There is a sprightliness in the conversation of Lady Byron that wins the listener, and a common sense that edifies him, while the tinge of sadness which flows through it gives a serious and sincere hue to the vein of pure morality that pervades much of this unfortunate woman's discourse. Decidedly plain-looking—for, even in the bloom of youth, she could not have been handsome—her countenance when in repose is rather dull and uninteresting, but it kindles up when excited by the contact of kindred minds, and is set off by an address and manners familiar and easy.
Lady Byron has found occasional relief from the cloud which memory hangs over her, by participating in enterprises of charity and philanthropy. Indeed, she seemed to be quite a reformer, apparently holding firmly, while uttering cautiously, the liberal political sentiments which constituted the redeeming feature in her husband's character. As might be expected, she is sensitive to all allusions in her presence to him, seeming desirous that the thick veil of oblivion should hide all traces of their lamentable union and separation. It is not so with her daughter, Ada Augusta—the "gentle Ada"—since Lady Lovelace, who loves to talk of her father, and glows with delight when you tell her that his works are universally read, not only in the seaboard cities of America, but among the far-away woods and prairies of the New World.
Who that can appreciate a happy blending of philosophical acumen with philanthropic devotion, illustrated in writings profound and poetic, and conversation rational and racy, could fail to be pleased with Miss Harriet Martineau—in spite of her tin trumpet? And well would it be for their own reputation and the comfort of society, if many authors and talkers used a trumpet to gather up the responses of their readers and auditors, rather than to blow private griefs or fancied merits in the averted face of the public. Descended from one of the families exiled from France on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Miss Martineau inherits the fondness for philosophical speculation and the vivacity of spirit of the people whence she traces her lineage, mingled with the hatred of tyranny and love of toleration which the event that drove her forefathers to England was calculated to inspire. These French Puritans, wherever scattered up and down the world by the bigotry of Louis XIV, if they have had less of iron in their character and marble in their aspect than the Huguenots of Plymouth, they have displayed, under persecutions equally severe, as heroic a defense of their own civil and religious freedom, while exhibiting in their treatment of others a larger measure of that charity which suffereth long and is kind.
Miss Martineau became a student in extreme youth. While a girl, delicate health prevented her mingling in pastimes usual to her sex and years, and she sought society in books. Subsequently, an embarrassing deafness threw her upon her own mental resources for amusement and instruction. Gifted with ready powers of writing, and the needed motive for "trying her hand" being found in pecuniary necessity, she naturally turned from reading books to making them, and became an author at the age of twenty. During the next twenty-five years, she sent to press numerous works, ranging over a wide field of topics, from verses and stories adapted to the nursery and the school, to volumes on political economy and poor-laws, after the order of Bentham and Malthus. She has written tales, novels, prayers, hymns, illustrations of political economy and pauperism and taxation, sketches of travels in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and numberless papers for reviews and magazines, exhibiting high powers of reflection and rare graces of composition, and aiming at the great and good end of instructing, amusing, and elevating mankind. Two of her most interesting publications, and they are among the most recent, are "Life in a Sick Room" and "The Holy Land"—the former, a beautiful record of her own experience and reflections while suffering under deep-seated disease; the latter, a vivid and graphic picture of her lingerings around the sacred scenes of Palestine.
The works of Miss Martineau that produced the greatest sensation, and most widely extended her reputation, are those on political subjects. In politics, for she is a politician, she must be classed with the radicals of the school of Bentham, Cobden, and Hume. This fact, uniting with the class of topics she handled, have not vouchsafed to her exemption from the canons and hot shot of criticism to which the writings of the other sex are exposed. And she is too much of a woman to plead her sex in bar of the operation of any legitimate rule of literary warfare. She is able to give as well as take in the arena of authorship. Her works, or rather tales, (for she dressed her disquisitions in the drapery of fiction,) on political economy, poor-laws, and cognate subjects, drew down upon her the sneers and maledictions of the High Tory Quarterly Review—the former being aimed at her sex, the latter at her doctrines—which only resulted in proving that the critics had very slender claims to be regarded either as gentlemen, philosophers or statesmen. So novel was her undertaking, that she encountered great difficulty in getting a publisher for her "Illustrations." She first offered them to the generally astute and always liberal Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The managers declined to issue them, prophesying that the project would prove a dead failure. At length a bookseller was found, hardy enough, or wise enough, to send into the world essays on political economy, poor-laws, and taxation, dressed up in fiction by the hand of a woman. The success of the experiment was immediate and complete. The numbers were eagerly bought as they came out, the advent of each link in the series being looked for with as much interest as Dickens' Nickleby or Dombey; new editions followed new editions; Germany and France translated and sent them over Europe; till the most driveling specimen of Britain's old-womanish legislation received a shock from which it has never recovered, and looked at one time as if it might fall a sudden victim to the exposures of a comparatively young damsel.
Mrs. Mary Howitt has walked gracefully over a portion of the same field of literature as Miss Martineau, gathering flowers not seen by or not congenial to the eye of the more matter-of-fact disciple of the great Utilitarian. She has more poetry and less philosophy in her temperament than Miss Martineau, is more domestic and rural in her tastes, grapples less with themes that agitate senates, and has a heart more susceptible to the individual joys and sorrows of mankind. She is equally bountiful in her contributions to the every-day reading of the times; gives her writings a high moral aim; makes her readers good-humored, and overflowing with bonhommie; and if she does not set them to thinking so hard about the causes of human misery, stimulates them to as much activity in alleviating the effects.
In 1823, soon after her marriage with Mr. Howitt—and two more congenial spirits never closed hands at the altar—they jointly published "The Forest Minstrel," a volume abounding in lively pictures of rural scenery, and filial reverence for the poetry of the olden time. They made a tour of Scotland, traveling more than a thousand miles over highland and moorland, half of which they performed on foot, drinking at the storied fountains, and holding familiar converse with the spirits that haunt the old castles and battle-fields of a country whose novelists and bards have associated
"With every glen and every stream,
The romance of some warrior dream."
This tour, taken when their minds were alive to the sublimities and beauties of the scenery, and when their poetic eye threw its young glance upon each filament of the drapery that song and story have spread over every spot between Tweed-dale and Loch Ness, gave form and color to all the subsequent writings of the Howitts. Returning home, they published another volume of poetry, which, like the first, was warmly eulogized by the public press. They were now fairly launched on the stream of English literature. For several years Mrs. Howitt gave much time to the preparation of works for the young. Being first enlisted in this department by the wants of her own rising household, she subsequently wrote for the public, throwing off scores of stories, which were bought, read, and admired by "the million" of her own country, are found in "morocco and gilt" on marble tables in American cities, and in yellow covers in the log huts beyond the mountains, while some, through the medium of translations, have found their way into the nurseries of Germany and the forest-homes of Poland.