those selfish and hard-headed men whom you so often find the originators and administrators of 'benevolent' schemes—a man who wondered what was the matter, when half-starved, fear-stricken children didn't mind his lecturing, and turned away their sad, weary faces death-ward— a Diotrephes, whose steady grasp of an idea, and mechanical adherence to maxim-goodness, showed him to distant eyes a paragon of 'conscientiousness'-one of those not uncommon men whose notions of 'duty' would make them capital workers under others of better and sweeter inspiration, but whose love of the pre-eminence' carries them into positions where they cannot but be tyrants. Miss Scatcherd and Miss Temple are copies from the life, as well as the clerical founder of Lowood; and Helen Burns is Charlotte's sister, Maria.

After the removal of the children from Cowan's Bridge, Charlotte went to a school kept by a Miss Wooler, of Roe Head, of which Mrs. Gaskell draws a very kindly picture. Miss Wooler continued Charlotte's friend throughout her life. A school-fellow gives a very graphic account of Charlotte's first appearance at Roe Head School, on the 19th of January, 1831 :

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'I first saw her coming out of a covered cart in very old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable. When she appeared in the school-room her dress was changed, but just as old. She looked a little old woman, so shortsighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and moving her head from side to side to catch a sight of it. She was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent. When a book was given her, she dropped her head over it till her nose nearly touched it, and when she was told to hold her head up, up went the book after it, still close to her nose, so that it was not possible to help laughing. We all thought her very ignorant, for she had never learnt grammar at all, and very little geography. Miss Wooler took her aside, and told her she was afraid she must place her in the second class for some time, till she could overtake the girls of her own age in elementary knowledge; but poor Charlotte received this announcement by so sad a fit of crying, that Miss Wooler's kind heart was softened, and she wisely perceived that with such a girl it would be better to place her in the first class, and allow her to make up by private study in those branches where she was deficient. She would confound us by knowing things that were out of our range altogether. She was acquainted with most of the short pieces of poetry that we had to learn by heart; would tell us the authors, the poems they were taken fro, and sometimes repeat a page or two, and tell us the plot. In our play-hours, she sat or stood still, with a book if possible. Some of us once urged her to be on our side in a game at ball. She said she had never played, and could not play. We made her try; but soon found that she could not see the ball, so we put her out. She took all our proceedings with pliable indifference, and always seemed to need a previous resolution to say 'No' to anything. She used to go and stand under the trees in the playground, and say it was pleasanter. She endeavoured to explain this, pointing out the shadows, the peeps of sky, &c. We understood but little of it. She said that at Cowan Bridge she used to stand in the burn on a stone, to watch the water flow by. I told her she should have gone fishing; she said she never wanted. She always showed physical feebleness in everything. She ate no animal food at school. It was about this time I told her she was very ugly. Some years afterwards I told her thought I had been very impertinent. She replied, "You did me a great deal of good, Polly, so don't repent of it." Whenever an opportunity occurred of examining a picture or cut of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper; looking so long, that we used to ask her what she saw in it. She could always see plenty, and explained it very well. At night, she was an invaluable story-teller, frightening us almost out of our wits as we lay in

bed. On one occasion, the effect was such that she was led to scream out loud and Miss Wooler, coming up stairs, found that one of the listeners had been seized with violent palpitations, in consequence of the excitement produced by Charlotte's story.'

The time between 1832 and 1847 is filled up with intervals at Haworth, where Charlotte taught her sisters; intervals of governesship in different parts of the country; and a sojourn of Charlotte and Emily at Brussels, which, of course, is 'Villette,' with a most able and excellent M. Héger, for details concerning whom we have no space. Anne was always ill. Emily little better, and, when away, ever drooping for home; so that it came to be resolved at last, that whoever left Haworth and the purple moors she should not. anecdote of this extraordinary girl we must give, for the light it throws on her character, and through hers, on that of the family, in all of whom an element of fierce, defiant courage, mingled with the warmest attachment and the tenderest sympathy. At Haworth Parsonage there was a family dog, Keeper:

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'Keeper was faithful to the depths of his nature as long as he was with friends; but he who struck him with a stick or whip roused the relentless nature of the brute, who flew at his throat forthwith, and held him there till one or the other was at the point of death. Now Keeper's household fault was this. He loved to steal up stairs and stretch his square tawny limbs on the comfortable beds, covered over with delicate white counterpanes. But the cleanliness of the parsonage arrangement was perfect; and this habit of Keeper's was so objectionable, that Emily, in reply to Tabby's remonstrances, declared that, if he was found again transgressing, she herself, in defiance of warning and his well-known ferocity of nature, would beat him so severely that he would never offend again. In the gathering dusk of an autumn evening, Tabby came, half triumphantly, half tremblingly, but in great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily's whitening face and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily's eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed into stone. She went up stairs, and Tabby and Charlotte stood in the gloomy passage below, full of the dark shadows of coming night. Down stairs came Emily, dragging after her the unwilling Keeper, his hind legs set in an heavy attitude of resistance, held by the "scuft of the neck," but growling low and savagely all the time. The watchers would fain have spoken, but durst not, for fear of taking off Emily's attention, and causing her to avert her head for a moment from the enraged brute. She let him go, planted in a dark corner at the bottom of the stairs; no time was there to fetch stick or rod, for fear of the strangling clutch at her throat-her bare clenched fist struck against his red fierce eyes before he had time to make his spring, and, in the language of the turf, she "punished him" till his eyes were swelled up, and the half-blind stupified beast was led to his accustomed lair, to have his swelled head fomented and cared for by the very Emily herself. The generous dog owed her no grudge; he loved her dearly ever after he walked first among the mourners to her funeral; he slept moaning for nights at the door of her empty room, and never, so to speak, rejoiced, dog-fashion, after her death.'

In all this time, Charlotte was acquiring experiences which she afterwards turned to account in her novels. She learnt of a mill-riot which she reproduced in 'Shirley;' she had offers of marriage, one from a gentleman who sat for her St. John Rivers in 'Jane Eyre;' her Brussels and governess history we need not say she has largely availed herself of in her writings. The plans of the girls for starting

a school all came to nothing; Charlotte wrote to Southey, and Branwell to Wordsworth, about their literary plans, and received, respectively, very interesting replies. And a volume of poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell was, at last, put into the press under the care of Messrs. Aylott and Jones, at the authors' own expense. Meantime, the guilty infatuation of Branwell had begun. Placed out as tutor in the household of a gentleman who was confined to his bed by illness, he fell under the power of the wife, twenty years his senior, and at once destroyed his own happiness, and that of his father and sisters. He came home to Haworth, to lead the life of a besotted madman, fluctuating between remorse, intoxication, and passion— passion, for he retained a profound attachment to this woman, and, when her husband at last died, and he received his death-stroke from her heartlessness, her letters were found in his pocket. Branwell died, at last, a victim to a broken heart, a torturing conscience, and perpetual intoxication from alcohol or opium. The life that the Haworth circle led with him must have been terrible, in constant fear as they were of his carrying out threats of suicide or murder. It was from his conversation that Charlotte gleaned some of that exceptional knowledge of life which so startled some of the readers of Jane Eyre,' when Currer Bell was found to be a lady. The abandoned woman who was the prime mover in all this sin and misery still lives in May-fair, and patronizes Christmas county balls, says Mrs. Gaskell.

In 1847, Wuthering Heights,' and 'Agnes Grey,' were accepted by Mr. Newby. In the same year, after Charlotte's story of The Professor' (now in the press, and vouched for by Mrs. Gaskell) had gone the round of London publishers to be rejected, and after Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co., had declined it, though in a very handsome and encouraging letter, expressing their readiness to consider another story by the same hand-in this year, 1847, the same house accepted and published Jane Eyre.' What an era in the history of modern fiction was fixed by that event, we need tell no reader. Mrs. Gaskell produces in her book some of the very interesting correspondence to which it led between the authoress and living men of letters. Mr. Thackeray and Mr. G. H. Lewes were among the first to recognise the new comer, who was not long to remain a stranger to London society, though her shyness, and still more her wretched health, necessitated careful and recluse habits. A misunderstanding about Anne's 'Tenant of Wildfell Hall,' in the hands of another publisher, led Mr. Smith to write to Currer Bell'-still unknown, except to fame by her Jane Eyre'-upon a question of identity of authorship which publishing greed had suggested. Were Currer, Ellis, and Acton, one and the same Bell? Charlotte and Anne darted up to London, and, with his letter in hand, the wee dark' sisters burst upon the astonished Mr. Smith in Cornhill. And this was 'Currer Bell!' As small as a woman could be without being deformed! And, oh! such a quiet, quakerish dress! And they had put up at the Chapter Coffeehouse! Can you conceive the surprise of the great publisher ?

This was a very short stay, though Mr. Smith made it a crowded one. Then, Charlotte was 'found out' at Haworth, and there was another ordeal. Then, she came to London again, and, in spite of her resolute attempts to keep up her incognito, was recognised at one of Thackeray's lectures, and had to walk down a double line of the creme de la crème of London society, drawn up in inquisitive array to look at the authoress of Jane Eyre' as she left the room. Then came other visits; a friendship with Harriet Martineau and Mrs. Gaskell, with whom, by-the-bye, she expostulated for killing' Ruth,' wherein we sympathize with her. This is Mrs. Gaskell's description of her :

Her eyes were quiet and intelligent, except when she was strongly moved, and then they glowed with spiritual fire. I never saw the like in any other creature. As for the rest of her features, they were plain, large, and ill set; but unless you began to catalogue them, you were hardly aware of the fact, for the eyes and power of the countenance over-balanced every physical defect; the crooked mouth and the large nose were forgotten, and the whole face arrested the attention, and presently attracted all those whom she herself would have cared to attract. Her hands and feet were the smallest I ever saw; when one of the former was placed in mine, it was like the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm. The delicate long fingers had a peculiar fineness of sensation, which was one reason why all her handiwork, of whatever kind—writing, sewing, knitting—was so clear in its minuteness.'

But Charlotte visited little, and when she did visit, suffered severely. The least excitement, or the slightest cold, had the effect of blotting out the whole world for her in 'a great mist of headache.'

In her home life an overflowing cup of sorrow was held to her to drink. Branwell died. Anne died. Emily died. It will illustrate the fierce energy of the Brontës if we mention that Branwell insisted on standing up to die, and that Emily sternly refused medicine and advice, and even a helping hand, up to the very hour of her death. Not many more touching things has it fallen to our lot to read than that incident of Charlotte's testing the strength of the failing life, by showing this sister a sprig of heather, for which she had eagerly searched every nook of the moor, and finding it was not recognised by the glazing eye. Scarcely less affecting than this is that noble letter of Charlotte's in which she insists on Mrs. Gaskell's 'Ruth' having 'the start of her 'Villette' in a publishing point of view, so as to leave free to her all the February magazines,' or that other letter in which she avows her resolve to stand by Harriet Martineau, forsake her who might, convinced that her error in that unhappy 'Development' business was for God, not man, to judge.

We must close. In 1852, Mr. Nicholls, Mr. Brontë's curate, who had loved Charlotte for many years and kept silence, proposed for her hand. Charlotte consulted her father, who said No. That was enough for Charlotte, and Mr. Nicholls resigned his curacy. But time mended even this trouble, and at last the marriage came off, After a few months of happy domestic life the wife died, when about four months would have made her a mother (so we read Mrs. Gaskell). The illness preceding her death was accompanied with incessant nausea and incapacity to take food; when that symptom abated, this

glorious creature died. A village 'Ruth,' and a poor blind girl living four miles off, both of whom Charlotte had befriended, came to her funeral. In the words of Harriet Martineau, who wrote her elegy in the Daily News' of the time, 'a pang was felt in the midst of the strongest interests of the day, through the length and breadth of the land, and in the very heart of Germany (where her works are singularly appreciated), France, and America,' that this wee dark' creature had gone to the Silent Land. Amidst all the clash of war, and while thousands of lives were being trampled out in blood on the shores of the Azof, a voice of mourning from Haworth found echoes all over the wide, wide, and by no means too soft-hearted world. We have heard an old man say that when the news of the death of Lord Byron reached England, he felt as if he had lost a dear familiar friend. In some such way we can conceive the present generation speaking of the death of Currer Bell to the next.

Charlotte Nicholls, née Brontë, was born at Thornton, 21st April, 1816; she was married at Haworth, 29th June, 1854; and died at the same, 31st March, 1855.

Some day, when the impressions made by these enchanting volumes are somewhat less vivid, and somewhat more distinct, we may make the life of Charlotte Brontë a text from which to say some necessary words, for which there would not now be space, upon the development of the Christian life in the imaginative character.

Stoughton's Congregational Lecture.*

Ar length, far on in the spring of 1857, the Congregational Lecture delivered in November, 1855, has made its appearance in St. Paul's Churchyard. Either Mr. Stoughton or the printers, or perhaps both, must have taken a twelvemonth's comfortable nap over the business, since in the ordinary course of things it should have made its advent amongst us with the swallows of last year. Had the next Course been forthcoming in its due season, its publication might easily have anticipated Mr. Stoughton's. But, indeed, it would really seem as though the next Course had only an ideal existence, if so much. Is the scheme, so nobly inaugurated, and so ably sustained during twenty years, finally abandoned; and is this Series really the last we may expect to hear or see? For the honour of Congregationalism we hope not. But we must say we have our fears. There are ominous indications that the novelty of the thing having worn off, the toy is to be thrown aside. It tickled our denominational vanity to set up a Lecture which should take rank with the Boyle, the Warburton, the

*Ages of Christendom before the Reformation. The Congregational Lecture for 1855. By John Stoughton.' Pp. 461. London: Jackson and Walford. 1857.