human
she was not more than twenty-nine herself, and had known neither the passion of love nor motherhood. Her all-embracing love of humanity made the subject of interest to her, but there is upon the whole too much of Reason and too little of the heart in the little volume. Circumstances over which she had no control were soon to teach her for good and all that the affections will not be suppressed and peremptorily demand their share. When next she touched upon the subject she was a mother and confronted with the task of educating her own child in the long and frequent absences of a faithless and undeserving father. The
gpt
in Volume II of the posthumous edition of her works are the result of the joint teachings of maternal love and bitter experience. Here she is herself, an essentially human, loving woman, overflowing with tenderness and bound up closely with her child not merely by the ties of duty, but by those of an all-absorbing affection. Having thus tried to do justice to the author by accounting for what seems contradictory, we may frankly say that Mrs. Mason is an insufferable pedant. The Mr. Barlow of _Sandford and Merton_, while constantly moralising,--in doing which he draws far more sweeping conclusions than even Mrs. Mason--and arranging incidents to illustrate and anticipate his moral lessons like the best of stage-managers[41], at least does not obtrude her own personality. But the impeccable Mrs. Mason in her boundless self-confidence never loses an opportunity to introduce her own personality. Her benevolence is unlimited, and she is utterly incapable of doing wrong. If she inflicts bodily pain, it is that Reason has whispered to her that in doing so she avoids a greater evil. She puts her foot deliberately on a wounded bird's head,
human
. She teaches by example rather than precept, and the example somehow seems to be always herself. Never for a moment are the girls allowed a rest from the moral deluge. The first eight chapters of the little book contain the moral food for one single day, carefully divided into a morning, an afternoon and an evening of incessant moralising. Yet she is