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. Hilaire to order a large, sensible bonnet for her in Paris, which was at once christened the ‘Aristotelian,’ and was supposed to be the only useful bonnet in England.  Grote has to leave Paris after the coup d’etat, he tells her, because he cannot bear to see the establishment of a Greek tyrant.  Alfred de Vigny, Macaulay, John Stirling, Southey, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hallam, and Jean Jacques Ampere all contribute to these pleasant pages.  She seems to have inspired the warmest feelings of friendship in those who knew her.  Guizot writes to her:  ’Madame de Stael used to say that the best thing in the world was a serious Frenchman.  I turn the compliment, and say that the best thing in the world is an affectionate Englishman.  How much more an Englishwoman!  Given equal qualities, a woman is always more charming than a man.’

Lucie Austin, afterwards Lady Duff Gordon, was born in 1821.  Her chief playfellow was John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham’s garden was her playground.  She was a lovely, romantic child, who was always wanting the flowers to talk to her, and used to invent the most wonderful stories about animals, of whom she was passionately fond.  In 1834 Mrs. Austin decided on leaving England, and Sydney Smith wrote his immortal letter to the little girl: