Each story carries through some of the characters introduced before, so that there is an intimate connection between them all. In general, they have no special moral teaching, but there are two notable exceptions, in the story of "Ivo, the Gentleman," and "The Lauterbacher."
The first of these, "Ivo the Gentleman", professes to give the life of a Catholic family, and the story of a student in his preparation for the priesthood. We cannot fail to be interested in the home-life of the collegian, and anxiously watch the development of doubts and difficulties in his path; but there is a coldness and hardness in the analyzation of his perplexities and his religious footsteps that lead one to feel that there is little vitality in the creed of the author.
In the story of "The Lauterbacher," there are many striking thoughts brought out with such charming familiarity as to make one wonder why they have never before seen them on paper. The moral of this tale is clear and good. Now and then, however, one meets with a touch of the mystical transcendentalism with which many of the works of this author abound; but we find in this volume less of these fancies than in anything we have seen from his pen.
The stories are interspersed with grotesque wood-cuts as illustrations, with a sprinkling of fantastic rhymes, which remind us forcibly of our childhood's first introduction to the muses through the whimsical measures of Mother Goose's Melodies.
Biographical Sketches.
By Harriet Martineau.
New York: Leypoldt & Holt. 1869.
No one at all familiar with the mental characteristics and proclivities of Harriet Martineau could expect from her pen a more liberal view of the characters which she has here attempted to delineate than the volume before us actually presents. The ordinary reader, ignorant of or not fully appreciating the standpoint from which the authoress judges the dispositions and achievements of mankind will, however, experience a feeling of disappointment and dissatisfaction. The tone of many of her sketches is depreciatory. The time-honored maxim, "Nil de mortuis," etc., is rigidly ignored, and the shadows in the lives of the personages she notices are brought into striking contrast with the sunlight of their virtues and accomplishments. We remark this especially in regard to those whose work in the world was of a religious or charitable nature. It grates upon our inward reverence for men, whose toil and self-sacrifice have resulted even in a transient benefit to mankind, to be told that they were mere creatures of an ephemeral occasion, or the unconscious agents of political aspirants; that the seed which they sowed had no root, and the plant has withered away. It seems like an aspersion on the moral capabilities of the human race when those men who reach the highest ranks of ecclesiastical and religious preferment are represented as untrue to their convictions, and recreant to the principles confided to their propagating and protecting care. Miss Martineau does good morals and large charity no service, by showing that their outward exercise may coexist with hypocrisy, tergiversation, and sordid self-seeking. Nor is it absolute justice to the dead that, having during life received from her no admonition to correct their faults, they should at last, when such correction has become impossible, be held up to posterity as being, after all, but frail and failing specimens of human kind.
With this exception, we have found the work before us worthy of the encomiums bestowed upon it by the press both of this country and England. It is a handbook to read and remember, to take up with interest and lay down with pleasure, and, after the first reading, to consult, from time to time, as a gallery of portraits painted from subjects of unusual eminence by a skilful hand.