The following letter relates to the controversy raging round Miss Martineau and her mesmerism.  Miss Barrett had evidently referred to it in a letter to Mr. Chorley, which has not been preserved.

To Mr. Chorley 50 Wimpole Street:  April 28, 1845.

Dear Mr. Chorley,—­I felt quite sure that you would take my postscript for a womanish thing, and a little doubtful whether you would not take the whole allusion (in or out of a postscript) for an impertinent thing; but the impulse to speak was stronger than the fear of speaking; and from the peculiarities of my position, I have come to write by impulses just as other people talk by them.  Still, if I had known that the subject was so painful to you, I certainly would not have touched on it, strong as my feeling has been about it, and full and undeniable as is my sympathy with our noble-minded friend, both as a woman and a thinker.  Not that I consider (of course I cannot) that she has made out anything like a ‘fact’ in the Tynemouth story—­not that I think the evidence offered in any sort sufficient; take it as it was in the beginning and unimpugned—­not that I have been otherwise than of opinion throughout that she was precipitate and indiscreet, however generously so, in her mode and time of advocating the mesmeric question; but that she is at liberty as a thinking being (in my mind) to hold an opinion, the grounds of which she cannot yet justify to the world.  Do you not think she may be?  Have you not opinions yourself beyond what you can prove to others?  Have we not all?  And because some of the links of the outer chain of a logical argument fail, or seem to fail, are we therefore to have our ‘honours’ questioned, because we do not yield what is suspended to an inner uninjured chain of at once subtler and stronger formation?  For what I venture to object to in the argument of the ‘Athenaeum’ is the making a moral obligation of an intellectual act, which is the first step and gesture (is it not?) in all persecution for opinion; and the involving of the ‘honour’ of an opponent in the motion of recantation she is invited to.  This I do venture to exclaim against.  I do cry aloud against this; and I do say this, that when we call it ‘hard,’ we are speaking of it softly.  Why, consider how it is!  The ‘Athenaeum’ has done quite enough to disprove the proving of the wreck story,[135] and no more at all.  The disproving of the proof of the wreck story is indeed enough to disprove the wreck story and to disprove mesmerism itself (as far as the proof of mesmerism depends on the proof of the wreck story, and no farther) with all doubters and undetermined inquirers; but with the very large class of previous believers, this disproof of a proof is a mere accident, and cannot be expected to have much logical consequence.  Believing that such things may be as this revelation of a wreck, they naturally are less exacting of the stabilities of the proving process.  What we think