drank-I covered her ice-cold and clammy hand with mine: the feeble fingers shrank from my touch-the glazing eyes shunned my gaze.

6.66

Love me, then, or hate me, as you will," I said at last, "you have my full and free forgiveness: ask now for God's; and be at peace."

Poor, suffering woman! it was too late for her to make now the effort to change her habitual frame of mind; living she had ever hated memust hate me still.

-dying, she

'I yet lingered half an hour longer, hoping to see some sign of amity: but she gave none. She was fast relapsing into stupor; nor did her mind again rally: at twelve o'clock that night she died. I was not present to close her eyes, nor were either of her daughters. They came to tell us the next morning that all was over. She was by that time laid out. Eliza and I went to look at her: Georgiana, who had burst out into loud weeping, said she dared not go. There was stretched Sarah Reed's once robust and active frame, rigid and still: her eye of flint was covered with its cold lid; her brow and strong traits wore yet the impress of her inexorable soul. A strange and solemn object was that corpse to me. I gazed on it with gloom and pain: nothing soft, nothing sweet, nothing pitying, or hopeful, or subduing, did it inspire; only a grating anguish for her woes-not my loss -and a sombre tearless dismay at the fearfulness of death in such a form.

'Eliza surveyed her parent calmly. After a silence of some minutes she observed:-"6 :-"With her constitution she should have lived to a good old age: her life was shortened by trouble." And then a spasm constricted her mouth for an instant: as it passed away she turned and left the room, and so did I. Neither of us had dropt a tear.'-Vol. ii. p. 177-182.

Here we have a deathbed of unrepentant sin described with as deliberate a minuteness and as serene a tranquillity as a naturalist might display in recording the mortal orgasms of a jelly-fish. It is the despair of Beaufort-the He dies and makes no sign,' without the response, O God, forgive him!' All the expressions of tenderness and forgiveness, on the part of the injured Jane, are skilfully thrown in so as to set off to the utmost the unconquerable hardness of the dying sinner's heart. They are the pleadings of the good angel, made audible, and rejected to the last. We are compelled to see and acknowledge beyond the possibility of doubt, that Mrs. Reed dies without remorse, without excuse, and without hope.

The plot is most extravagantly improbable, verging all along upon the supernatural, and at last running fairly into it. All the power is shown and all the interest lies in the characters. We have before intimated our belief, that in Jane Eyre, the heroine of the piece, we have, in some measure, a portrait of the writer. If not, it is a most skilful imitation of autobiography. The character embodied in it is precisely the same as that which pervades the whole book, and breaks out most signally in the Preface a temper naturally harsh, made harsher by ill usage, and visiting both its defect and its wrongs upon the world--an understanding disturbed and perverted by cynicism, but still strong and penetrating-fierce love and fiercer hate all this

viewed from within and coloured by self-love. We only wish we could carry our hypothesis a step further, and suppose that the triumph which the loving and loveable element finally obtains over the unloving and unloveable in the fictitious character had also its parallel in the true. But we fear that few readers will rise from the book with that impression.

The character of Mr. Rochester, the hero, the lover, and eventually the husband, of Jane Eyre, we have already noticed as being, to our minds, the characteristic production of a female pen. Not an Adonis, but a Hercules in mind and body, with a frame of adamant, a brow of thunder and a lightning eye, a look and voice of command, all-knowing and all-discerning, fierce in love and hatred, rough in manner, rude in courtship, with a shade of Byronic gloom and appetizing mystery-add to this that when loved he is past middle age, and when wedded he is blind and fire-scarred, and you have such an Acis as no male writer would have given his Galatea, and yet what commends itself as a true embodiment of the visions of a female imagination. The subordinate characters almost all show proportionate power. Mr. Brocklehurst, the patron and bashaw of Lowood, a female orphan school, in which he practises self-denial, alieno ventre, and exercises a vicarious humility, is a sort of compound of Squeers and Pecksniff, but more probable than either, and drawn with as strong a hand. His first interview with Jane Eyre, in which he appears to the eye of the child like a black pillar,' and a scene at Lowood in which, from the midst of a galaxy of smartly dressed daughters, he lectures the half-starved and halfclothed orphans on his favourite virtues, would be well worth quoting, but that their humour borders on the profane. His love of miracles of destruction is a true hit. Those miracles are still credible. So is the inscription on the wall of Lowood. 'Lowood Institution. This portion was rebuilt A.D. - by Naomi Brocklehurst, of Brocklehurst Hall, in this county.' Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.' Mrs. Reed is a good type of the 'strong-minded' and odious woman. Excellent too, in an artistic point of view, is the character of St. John Rivers, the Calvinist clergyman and missionary, with all its complex attributes and iridescent hues-self-denial strangely shot with selfishness-earthly pride and restless ambition blending and alternating with heaven-directed zeal, and resignation to the duties of a heavenly mission. The feeblest character in the book is that of Helen Burns, who is meant to be a perfect Christian, and is a simple seraph, conscious moreover of her own perfection. She dies early in the first volume, and our authoress might say of her saint, as Shakspeare said of his Mercutio, ‘If I

had not killed her, she would have killed me.' In her, however, the Christianity of Jane Eyre is concentrated, and with her it expires, leaving the moral world in a kind of Scandinavian gloom, which is hardly broken by the faint glimmerings of a 'doctrine of the equality of souls,' and some questionable streaks of that 'world-redeeming creed of Christ,' which being emancipated from ' narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few,' is seldom invoked but for the purpose of showing that all Christian profession is bigotry and all Christian practice is hypocrisy.

In imaginative painting Jane Eyre is very good. Take the following-probably from the threshold of the lake country— the neighbourhood of Kirby Lonsdale.

:

'I discovered, too, that a great pleasure, an enjoyment which the horizon only bounded, lay all outside the high and spike-guarded walls of our garden this pleasure consisted in a prospect of noble summits girdling a great hill hollow, rich in verdure and shadow; in a bright beck, full of dark stones and sparkling eddies. How different had this scene looked when I viewed it laid out beneath the iron sky of winter, stiffened in frost, shrouded with snow! When mists as chill as death wandered to the impulse of east winds along those purple peaks, and rolled down "ing" and holm till they blended with the frozen fog of the beck! That beck itself was then a torrent, turbid and curbless it tore asunder the wood, and sent a raving sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or whirling sleet; and for the forest on its banks, that showed only ranks of skeletons.

6

April advanced to May: bright, serene May it was; days of blue sky, placid sunshine, and soft western or southern gales filled up its duration. And now vegetation matured with vigour: Lowood shook its tresses: it became all green, all flowery; its great elm, ash and oak skeletons were restored to majestic life; woodland plants sprang up profusely in its recesses; unnumbered varieties of moss filled its hollows, and it made a strange grand sunshine out of the wealth of its wild primrose plants.'— Vol. i. pp. 145, 146.

The rather ambitious descriptions of manners and social life which the book contains are, we are bound to say, a most decided failure. Their satire falls back with accumulated force upon the head of the satirist. It is high life below stairs' with a vengeance; the fashionable world seen through the area railings, and drawn with the black end of the kitchen poker. Listen to the polite badinage of Mr. Rochester's drawing room.

"Certainly, my best;" says Lady Ingram to her daughter, " and I was quite right; depend on that: there are a thousand reasons why liaisons between governesses and tutors should never be tolerated a moment in any well-regulated house; firstly-"

"Oh gracious, mamma! Spare us the enumeration! Au reste, we all know them: danger of bad example to innocence of childhood; distractions and consequent neglect of duty on the part of the attached; mutual alliance and reliance; confidence thence resulting-insolence accompanyingmutiny and general blow up. Am I right, Baroness Ingram, of Ingram Park?"

"My lily-flower, you are right now, as always."

Or the following playful coquetry between the said lily-flower and Mr. Rochester:

"Mr. Rochester, do you second my motion?"

"Madam, I support you on this point as on every other."

"Then on me be the onus of bringing it forward. Signior Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?"

"Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be."

"Then Signior, I lay on you my sovereign behest to furbish up your lungs and other vocal organs, as they will be wanted on my royal service." "Who would not be the Rizzio of so divine a Mary?"

"A fig for Rizzio!" cried she, tossing her head with all its curls, as she moved to the piano. "It is my opinion the fiddler David must have been an insipid sort of fellow: I like Black Bothwell better: to my mind a man is nothing without a spice of the devil in him; and history may say what it will of James Hepburn, but I have a notion, he was just the sort of wild, fierce, bandit-hero, whom I could have consented to gift with my hand." "Gentlemen, you hear! Now which of you most resembles Bothwell?" cried Mr. Rochester.

"Here then is a corsair song. Know that I doat on corsairs; and for that reason, sing it con spirito."

"Commands from Miss Ingram's lips would put spirit into a mug of milk and water."

"Take care, then: if you don't please me, I will shame you by showing how such things should be done."

"That is offering a premium on incapacity: I shall now endeavour to fail."

"Gardez-vous en bien! If you err wilfully, I shall devise a proportionate punishment."

""Miss Ingram ought to be clement, for she has it in her power to inflict a chastisement beyond mortal endurance."

"Ha! Explain!" commanded the lady.

"Pardon me, madam: no need of explanation; your own fine sense must inform you that one of your frowns would be a sufficient substitute for capital punishment."'—Vol. ii. pp. 52—57.

The Novelist is now completely lord of the domain of Fiction. Whatever good or evil is to be done in the present day through that medium, must be done by him. He is the only dramatist whose plays can now command an audience. He is the only troubadour who finds admittance into the carpeted and cushioned halls of our modern chivalry, and arrests the ear of the lords and ladies of the nineteenth century. His work is the mirror of our life. It is the Odyssey and the Niebelungen Lied under a strange form: but still it is them indeed. Man's appetites do not change, nor his faculties, but only the external conditions under which they act; and the same appetites, the same faculties, which under one set of external conditions gave birth to Achilles, under another set give birth to Waverley or Pelham; who is to the reading gentleman what the son of Thetis was to the listening Greek-himself made perfect.

In the infancy of nations-in the age of bodily prowess, war,

adventure, chivalry, when the mind is always turned outwards to great deeds and never inwards to itself, the Romance, be it in the prose form specifically so called, or in the ballad, or that higher form of ballad which is termed the Epic, holds undivided sway. The Iliad and Odyssey ought to be classed, not with the Eneid, Paradise Lost and the Henriade, but with Amadis de Gaul and the Cid. Virgil, Milton, and Voltaire have obscured the idea of the Epic, as the perfection of ballad poetry, by trying to write after the Epic model in an unepic age. The consequence of this error to themselves (a consequence which Virgil and Milton seem to have felt) is, that Virgil is redeemed from failure by certain non-epic passages, such as the history of Dido's love, and the splendid Inferno and Paradiso in the Sixth Book; Voltaire fails utterly; and Milton, thanks to that immortal force of genius which his original fault of judgment could not force from its true bent, produces a great spiritual poem-the poem of Puritanism.

To another age of civilization belongs the drama. This too has its time-a time which does not return. Homer's heroes hurl stones ten times as large as his audience could hurl; but his audience too hurled stones, or they would not have heard of it with interest. In Shakspeare's plays action may be ten times more intense and rapid, language ten times more vehement, and character ten times more marked than in the real men of his day; but still in the real men of his day action was intense and rapid, language was vehement, and character was marked. The Sidneys, Raleighs, and Southamptons saw in the heroes of the stage what they themselves aimed at being, and, in some measure, were. It was their own age which they saw imaged there, with all its grandeur and its grotesqueness, its free and swelling speech, its fierce and open passion, its strong and sudden hand. The wildest Utopia which the brain of an Idealist ever conceived, was only an exaggeration of the type of his own age. Plato's Republic is but a Greek polity after all. And so, we may be sure, the eye of the great poet, when rolling in its finest phrensy, saw the men of his own day, though he saw them through and through, to the very core of their humanity, and therefore was the poet of all ages while he was the dramatist of one. essence of the drama is the development of character through action. When character is no longer developed in action—that is in visible action—the drama ceases. And that is the case in the period of civilization at which we are now arrived. You can no longer tell what a man is by what you see him do. The essence of action is driven inward; and what little does remain outward and visible, so as to be available for the purposes of the drama, is spread over so wide an expanse of mere conventionality

The