The heroine is one of those
creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird tied
to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be 'shyed' at
(i.e. pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the end of
all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is never the
worse for all the blows it has had--nay, the better--and that now,
with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body, it is going
to be quite happy. No, fair ladies, you know that it is not
so--_resigned_, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness out
of such wrecks.

In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she
detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as
moribund. 'The Radical party is evidently effete,' she writes to M.
Victor Cousin; the probable 'leader of the Tory party' is Mr. Gladstone.
'The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short,
governed,' she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says
that the state of things in France fills 'me with the deepest anxiety on
one point,--the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our
salvation as a nation turn. Are our higher classes able to keep the lead
of the rest? If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear
Charles Buller--_our_ turn must come. Now Cambridge and Oxford must
really look to this.' The belief in the power of the Universities to
stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as
'one of the dissolvents of the age--as mischievous as his extravagances
will let him be'; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as 'pernicious'; and
talks of John Stuart Mill as a 'demagogue.' She was no doctrinaire. 'One
ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed. It is no use to
give the meat before you give the hunger.' She was delighted at a letter
of St. Hilaire's, in which he said, 'We have a system and no results; you
have results and no system.' Yet she had a deep sympathy with the wants
of the people. She was horrified at something Babbage told her of the
population of some of the manufacturing towns who are _worked out_ before
they attain to thirty years of age. 'But I am persuaded that the remedy
will not, cannot come from the people,' she adds. Many of her letters
are concerned with the question of the higher education of women. She
discusses Buckle's lecture on 'The Influence of Women upon the Progress
of Knowledge,' admits to M. Guizot that women's intellectual life is
largely coloured by the emotions, but adds: 'One is not precisely a fool
because one's opinions are greatly influenced by one's affections. The
opinions of men are often influenced by worse things.' Dr. Whewell
consults her about lecturing women on Plato, being slightly afraid lest
people should think it ridiculous; Comte writes her elaborate letters on
the relation of women to progress; and Mr. Gladstone promises that Mrs.
Gladstone will carry out at Hawarden the suggestions contained in one of
her pamphlets. She was always very practical, and never lost her
admiration for plain sewing.

All through the book we come across interesting and amusing things. She
gets St.