been censured are by no means blameless, when considered artistically. The confidence between Jane Eyre and Rochester is much too sudden and excessive. There is too little attractiveness in the heroine to account for a violent passion in such a man. The explanation is inadequate. Why should so much fondness be lavished upon this demure, keen-eyed little woman? Why should it be? we ask; and the reply is, It would not be so with us; and a feeling of contempt for the infatuation of this otherwise astute and daring man of the world is the result.

The characters, also, though drawn with mastery, are too strongly marked. Rochester is the type of one order of mind; St. John Rivers of another; and the features in each case are exaggerated to produce an effective contrast. Still, both are of the grand order of men. The broad-chested, grimmouthed Rochester, sweeping past us on his black horse Mesrour, and followed by his Gytrash-like sleuth hound, is a modern apparition of Black Bothwell, somewhat more vivid and life-like than Mr. Aytoun has succeeded in raising. It is like passing from the intoxicating fumes of a witch's cave into the still severity of an Attic porch when we quit this burly northern Viking and make St. John's acquaintance. St. John is the warrior-priest, cool and inflexible as death. His integrity is austere, his conscientiousness implacable. It is impossible to love him; nay, even Rochester, in his devilish madness, is preferable to this inexorable priest. Yet the man is not tranquil; there is a passionate unrest at the bottom of his heart. A statue of snow, and fire burns underneath! But the fire will not thaw the ice. He will die ere the passion vanquish him -ere he abandon the mission on which the Great Captain has sent him-ere he flee from the fiends he has been called to conquer. There is no impulse of tenderness; he never relents; one last touch of human sorrow for his moorland birthplace, strangely affecting in such a man, and then the sacrifice is completed.

'Let us rest here,' said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers of a bat

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talion of rocks guarding a sort of pass, beyond which the beck rushed down a waterfall; and where, still a little further, the mountain shook off turf and flower, had only heath for raiment and crag for gem; where it exaggerated the wild to the savage, and exchanged the fresh for the frowning, where it guarded the forlorn hope of solitude, and a last refuge for silence.

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I took a seat; St. John stood near me. He looked up the pass and down the hollow; his glance wandered away with the stream, and returned to trathe unclouded heaven which coloured it; he removed his hat, let the breeze stir his hair and kiss his brow. He seemed in communion with the genius of the haunt; with his eye he bade farewell to something.

'And I shall see it again,' he said aloud, in dreams, when I sleep by the Ganges, and again in a more remote hour-when another slumber overcomes me on the shore of a darker stream.' An Strange words of a strange love! austere patriot's passion for his fatherland! He sat down; for half an hour we never spoke-neither he to me nor I to him.

Shirley presents a notable contrast to Miss Brontë's other novels. In them there is a profound and frequently overmastering sense of the intense dreariness of existence to certain classes. The creative spirit of poetry and romance breaks at times through the dull and stagnant life; but as a rule it is different; and Villette, especially, becomes monotonous from the curb maintained upon the imagination. But Shirley is a Holiday of the Heart. It is glad, buoyant, sunshiny. The imagination is liberated, and revels in its liberty. It is the pleasant summer-time, and the worker is idling among the hills. The world of toil and suffering lies behind, but ever so far away. True, it must be again encountered, its problems resolved, its sores probed; the hard and obstinate war again waged manfully; but in the mean time the burn foams and sparkles through the glen; there is sunshine among the purple harebells; and the leaves in the birken glade dance merrily in the summer wind.

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore

Than labour in the deep mid ocean, wind, and wave, and oar; O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

In Villette Miss Brontë returns to the realities of life; but with power more conscious and sustained. She is less absorbed, and more comprehensive. There is the same passionate force; but the horizon is wider.

Villette is by no means a cheerful book; on the contrary, it is often very painful, especially where the central figure-the heroine-is involved. Her pain - her tearless pain is intense and protracted. And in this connexion Villette may be regarded as an elaborate psychological examination-the anatomy of a powerful but pained intellect -of exuberant emotions watchfully and vigilantly curbed. The character of this woman is peculiar, but drawn with a masterly hand. She endures much in a certain Pagan strength, not defiantly, but coldly and without submission. Over her heart and her intellect she exercises an incessant restraint-a restraint whose vigilant activity curbs every feeling, controls every speculation, becomes as it were engrained into her very nature. She, at least, will by all means look at the world as it is a hard, dry, practical world, not wholly devoid of certain compensating elementsand she will not be cajoled into seeing it, or making others see it, under any other light. For herself, she will live honestly upon the earth, and invite or suffer no delusions; strong, composed, self-reliant, sedate in the sustaining sense of independence. But cold and reserved as she may appear, she is not without imagination-rich, even, and affluent as a poet's. This is in a measure, however, the root of her peculiar misery. The dull and cheerless routine of homely life is not in her case relieved and penetrated by the creative intellect, but on the contrary, acquires through its aid a subtle and sensitive energy to hurt, to afflict, and to annoy. Thus she is not always strong; her imagination sometimes becomes loaded and surcharged; but she is always passionately ashamed of weakness. And through all this torture she is very solitary: her heart is very empty; she bears her own burden. There are cheerful hearths, and the pleasant firelight plays on the purple drapery that shuts out the inhospi

table night; but none are here who can convey to her the profound sympathy her heart needs pitifully; and so she passes on, pale and unrelenting, into the night. Undoubtedly there is a very subtle, some may say obnoxious, charm in this pale, watchful, lynx - like woman a charm, certainly, but for our own part we have an ancient prejudice in behalf of Shirley's' piquant and charming ferocity.

Miss Brontë always wrote earnestly, and in Villette she is peremptorily honest. In it she shows no mercy for any of the engaging ruses and artifices of life: with her it is something too real, earnest, and even tragic, to be wantonly trifled with or foolishly disguised. She will therefore tolerate no hypocrisy, however decent or fastidious; and her subdued and direct insight goes at once to the root of the matter. She carries this perhaps too farit may be she lacks a measure of charity and toleration, not for what is bad for that there must be no toleration-but for what is humanly weak and insufficient. Graham Bretton, for instance, with his light hair and kind heart and pleasant sensitiveness, is ultimately treated with a certain implied contempt; and this solely because he happens to be what God made him, and not something deeper and more devout, the incarnation of another and more vivid kind of goodness, which it is not in his nature to be, and to which he makes no claim. It is the patience, the fortitude, the endurance, the strong love that has been consecrated by Death and the Grave, the spirit that has been tried in fire and mortal pain and temptation,-it is these alone she can utterly admire. We believe she is wrong. But as we recal the lone woman sitting by the desolate hearthstone, and remember all that she lost and suffered, we cannot blame very gravely the occasional harshness and impatience of her language when dealing with men who have been cast in a different mould.

Villette excels Miss Brontë's other fictions in the artistic skill with which the characters are--I use the word advisedly-developed. She brings us into contact with certain men and women with whom she

wishes to make us acquainted. She writes no formal biography; there is no elaborate introduction; the characters appear incidently during the course of the narrative, and by degrees are worked into the heart of the every-day life with which the story is concerned. But the dissection goes on patiently all the timeso leisurely and yet so ruthlessly— one homely trait accumulated upon another with such steady, untiring pertinacity, that the man grows upon us line by line, feature by feature, until his idiosyncrasy is stamped and branded upon the brain. Probably the most genuine power is manifested in the mode in which the interest is shifted from Graham Bretton to the ill-favoured little despot-Paul Emmanuel. No essential change takes place in their characters, they remain the same, the colours in which they were originally painted were quite faithful, perfectly accurate--not by any means exagge rated for subsequent effect and contrast. It is only that a deeper insight has been gained by us, and if our original judgment undergoes modification, it is not because any new or inconsistent element has been introduced, but because, the conditions remaining the same, we see further. Leaf after leaf has been unfolded with a cold and impartial hand, until we have been let down into the innermost hearts of the men, and taught by the scrutiny a new sense of their relative value and worthiness. And Paul Emmanuel is surely a very rich and genuine conception. The Professor' will ever be associated in our memory with a certain soft and breezy laughter; for though the love heinspires in the heroine is very deep and even pathetic after its kind, yet the whole idea of the man is wrought and worked out in a spirit of joyous and mellow ridicule, that is full of affection, however, and perhaps at times closely akin to tears.

M. Heger, of the Brussels Pension, was probably the original of Paul Emmanuel; but we cannot help believing that the author of Vanity Fair was in Miss Brontë's thoughts when she wrote. Thackeray was, as we have said, after the Great Duke,' her peculiar hero; their portraits hung in the parsonage parlour side by side.

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And there came up a lion out of Judah!' she exclaimed, when she first saw Lawrence's picture of the giant. To him, moreover, she dedicated Jane Eyre, as to one in whom she detected an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised.' When she came to know him her admiration did notabate. Thackeray is a Titan of mind. His presence and powers impress one deeply in an intellectual sense; I do not see him or know him as a man. All the others are subordinate.' Our many-sided satirist was, however, to her, a tantalizing study, an enigma she could not quite solve. She admired him, she honoured him, but he puzzled her. She was angry with him because he did not, as she believed, adequately use his great powers; he excited in her ire and sorrow, as well as gratitude and admiration. She rebelled against his judgment; she vehemently combated his conclusions. Why should he lead so harassing a life? Why should his mocking tongue so perversely deny the better feelings of his better moods ?' To the last she could not quite fathom or compass him; but the little woman did not hesitate to grapple with the Philistine. The giant sate before me; I was moved to speak to him of some of his shortcomings; one by one the faults came into my head, and one by one I brought them out, and sought some expla nation or defence. He did defend himself like a great Turk and heathen that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself.' How graphic! But she will allow no one else to attack him. Some people have been in the habit of terming him the second writer of the day; it just depends on himself whether or not these critics shall be justified in their award. He need not be second. God made him second to no man. If I were he I would show myself as I am, not as critics report me; at any rate I would do my best. But Mr. Thackeray is easy and indolent, and seldom cares to do his best.' There is certainly a reserve of strength in everything Thackeray puts his hand to; the grand seriousness of the latter half of The Newcomes, however, would, I

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think, have satisfied his vehement kindly little critic. But it might not be. There was no Charlotte Brontë at Haworth when the Colonel answered "Adsum.'

To ourselves, one of the most surprising gifts of the authoress of these volumes is the racy and inimitable English she writes. No other Englishwoman ever commanded such language-terse and compact, and yet fiercely eloquent. We have already had occasion to notice the absence of comparison or metaphor in her poetry; the same is true of her prose. The lava is at white heat; it pours down clear, silent, pitiless; there are no bright bubbles nor gleaming foam. A mind of this order-tempered, and which cuts like steel-uses none of the pretty dexterities of the imagination; for to use these infers a pause of satis fied reflection and conscious enjoyment which it seldom or never experiences. Its rigorous intellect seeks no trappings of pearl or gold. It is content to abide in its white veil of marble-naked and chaste, like Death' in the Vatican. Yet, the still severity is more effective than any paint could make it. The chisel has been held by a Greek, the marble hewed from Pentelicus. Compare, side by side, these pictures of the Winter and Summer twilight:

The ground was hard, the air was still, my road was lonely; I walked fast till I got warm, and then I walked slowly to enjoy and analyse the species of pleasure brooding for me in the hour and situation. It was three o'clock; the church bell tolled as I passed under the belfry; the charm of the situation lay in its approaching dininess, in the lowgliding and pale beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen, to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds which stirred occasionally in the hedge looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop.

On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon, pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momently. She looked over Hay, which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life. My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could not tell; but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams and the sough of the most remote.

A splendid midsummer shone over England; skies so pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour even singly our wave-girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the south, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs of Albion. The hay was all got in; the fields round Thornfield were green and shorn; the roads white and baked; the trees were in their dark prime; hedge and wood, full leaved and deeply tinted, contrasted well with the sunny hue of the cleared meadows between.

It was now the sweetest hour of the twenty-four. 'Day its fervid fires had wasted,' and dew fell cool on panting plain and scorched summit. Where the sun had gone down in simple state-pure of the pomp of clouds-spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, on one hill peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven. The east had its own charm of fine deep blue, and its own modest gem-a rising and solitary star; soon it would boast the moon, but she was yet beneath the horizon.

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And now, closing these volumes for the last time, a profound sense of regret comes upon us that a woso powerfully and uniquely gifted should have been taken from us on the verge of her ripe maturity. Such regrets, however, are idle and unavailing. We will not say after life's fitful fear she sleeps well;' that was not the boon she prayed for; but rather try, as we best may, to echo the grave hope of our poet :We revere, and while we hear The tides of music's golden sea Setting towards eternity,

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Uplifted high in heart and hope are we, Until we doubt not that for one so true There must be other, nobler work to do.

SHIRLEY.