completed the hand that wrote it would be cold in death. Most of us are acquainted with Molly Gibson, the doctor's daughter, and with Dr. Gibson himself, a trifle cynical but good-hearted and honourable. We see that his second wife, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, is not good enough for him; she is somewhat deceitful and tricky, accustomed to practise elegant gentilities on small means, and to turn over the greasy pages of a novel with a pair of scissors. His brilliant daughter, Cynthia, we feel will be a formidable rival to good little Molly, and so it turns out, for Roger Hamley, with a man's perverseness, at once falls in love with her. But worldly Cynthia deserts Roger, and Molly is taken at her true value. The story, as far as construction goes, is as commonplace as Mrs. Oliphant could choose, but Mrs. Gaskell's fine touches make it distinctly original. We are sometimes indifferent whether Mrs. Oliphant's heroines marry the right people or not; but our sympathies with Molly Gibson are as warm as if we had known and loved her all our lives. If Mrs. Gaskell had shown in Mary Barton and Ruth that she could write exciting and dramatic scenes, in Wives and Daughters she accomplished the still more difficult task of making the every-day story of a doctor's daughter as interesting as a romance. Only a few months before Mrs. Gaskell's death, George Sand observed to Lord Houghton, "Mrs. Gaskell has done what neither I nor any other female writer can accomplish— she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and yet which every girl will be the better for reading." When George Eliot wrote, in 1859, to thank Mrs. Gaskell for her "sweet, encouraging words," she says, "While the question of my powers was still undecided for me, I was conscious that my feeling towards life and art had some affinity with the feelings which had inspired Cranford, and the earlier chapters of Mary Barton." Wives and Daughters was not quite finished when Mrs. Gaskell was staying at a country house at Holybourne, near DEATH AT HOLYBOURNE. 189 Alton, in Hampshire, which she had purchased with the proceeds of her last book. She was talking with her daughters on Sunday, November 12, 1865, when she fell back and died suddenly at the age of fifty-five. Success, the love of her friends and family, the admiration of those who might have been her rivals, smiled on her, but the summons came. Surely when she "crossed the bar" there were hands stretched out to greet her, and voices to welcome her. She was buried in the place she most loved-at Knutsford -in the graveyard of the old Unitarian Chapel, and there, too, her husband was laid to rest beside her, in 1884. Tablets are put up to the memory of both in the Chapel of Cross Street, Manchester. Mrs. Gaskell did not begin to write till she was thirty-five, so her literary life only lasted about twenty years. Yet what work she gave! Besides her novels, she wrote A Dark Night's Work, and that exquisite idyll Cousin Phillis, which is like a delicate water-colour sketch. Only the story of a girl's slighted love, yet how it stirs the heart and touches the fount of tears! Mrs. Gaskell believed that the art of telling a story is born with some people, and cannot be acquired. We are told by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie that she and her sister were under the same roof with Mrs. Gaskell, at the house of Mr. and Mrs. George Smith at Hampstead, and she says that the remembrance of Mrs. Gaskell's voice comes back to her, harmoniously flowing on and on, " with spirit and intention and delightful emphasis, as we all sat indoors one gusty morning, listening to her ghost stories." For purity of tone, earnestness of spirit, depth of pathos, and lightness of touch, Mrs. Gaskell has not left her superior in fiction. One who knew her said, "she was what her books show her to have been, a wise, good woman. She was even more than wise or good. She had that true poetic feeling which exalts whatever it touches, and makes nothing common or unclean. She had that clear insight which sees all and believes in the best." IX. CHARLOTTE BRONTË. 1816-1855. Birth-Eccentricities of Mr. Brontë-Cowan Bridge-Round the kitchen fire-At Roe Head-An excursion to Bolton Abbey-A governess— At Brussels-Poems by Ellis, Currer, and Acton Bell-The Professor -Jane Eyre-Death of Emily-Shirley-Villette-Marriage-Death. OME authors seem like shadows; their voices interest, SOM voices we care little or nothing. With other authors the case is different; soul has spoken to soul, a responsive chord is touched, we feel a strange spiritual kinship with them ; they seem like our brothers, our sisters, our friends. Charlotte Brontë, by virtue of a strong personality and an ardent and vigorous genius, has thus projected herself into the minds of her readers, and made herself one with them. Thus every detail connected with her, whether true or false, is eagerly pounced upon. Years upon years have fled since she was laid in Haworth Churchyard, yet still public interest hovers around her; and though hundreds of novelists have written hundreds of novels since she has passed away, yet troops of visitors halt at the Haworth station, in order to visit that grim parsonage among the rugged Yorkshire hills with its outlook of graves and its background of moors. Tourists diligently read the long line of inscriptions under the organ-loft of the village church, and |