We do not at all like to spare Mrs. Lynn Linton, whose death is announeed to-day. She was in an especial degree one of those who are personages as well as authors in our intellectual and social world. What a striking and suggestive personal career was hers! The daughter of country vicar and the grand-doughter of a Bishop—of close clerical extract—alike on the paternal and the maternal side, one may say, if we may speak in unveiled words, that she was an unbeliever in her teens, and practically never, in her nearly four-score years, a real believer in the croed of Christianity. And here was a writer, sending "copy" to the newspaper Press and the pul er to the very last, whose personal recollections of Robert Southey were keen and fresh to the hour of her death, and who fought the battle of a beginner in literature and journalism under the counsel and championship of Walter Savage Lander. Two of her books are among the most extraordinary and astonishing that the century has produced in the Anglo-Saxon language—her Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland and her Joshua Davidson. In the first she put some astonishing autobiographical material into the life in the first person of an imaginary person of the opposite sex to her own, and we the world startling revelations of the intimate life of real men and women in the intellectual world of that period. In the latter the hero was, in point of fact, Jesus Christ in the outer form of a poor London East End car-enter, visionary, religious enthusiast suppose those of us must be getting old whoeo recollection is still green of the days when the whole reading world was wildly agog over those Girl of the Period articles of hers which did more than anything else to make the fortune of the Saturday Review when the Saturday Review was indeed a fortune, and when, for a time at any rate, one of her contemporary brilliant writers in the papers of that journal was the man who is to-day Prime Minister of England! Again, Mrs. Lynn Linton was, like the great philosopher Hobbes and many other personages of massive an dependent intelligence, wholly north: dox in respect of the foundations of faith, whether in Sociology or Theology, and at the same time a fierce challenger of the recognised creed, social and political, of the conventional reformers.
15th July.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.