sound views—­nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present.  This modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the cordiality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements.  Say that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that black is not so very black, he will reply, “Exactly.”  He has no hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public meeting and express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal; but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far.  His only bigotry is a bigotry against any clearly defined opinion; not in the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of coherent thought—­a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing.  The one thing he is staunch for is the utmost liberty of private haziness.

But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, rendering him incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are administered in a highly diluted form, make it a matter of rejoicing that there are clever, fair-minded men who will write books for him—­men very much above him in knowledge and ability, but not too remote from him in their habits of thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of history and science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton.  Among such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe entitles him to a high place.  He has prepared himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives proof of those important moral qualifications, impartiality, seriousness and modesty.  This praise is chiefly applicable to the long chapter on the history of Magic and Witchcraft, and to the two chapters on the antecedents and history of Persecution.

A further evidence of her wide culture and reading, and of her large critical ability, may also be found in the first number of the Fortnightly Review, for which she wrote the first of the “notices of new books” which it published.  This was a review of Mr. Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament.  The author was one of her friends, and the decorator of the rooms in which her Sunday receptions were held.  She praised the book very highly.  The first paragraph of this notice betrays her appreciation of the aesthetic movement in England, and her sympathy with its objects and spirit.  The moral value of aesthetic influences is characteristically expressed.  The influence of the environment, as she understood it, is here seen.  The largeness of her faith in the moral efficiency of material causes is nowhere so strongly expressed by her as in the words which follow.