edited that "unstinted flood of panegyrics," the Memoirs, of which "the Quarterly, so savage and tartarly," excusably fell foul, it certainly never dawned on the doting daughter that her best works had been spoilt by their preposterous subject.

This gentle, pleasant woman, who spent most of her considerable earnings on her pretty step-sisters, never blamed her father for his treatment of her doleful young mother, and never thought of her work as otherwise than embellished by his "improvements." Her life was very happy and wholly unselfish, and his was wholly selfish and entirely happy. It sounds like a paradox, yet it is the truth, and nothing but the truth.

That Susan Ferrier was a unique woman one fact determines. She produced three novels, Marriage, Destiny, and The Inheritance, was paid very highly for the last two, and stopped writing altogether, despite the petitions of her publishers, "because she had nothing more to say." Why did she so early arrive at a barrenness little indicated by the length and high spirits of her striking trio of clever books? Possibly because life with a not too grateful aged parent did not stimulate her imagination enough to let it triumph over painful physical infirmities. Her father was thoroughly respected as a worthy and efficient Clerk of Sessions at Edinburgh, of so robust a constitution that he did not retire until he was eighty-four. Seized one day, at that advanced age, with an attack of giddiness, he fell against a lamp-post and cut himself. "What said old Rugged Tough? Why, that his fall against the post was the luckiest thing that could have befallen him, for the bleeding was exactly the remedy for this disorder!"

Like most famous woman writers, Susan Ferrier lost her mother early; like most of them, she made her

father her supreme object in life. Mrs. Ferrier was beautiful, and her daughter, in her youth, had her share of good looks in addition to a ready wit. There is something sad in the contrast between the fame of the books and the dreary isolation of their writer in the midst of those who, in an intellectual Edinburgh, would so gladly have given her the place she had won. "My father I never see save at meals, but then my company is just as indispensable as the tablecloth or chairs. That

he could live without me I make no doubt, so he could without a leg or an arm, but it would ill become me to deprive him of either, therefore never for a single day could I reconcile it either to my duty or my inclination to leave him." How did he requite this selfsurrender? A later letter answers that question piteously: "We never have a soul. I think one or two intimate friends now and then would be an agreeable variety, but it won't do. Even Jane Walker in her fur cap would be taken for company."

Like Mr. Edgeworth-and he was born in the same year-Mr. Ferrier had his own way throughout his long life. Put out to nurse in a cottage after the strange custom of his day, he howled to be taken back to his foster-mother upon his return home, and was so self-willed that he was actually allowed to go back for some years. Of good family, he persisted in marrying the daughter of a small farmer, a piece of seeming imprudence justified by a disposition as charming as the face that caught the errant fancy of Burns:

Jove's tuneful dochters, three times three,

Made Homer deep their debtor; But, gien the body half an e'e, Nine Ferriers wad done better.

His early letters to Susan are kindly, but her gray memoir bears little token

that he realized that her fate was not the happiest. As she says in a letter to her friend Miss Clavering, whose portrait is so lovely we forgive her even for interpolating the dreary "narrative of Mrs. Douglas" in Marriage, "just to hear the sound of the wheels and the jostling of the chairs does not make gaiety," for solitude in an animated crowd is sadder than in a desert. She, too, was in a prison with an eminently respectable and quite unconscious jailer, but for her there came no chivalrous D'Arblay to compensate for loneliness by an ardent if belated courtship among the golden autumn leaves and purple Michaelmas daisies of Juniper Hall.

Miss Ferrier is harshly accused of being soured and given to "moods" in her later years, but at least she did her duty with a fine disregard of self. Her level head was never turned even by the admiration of Scott, who so especialy admired her Earl of Glenfearn in The Inheritance, that aristocrat who objected to the heroine's taking a walk on a sunny June morning, lest she should come in to breakfast "with the cheeks of a milkmaid and the appetite of a ploughboy." Gertrude's immediate docility and acquiescence to his direful suggested substitute of “elegant employment" in her dressingroom had its parallel. Susan Ferrier herself never broke bounds even to this limited extent, and faded into a subdued old maidenhood beside the muchflattered orginal of her own Uncle Adam.

In passing on to the disreputable father of that kindly, noble-hearted woman, Mary Russell Mitford, the first things to be said about him are that he came of a "good old" family, degenerate scion of it as he was, and that this best and most ill-used of daughters "respected him to his dying day"-a mystery past finding out. Even Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, in her

fascinating preface to the little cowslip-scented classic, Our Village, describes him aptly as "an incorrigible old Skimpole," and, indeed, unless, as we all know rather too well, Leigh Hunt certainly sat for the casual Harold, the "handsome doctor with the plain, much-enduring wife" might have been the model for the picture. "The Doctor's manners were easy, natural and apparently extremely frank," says Mr. Harness, "but he nevertheless met the world on his own terms, and was prepared to allow himself any insincerity which seemed expedient."

He was an inveterate gambler, and his first "expedient" was to spend his wife's considerable fortune in an "incredibly short space of time." Having reduced Mrs. Mitford and the "puny child with an affluence of curls" to small lodgings in Blackfriars, he characteristically bought Mary the costly and historic lottery ticket as a birthday present. That Mary insisted on the winning number, 2224, because the figures combined amounted to her own ten years, won her twenty thousand pounds, but, alas, they soon followed the fifty thousand of her mother. A specially built house, carriages, servants, porcelain with the Mitford arms-all these things piled up the load of debt never lifted from the frail shoulders of one industrious girl. Honest and unselfish as she was, she could yet write to "her darling" the most touching letters, full of undeserved love and inexplicable admiration. Amid the importunate tradesmen and "angry tax-gatherers," she can always find solace for her pain among her flowers. Vainly she pleads to the gay butterfly to return from London to the home near Reading. She tempts him prettily with accounts of the glories of her hyacinths, peonies, or azaleas, and sometimes scarcely knows where to address her letters.

"The old brute never informed his

friends of anything. All they knew

of his affairs, or whatever, false or true, he intended them to believe, came out in his loose, disjointed talk." He had apparently no polite scruples as well as no morals, for he once left poor Mary at a resplendent mansion in the North, where they "sat down sixty-five to a dinner entirely served on plate," and refused her plaintive petition to return and escort her home. "Mr. Ogle is extremely offended," writes the poor martyr to the parental vagaries. "I implore you to return. call upon Mamma's sense of propriety"-frail reed-"to send you here directly. Little did I suspect that my father, my beloved father, would desert me." At last he comes, but it is always the same piteous tale Mary's true friends-and she had many-read between the lines of those letters written under "great syringas in full blossom," and perfumed with the flowers.

I

Well might she say that "friendship was the bread of the heart," as she touched, always with dignity, on her pecuniary troubles in her letters to Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett in the darkened invalid chamber so soon to be exchanged for freedom and Italy. It was the same to the end. We find her "straining every nerve" to pay for "cows and a dairy" for the outrageous old trifler, who once moved her to a perfect passion of gratitude by a promise to get "some employment”-needless to say never fulfilled. The hundreds she incomprehensively received for her forgotten tragedies, when Our Village had raised the circulation of the Lady's Magazine read by Shirley and Caroline Helstone, were but drops in an ocean of selfish expenses. Very soon she wrote to her trustee imploring him to sell out the small remnant of her fortune. "My dear father has been very improvident, and is still irritable and difficult to live with, but he is a person of a thousand virtues

and if the money be withheld my dear father will be overthrown, and I shall never know a happy hour."

It may be harsh to say candidly that until the Doctor's decease, and the meeting of his liabilities by a public subscription (!), she never had peace of mind or respite from the slavery of overwork. It is good to know that her cheerful spirit found happiness for her later years in her cottage at Swallowfield, where Charles Kingsley was a constant visitor, and the young James Payn delighted in the quaint little old lady who "talked like an angel." Julian and that Rienzi which we are so glad to know "resulted in a stout pony and chaise" for Miss Mitford lie in the dusty limbo of dead plays; but, fragrant as her own sweetbriars and clove carnations, her memory "smells sweet, and blossoms in the dust," and linked indissolubly with her story of self-sacrifice is the remembrance of its unworthy object. It is too late for scolding, or "tonguebanging," as it is called in Our Village, but to forgive Dr. Mitford is impossible. He does not appear even, like the "Corsair," to have "linked one virtue with a thousand crimes."

To speak in the same breath of the upright father of perhaps the most wonderful family any man ever had is unfair, for the Reverend Patrick Brontë was a man of much stoical virtue. "His opinions of life might be often both wild and erroneous, his principles of action eccentric and strange, his views of life partial and almost misanthropical, but not one opinion he held could be stirred or modified by any worldly motive." Mrs. Gaskell's estimate is a true one, and she adds that she has mentioned these salient traits as searchlights on the characters of Charlotte and that amazing Emily of whom the latest exponent of the so-called "Brontë mystery" would have us believe that she

never wrote her lonely masterpiece at all, and that her sister's heartrending preface to its later edition was therefore but a clever literary fraud.

The fragile mother died young, her prim sister watching over the delicate brood, and supplementing the father's Spartan treatment with "endless tasks of sewing." He "wished to make them hardy and indifferent to eating and dress"; but, though his system easily produced the indifference, the health never came with it. He gives a picture of their uncanniness startling enough when he tells us of an examination conducted by himself when the eldest child was but ten. He asked the tiny Anne, aged four, what she most needed, and the poor mite's answer was, "Age and experience"! Charlotte, a little older, pronounced "The Bible the best book in the world, the next best the book of Nature." Maria, the little martyr at Cowan Bridge, thought the best way to spend time was "by laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity"; and the stern Emily, on being questioned as to the right punishment for a naughty child, said, “First reasoning, and then, if useless, whipping."

What they all needed was tenderness, indulgence, and these the solemn father had no power to give. Self-control was his fetish, and when we hear of his "desolation" after Charlotte's death we feel impatient at his obstinate reserve when the passionate woman beside him was pining for sympathy and affection. "The solltude of my position fearfully aggravated its other evils." "Some long stormy days and nights there were when I felt such craving for support and companionship as I cannot express."

Did he dine with her even on the terrible night when she returned after the death of her last sister, when the dogs came about her with "strange The Fortnightly Review.

ecstacy," as if they believed their loved mistresses sure to follow, and the agony "that had to be endured" possessed her soul in torment? If he had broken his inviolable rules, surely she would have thankfully recorded it. Yet, when they were alone in dreary Haworth, they neither walked nor ate together, and it did not seein to dawn on the adamantine old man that the bird in its cage was drooping for lack of freedom.

What wonder that Charlotte at last rewarded her faithful lover? But what cruelty did her father inflict upon her before the day when, in her soft muslins, she "looked like a snowdrop" at the altar? Even when his reluctant consent had been wrung from him, at the last agitated moment on the wedding morning he "announced his intention of not going to church," and a nervous old governess gave away the bride who was the most famous woman in England.

"Qu'en dites-vous?" Thackeray's quick question to her as she moved so timidly through an admiring crowd so eager to behold the writer of Jane Eyre that it forgot for a moment even the writer of Vanity Fair recurs to the mind. Clearly he cared more for praise from her than from all the intellect and rank present on that memorable occasion, yet at Haworth she was of such small account.

Mr. Brontë lived to a great age, respected by all, and loved by none as by the submissive daughter whose fiery spirit was held in such stern check by her strong sense of duty. We may wonder if he was ever haunted by a vision of a pale, slender form clinging to the husband of a few short months with the cry of despair to God: "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us. We have been so happy." Did he regret that he might have let her be happy so much sooner?

Rowland Grey.

"The word 'school' as applied to painting," writes J. Henry Middleton sub voce in the Encyclopædia Britannica, is used with various more or less comprehensive meanings. In its widest sense it includes all the painters of one country of every date-as, for example, the Italian school. In its narrower sense it denotes a group of painters who all worked under the influence of one man-as, for example, the "school of Raphael." In a third sense it is applied to the painters of one city or province, who for successive generations worked under some common local influence and with general similarity of design, color, and technique-as, for example, "the Florentine school," "the Umbrian school." And the writer concludes, "The existence of defined schools of painting is now almost wholly a thing of the past."

If there are individual temperaments to be reckoned with, there must be national temperaments also. Nowhere do we seem to run up against this last more distinctly than in the history of the art of the Low Countries: a temperament which in a certain plodding sobriety it displays seemingly appeals to a strain of like character in us; for which reason probably Dutch painting has almost always been popular in England, though not perhaps generally the highest order of Dutch paintings, nor with the higher order of English intellects. In English taste, however, more especially in matters of art, there are so many contradictions that it would be rash to attempt to account for them. It is safer to take refuge behind a dictum of Richard Muther, the chief historian of contemporary art in Europe, who, apropos of Charles Keene, writes that in him the English "reveal that complete singularity which distinguishes them from all other mortals."

Ruskin's criticism must have tended to turn his generation away from Dutch art; and Ruskin knew little or nothing of the latest developments of the latter: the work of what the author of "Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century" calls the "Hague school" and its successors. Yet the painters of Holland have never lacked nor lack today admirers here, as the collection of the late Sir John Day bore witness, and not less the prices obtained at the sale thereof. Another great collector of modern Dutch art was Mr. Staats Forbes, from whose collection several pictures are reproduced in the work before us. At this moment some fine and representative works of Josef Israels, Anton Mauve, and of Jacob and Matthew Maris are on loan at the National Gallery; and a larger number