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Updated: May 24, 2025
Nevertheless, in spite of the Taylors and the Martineaus, says William Taylor's biographer, Robberds: "The love of society almost necessarily produces the habit of indulging in the pleasures of the table; and, though he cannot be charged with having carried this to an immoderate excess, still the daily repetition of it had taxed too much the powers of nature and exhausted them before the usual period."
For weeks after I first met this couple there rang in my ears that expression of Victor Hugo's, "To be blind and to be loved what happier fate!" But Harriet's lover was poor in purse and his family was likewise poor, and the thrifty Martineaus vigorously opposed the mating.
When I heard the pebbles and the gravel falling upon the coffin my courage gave way; I staggered and asked the two Martineaus to steady me. They took me, half-dead, to the chateau of Sache, where the owners very kindly invited me to stay, and I accepted.
Seccombe calls it; he continues: "Among the high lights of the illuminated capital of East Anglia were the Cromes, the Opies, John Sell Cotman, Elizabeth Fry, Dr. Rigby, the father of Lady Eastlake; but pre- eminent above all reigned the twin cliques of Taylors and Martineaus, who amalgamated at impressive intervals for purposes of mutual elevation and refinement.
Miss Martineau condensed the six volumes into two, and what is most strange, Comte thought so well of the work that he wrote a glowing acknowledgment of it. The Martineaus were of good old Huguenot stock, and the French language came easy to Harriet.
I could then, without witnesses, kiss that sacred brow with all the love I had never been allowed to utter. The third day, in a cool autumn morning, we followed the countess to her last home. She was carried by the old huntsman, the two Martineaus, and Manette's husband. We went down by the road I had so joyously ascended the day I first returned to her.
Opie, the Martineaus, and the Aldersons, took kindly to the same forces in him; forces descended from that New England Puritanism which produced half the great men and women of an earlier America.
"The soul knows all things," says Emerson, "and knowledge is only a remembering." The Martineaus were Huguenots, a stern, sturdy stock that suffered exile rather than forego the right of free-thought and free speech. These are the people who are the salt of the earth. And yet as I read history I see that they are the people who have been hunted by dogs, and followed by armed men carrying fagots.
Now Norwich, where the Martineaus lived, is a long way from Manchester, where Harriet's lover preached, or it was then, in stagecoach times. It cost money, too, to send letters. And there was quite an interval once when Harriet sent several letters, and anxiously looked for one; but none arrived. Then word came that the brilliant young preacher was ill; he wished to see his betrothed.
The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock, which in England belonged to the liberal Presbyterianism out of which much of British Unitarianism came. The righteousness of a persecuted race had left an austere impress upon their domestic and social life. Intellectually they inherited the advanced liberalism of their day. Harriet Martineau's earlier piety had been of the most fervent sort.
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