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lines of that society, and until she was seventeen was sufficiently given to love of music, dancing, and all social pleasures to enjoy and profit by her youth. She received a new impulse on listening to the preaching of William Savery, and thenceforth consecrated her life to religion and good works, became a "plain Quaker," married into the strictest sect, and, some years later, was made a minister, and continued all her life to speak and preach before the congregations of Friends. From her girlhood she had been interested in helping the poor and sick, and had visited workhouses and other institutions, where she introduced the "monitorial system" which was to effect such excellent results in her later labors among the convicts. Her first visit to Newgate was accidental, and, although she was deeply impressed by the misery she found there, it was not followed up until 1817, when her great work began. She was at that date in the thirty-seventh year of her age. Mrs. Pitman gives a clear, forcible, but not overdrawn picture of the condition of Newgate Prison, and it is so dark a story that one wonders what had become of the last vestiges of the humanitarian feelings left from Howard's ministrations forty years before. But nothing can be more hysterical and spasmodic than the practice of philanthropy, save among the few who have full sympathy and full knowledge of the miseries of the poor. If abuses could be overcome in a week, prisons, tenement-houses, and orphan-asylums swept and garnished in a day, there might be more workers. But for wise, patient, and toilsome processes different means are required, and, fortunately for the whole world which called itself Christian, Mrs. Fry knew how to use them. Her personal influence and constraining power upon others seem to have been of the rarest sort. Her methods were of the simplest, demanding first personal decency, then order; and, the instincts of self-respect thus fortified, she acted on the supposition that no felon was too degraded to be governed by reason and in a measure reclaimed. Supplemented by the abolition of the bloody laws that inflicted capital punishment for venial crimes, her work was one of the greatest humanitarian achievements of the nineteenth century. It was, too, the work of a pioneer, and gave the original impulse to much that has been accomplished in other fields and by different methods.

Mr. Higginson has done Margaret Fuller's memory good service by this biography, which, for the first time, clearly and in every-day language offers the history of a woman to whom nobility and a certain greatness are always conceded, but who has usually been written about in a way that made her wisest acts look foolish. "A woman whose aims were high and whose services great," Mr. Higginson characterizes her,—"one whose intellect was uncommon, whose activity incessant, whose life varied, and whose death dramatic," but who, he goes on to say, has been left by the tone of her "Memoirs" "a little too much in the clouds." In contrast with a career like Mrs. Fry's, Margaret Fuller's unbounded hopes, eager efforts, but unrealized ideals, must seem doubly vague, diffused, and ineffective. But it is Mr. Higginson's wish to show clearly that an intense desire for practical action lay beneath all her intellectual aspirations, and that even the highest thought, existing as mere thought, was not enough for her. "I never in my life have had the happy feeling of really doing anything," she writes at one time to W. H. Channing. "I can only console myself for these semblances of actions by seeing that others seem to be in some degree aided by them. But, oh! really to feel the glow of action, without its weariness, what heaven it must be!" Margaret Fuller seems, however, to belong to her epoch, which aimed to be world-wide, but was not, save in the case of Emerson, actually world-deep. It was her misfortune that a great deal of talk was going on which discussed almost every subject concerning the possibilities of human progress, and that the little fishes often talked like whales. Touching humanity and literature both with deeper insight and quicker sympathy than others, eager to know all that great thinkers thought and knew, and yet at the same time marvellously self-sustained, it would have been better for her to have lived among a coterie whose theories had not only for a starting-point a basis of sound erudition, but a goal which could be justified to the intellect as well as to the imagination. Mrs. Howe's Life of Margaret Fuller has, however, been too recently discussed in these pages to allow us to dwell upon the incidents of her career. What we should