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air worthy of Mrs. Candour, "the existence of coarseness here and there in her works, otherwise so entirely noble. I only ask those who read them to consider her life, which has been openly laid bare before them, and to say how it could be otherwise. She saw few men; and among these few were one or two with whom she had been acquainted since early girlhood, who had shown her much friendliness and kindness

through whose family she had received many pleasuresfor whose intellect she had a great respect-but who talked before her, if not to her, with as little reticence as Rochester talked to Jane Eyre. Take this in connection with her poor brother's sad life, and the out-spoken people among whom she lived; remember her strong feeling of the duty of representing life as it really is, not as it ought to be; and then do her justice for all that she was, and all that she would have been had God spared her, rather than censure her because circumstances forced her to touch pitch, as it were, and by it her hand was for a moment defiled. It was but skin-deep. Every change in her life was purifying her; it hardly could raise her. Again I cry, 'If she had but lived!" "

Charlotte Brontë's works are far from being "otherwise so entirely noble;" they have defects in abundance: but there never were books more free from the stain here so quietly assumed, and so feelingly lamented as unavoidable. Rochester does not talk without reticence to Jane Eyre. The writer never did touch pitch: she might paint it; but it was in the safety of her own innocency, and we lose patience at being told, with all this array of exculpation, that she needed "purifying." Coarse materials, indeed, she too much deals with; and her own style has something rude and uncompromising in it, not always in accordance with customary ideas of what is becoming in a female writer; but it would be scarcely possible to name a writer who, in handling such difficult subject-matter, carried the reader so safely through by the unseen guardianship and unconsciously exercised influence of her stainless purity and unblemished rectitude. The conventional proprieties of speech and subject-matter she disregards, indeed; her delicacy lost some of its bloom abroad, and she may be said with justice to want

refinement; but even that is the conventional refinement rather than the real one. It has been well said, and every reader perceives it, or ought to do so, that her plain speaking is itself the result of her purity.

What she has that jars on us often in her writings is not so much these things as a certain harshness, a love of the naked fact too unsparing, and a tendency to believe that what is attractive scarcely can be true. In the school of ladylike refined writing, true in its own sphere, enlivening, softening, and elevating, which deals gently with weak mortality, and, reversing the saying which dissuades us from breaking a butterfly on a wheel, punishes vice with a knitting-needle, which compels into courtly phrases the swelling form and native hideousness of crime, and throws over the stern precipices and gloomshrouded abysses of life-remorse and terror and madness-frail bridges of happy fancies and spirit-consoling hopes,-in this school we have many proficients. High in the list stands Mrs. Gaskell's own name. Her graceful fictions have power to beguile us, to cheer us, to instruct us; and if with too silver a voice she echoes the dread undertones of the mystery of sin and suffering and death, we remember that reality has more sides than one, that each side has its truth,—and welcome the genius which instinctively turns to that aspect where beauty predominates, and whose darkest shades are error and frailties and penitence. But Miss Brontë had a different call: her feet were rougher shod to walk through both life and art; and if she does not lead us through the dark caverns of life, at least she does not attempt to measure their depths with a silken thread, or hang pale lights of fancy in their mouths. As she passes over the lesser evils of life, she describes them in their native ruggedness; through the depths she steals, in general, in the silence of fortitude; and only now and then some brief cry of personal anguish rings sharp and sudden through the darkness.

If in this paper we have not swelled the number of those little paragraphs which publishers delight to cull, and which have pretty well exhausted the "combinations and permutations" of the language of eulogy, it is not because we have not a deep sense of the value of a record which raises the life of the woman so high above the triumphs of the artist, or of the beauty and the skill with which that record has been framed; but because we love to believe that authors of sense and delicacy estimate indiscriminate laudation at its true worth.

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SIR E. B. LYTTON, NOVELIST, PHILOSOPHER, AND POET.*

[April 1859.]

What will he do with it? and My Novel are Sir Bulwer Lytton's last and best works. This is no small distinction. It is a remarkable thing for a man to write some twenty books of imaginative fiction, and yet to retain a vigour of mind and a freshness of imagination capable of making new efforts which not only equal but surpass the first fruits of his genius. It is true that these works and The Caxtons are not so much his own as some of his previous writings; but perhaps they are not altogether the worse for that. Grafted on a stock of Sterne or Dickens, they flourish with a new energy, and bloom with a fairness and completeness which the scion on its own roots had never attained to. Pelham alone of his earlier works enters into rivalry with his last two novels; while it contrasts with them in being preeminently his own. A first work-for Falkland was but an abortive attempt-is almost always more characteristic than any later one of the mind of the writer. There he does not spare himself; he brings into play all his energies, is lavish of all his resources, and gives a glimpse of every facet of his mind. His powers may afterwards develope in particular directions, and the proportions originally indicated no longer be preserved; but the man himself and the cha

* The Novels and Romances of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. 20 vols. London: Routledge and Co. 1858.

The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. 5 vols, London: Chapman and Hall.

racteristics of his genius will generally be more compendiously illustrated in the first work which really has called out his full powers than in any subsequent one. And since Pelham first startled and pleased the world of novel-readers with its brisk witticisms, its sharp sarcasms and lively caricatures, its clever descriptions and skilful narrative, and annoyed them by its hardness, its affectations, and its pseudo-sentiment, every subsequent work has reflected the same merits and the same defects. But the circle of merits has widened, if that of defects has not contracted. What a world of patient industry, what an indefatigable striving to make the most of his vocation, what an up-hill energy all these novels display! Never was man more true to his calling of artist than Bulwer has been. No hasty slipshod productions have ever disgraced his powers. The love of fame is his darling passion; but no success has ever deluded him into believing that the wreath was safely grasped, and that he might sink into indolent security.

Much of this zeal is due, no doubt, to the high estiImate which the author has formed to himself of the influence and position of a novel-writer. He seems really to have persuaded himself that to write good romances is the highest achievement of the human intellect; possibly inferior to that of producing a great epic poem, but certainly by no other effort to be rivalled in its beneficial influence, or in its claims upon the gratitude of mankind. It is natural for a man somewhat to overrate the importance of his own sphere of activity; but it is obvious enough that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's judgment has been led further astray than it should have been by the fact that he has been successful in light literature, and attempted at least to write an epic poem. He exaggerates preposterously the influence of a novel-writer. He makes the wide diffusion which naturally belongs to entertaining writing, and the permanence which is inherent in printer's ink, too much the measure of the merit

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