet of paper are the only condition of the correspondence. The young lad felt that a letter home was a somewhat serious and formal matter, when it must cost his parents more than any indulgence they ever thought of for themselves; and the old fun and light-heartedness were dropped from such domestic intercourse as there was. The effect upon morals of this kind of restraint is proved beyond a doubt by the evidence afforded in the army. It was a well-known fact, that in regiments where the commanding officer was kind and courteous about franking letters for the privates, and encouraged them to write as often as they pleased, the soldiers were more sober and manly, more virtuous and domestic in their affections, than where difficulty was made by the indolence or stiffness of the franking officer. To some persons, this aspect has ever appeared the most important of the various interesting aspects of the postage reform achieved by Mr Rowland Hill. As for others, it is impossible to estimate the advantage of the change. In reading Cowper's life, how strange now seems his expenditure of time, thought, and trouble about obtaining franks for the manuscripts and proofs of his Homer; now, when every mail carries packets between authors, printers, and publishers, for a few pence, without any teasing solicitation for franks, or dependence upon anybody's good offices! What a mass of tradesmen's patterns and samples, of trade circulars, of bills and small sums of money, of music and books, of seeds and flowers, of small merchandise and friendly gifts, of curious specimens passing between men of science, of bulletins of health to satisfy anxious hearts, is every day sent abroad over the land; and now spreading over wide oceans and across continents, through Rowland Hill's discovery of a way to throw down the old barriers and break through the ancient silence! It was truly a beneficent legislation which made this change.

It was not easy, however, to make the change. Long after the case was made clear-long after the old evils and the new possibility were made as evident as facts and figures can make any proposition-there was difficulty-vexatious, even exasperating difficulty-in carrying the reform. One great obstacle at the outset was that the post-office has, through all time, declared itself perfect. As the Duke of Wellington declared of our representative system that it could not be improved, while the grass and trees of Old Sarum were sending two members to parliament, so the post-office declared itself perfect when carts and saddle-horses carried its bags; and again, when Mr Palmer's mail-coaches-declared an impossible creation in 1797-brought the Bath letters to London in eighteen hours, and could take no notice of out-of-the-way towns and small villages; and again, when a letter from Uxbridge, posted on Friday night, could not reach Gravesend till Tuesday morning; and, finally, when the state of postal communication in Great Britain was what has been indicated above. No postal reforms of a comprehensive character have ever originated in the Post-office itself. This is natural, because its officers are wholly occupied with its interior affairs, and cannot look abroad so as to compare its provisions with the growing needs of society. It required a pedestrian traveller in the Lake District, making his wayside observations, and following up the suggestion; an investigator who could ascertain something of the extent of the smuggling of letters; a man of an open heart, who could enter into family sympathies; a man of philosophical ingenuity, who could devise a remedial scheme; and a man of business, who could fortify such a scheme with an impregnable accuracy, to achieve such a reform. The man was among us, and the thing was done.

Mr Hill ascertained that the cost of mere transit incurred upon a letter sent from London to Edinburgh,