'cold obstruction.' Though living in a churchyard, she could not, as a girl, walk over a grave unawares without turning faint. The loss of an acquaintance made a ghastly void which she feared to think of. Her realizing power was her tyrantfor such a nature and temperament as hers solitude was terrible.

But now came a real legitimate diversion from loneliness and gloom-not in fame and success, which only brought a transient and fitful relief, but in a straightforward proposal of marriage, made, not in admiration of her genius, but herself. In her heart she did not care for being thought clever-she thought the term meant a shrewd, very ugly, meddling, talking woman;' but here was one who loved her for herself, at an age when women value and are more grateful for attachment than in youth. However, Mr. Brontë liked things to go on as they had done. He objected to his curate's marrying his daughter; and the exemplary daughter of thirty-seven submitted to his decision, and dismissed her lover. She could not vex him by her opposition to whom she had shown implicit obedience her whole life. We are not told how, after some months, the subject was revived, and the father's consent obtained, not for his daughter to leave him, but for her husband to share her charge-a charge which he felt so binding, that when subsequently he was offered a living he declined it, as feeling bound to Haworth while Mr. Brontë lived. In brief terms we are told of Charlotte Brontë's weddingday, the only witnesses her two oldest friends, Miss Wooler and E., of whom we have heard so much. The father had a consistent return of reluctance at the last moment, which made him, we have no doubt characteristically enough, refuse to be present. So Miss Wooler, in the emergency, had to give her faithful friend and pupil away. It is one of Charlotte's best traits, her keeping up a lasting steady friendship with this good lady. She was married June 29, 1854. Then follow the simple mention of months of great happiness and remarkable contrast to a life of trial and depression, too soon brought to an end by some imprudence of over-exertion.

'Soon after her return, she was attacked by new sensations of perpetual nausea, and ever-recurring faintness. After this state of things had lasted for some time, she yielded to Mr. Nicholls's wish that a doctor should be sent for. He came, and assigned a natural cause for her miserable indisposition; a little patience and all would go right. She, who was ever patient in illness, tried hard to bear up and bear on. But the dreadful sickness increased and increased, till the very sight of food occasioned nausea. wren would have starved on what she ate during those last six weeks," says one. Tabby's health had suddenly and utterly given way, and she died in this time of distress and anxiety respecting the last daughter of

"A

the house she had served so long. Martha tenderly waited on her mistress, and from time to time tried to cheer her with the thought of the baby that was coming. "I dare say I shall be glad sometime," she would say; "but I am so ill-so weary- -" Then she took to her bed, too weak to sit up.'

-Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 321, 322.

Two last letters are given to her friend E- and a Brussels schoolfellow. In the last she speaks of her father of course I could not leave him'-and her husband, No better, fonder husband than mine, it seems to me there can be in the world' 'I do not want now for companionship in health and the tenderest nursing in sickness;' and then in a very few weeks the end came.

'About the third week in March there was a change; a low wandering delirium came on; and in it she begged constantly for food and even for stimulants. She swallowed eagerly now; but it was too late. Wakening for an instant from this stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband's woeworn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her. "Oh!" she whispered forth, "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy."

Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.'—Ibid. vol. ii. p. 324.

Who can sum up such a character? who can reconcile its contradictions, account for its eccentricities, nicely discriminate and mark out its good and evil, bring the whole nature into harmony? We have not attempted the task. A strong original character vividly portrayed has its lesson, whether we fully understand and master it or not. If to some we have seemed over-lenient to certain grave errors it discloses, to them we would protest that our tenderness has not been won by mere admiration for strength of intellect; but we cannot realize the contrast, and almost antagonism between mind and temperament, without perceiving a force of temptation and trial to which few are exposed, and respecting, and even reverencing accordingly, that sense of duty, dim and narrow as it often was, which directed her daily steps and influenced her whole existence. How can we do otherwise than pity that life of labour and pain,' where duty was a harsh master, and gave so few rewards; and trust that in the period of late happiness which preceded her end, she may have been guided to the easy yoke and light burden which should have been her service in the heat of her dreary day.

We have already commented on the one great blot and failure on Mrs. Gaskell's part. As a work of art, this biography cannot be too highly commended. When we consider how her task must have appeared to herself at its

commencement, what small store of incident lay before her out of which to frame a narrative, how uneventful and externally insignificant was the life given her to portray, we own we wonder at her courage and success. When some local worthy passes from the scene, prominent, almost necessary, in his own sphere, and his friends contemplate the gap and loss, it is a universal impulse to write his life. One so important, so loved, so missed, should not be forgotten. The world must certainly be told of his excellences, and learn to know him. So Mr. So-and-so is deputed to write a biography. If this gentleman is a dull man, he probably accomplishes his task, and does not know that he has failed. Our readers may guess how Miss Brontë would fare under his hands. If he has taste, experience, and discernment, he presently becomes aware that this life, so impressive in its sphere, presents, under his handling, no points sufficiently distinguishing to awake new interest. Peculiar traits so pleasing to friends cannot be conveyed to strangers. The good deeds are common-place where the face, and form, and voice that set them off, are away. He feels that so far from doing honour to the dead, he would be committing the injustice of exposing him to an unfair ordeal, of parading him where he was not understood or cared for. And after weighing and deliberating for a sufficient length of time, he comes to the conclusion that most men's lives are to be witnessed, not recorded; that their example is for their own generation, not a future one. Mrs. Gaskell understood her work better, and realized from the first what she had to do-not the comparatively easy task of recording events, but delineating a character without the aids which incidents and adventure always furnish. Impressed by her subject, she was roused rather than repelled by its difficulties. Her fellow-feeling as an authoress, her tenderness as a friend, sympathy and admiration, pity, resentment, all stimulated her to the effort-for an effort it must have been-of presenting this various, contradictory, yet strong, interesting and remarkable woman, to the world. The wants and voids of that mind she could not feel as we must feel them. Therefore she is sustained throughout by undoubted reliance on the intrinsic excellence as well as genius of her subject, and rejoices to bring all her own powers to her task. And admirably suited they are to the purpose-her pathos, her romance, her graphic descriptions, her skill in drawing character, her singular felicity of arrangement and combination, all join to produce a picture harmonious, thrilling, impressive; which, if it rouses criticism, demands attention, and compels interest, and forms, as every forcible history of an original mind must do, a valuable addition to the world's experience,

146

ART. V.-L'Angleterre au dix-huitième siècle; Études et Portraits pour servir à l'Histoire du Gouvernement Anglais, depuis la fin du Règne de Guillaume III. Par M. CHARLES RÉMUSAT, de l'Académie Française. Deux Volumes. Paris, 1856.

THE reign of Queen Anne interests us in a way for which neither the grandeur of the characters which played out their parts in that scene, nor the greatness of the results of their policy, can account. Hardly a single personage acted without a consciousness of selfishness and insincerity fatal to the very conception of noble undertakings. At the end of the reign no generous or profound principle had been enunciated for the first time; no new phase of the constitution had developed itself. The battle-field of that constitution was far away, and the echoes of the conflict, prolonged from the militia debates of Charles I.'s last Parliament and the Civil Wars, and through the reciprocal anathemas of the petitioners and abhorrers of his son and namesake's government, even to the brief but decisive struggle for liberty against James II., had long since subsided. Only the prominence of party badges told through what dangers the State had passed, and by what means it had escaped. But, though the storm of civil discord had almost died away, men's passions still, as it were, rose and fell with the uneasy swell of suspicions and plots which enabled bystanders to measure the height of yesterday's waves.

From this point of view the period in question derives its main historical interest. The memories in which names or nominal distinctions were steeped invested them with an unreal importance, and excited politicians to contend in mock-serious combat for principles which had been determined already, and foregone conclusions. Parties or factions might make the Stuart's cause a war cry, and carry the country with them; but, as soon as ever the question was put, Will you give up a 'single privilege which the Civil Wars or the Revolution esta'blished?' the nation which had made a martyr of Sacheverell ignored its own enthusiasm, and refused to hold solved problems any longer for open questions. Party zeal needed badges and watchwords for party purposes; but even parties, when called upon to make good their own professions, turned a deaf ear to all propositions which might compromise England. They suffered George I. to be proclaimed, Bolingbroke and Ormond to flee their country, and Charles Edward to march into England,

without stirring a foot, or raising their voice for their favourite cause. Their leaders might well be deceived by the contrast between the apparent sense of terms, and the obligation to action, which they were not understood to connote. We, from our vantage-ground of time, can better compute what the state of public feeling really was. The importance of the study of the period consists to us in the observation, how the grand innovations, fought for and won on other occasions, had gradually worked their way into the national system, and modified all the relations of parties and society in accordance with themselves. In William's reign the progress towards this result had begun; but the contest was still too recent, and the indignation against the old régime still too little affirmed by the recognition of the new. Under George I., and Walpole, the contested principles were practically allowed, and any exceptional violation of them considered just matter for censure and explanation. The regular appeals of ministers to the people, through the press, and through Parliament; the responsibility of administrations to the nation for the sovereign's acts, spite of any plea of the sovereign's personal intervention; and, yet more, the felt inability of an almost unanimous cabinet, backed up by a strong Parliamentary majority, and the personal inclinations of the monarch, to rescind the nation's vote of exclusion of the Stuarts, make the reign of Anne the debatable ground, well marked out and defined, between the old and the new aspects of the constitution.

But, even more than this, more even than the causes which have erected a period, prolific chiefly in party tracts, into the 'golden age' of literature, what engages our fancy is that strong personal element, which manifests itself so clearly, as well in that literature, as in the conduct of affairs. Queen Anne's era bears the same relation to sober history which Mr. Disraeli's novels do to a serious political treatise. It is as though the spirit of the Parisian coteries of the time of Louis XIV., and the regency of Orleans, had blended with the violent humours and passions of an English electioneering season. Not till the issue of the struggle, which surprises us from its complete independence of the vicissitudes of the struggle itself, can we discover the true national pertinacity of adherence to a deliberate decision. The intermediate period is given up to a chaos of drawing-room schemes, back-stairs' plots, and the intrigues of club-committees. We feel (and there is a certain charm in the discovery) that the State is, after all, not an abstraction, but an aggregate of living beings, moved by the same impulses, and susceptible of the same vexations and pleasures, with the rest of mankind. Posterity is brought more