from adopting the doctrines of the Church. In December 1847 her novel, Wuthering Heights, was published by T. C. Newby, with her sister's story, Agnes Grey, the two making three volumes. Newby was a commission publisher of no high character. The sisters paid him £50, and he issued an edition of two hundred and fifty copies. Charlotte Brontë went over it carefully after Emily's death, and it is now printed with Charlotte's corrections. Emily Brontë did not live long enough to witness its recognition; she died on 19th December 1848, refusing medical advice, doggedly rejecting sympathy, and clinging passionately to life. The earlier critics of Wuthering Heights dwelt on its inhuman characteristics, and it obtained its first recognition from Sydney Dobell in an article published in the Palladium. Dobell refused to believe that Ellis Bell and Currer Bell were distinct, and urged Currer Bell to write as she wrote in Wuthering Heights. Though he deprecated the employment of the author's wonderful pencil on a picture so destitute of moral beauty and human worth, he declared that Wuthering Heights was such an elaboration of a rare and fearful form of mental disease--so terribly strong, so exquisitely subtle with such niceties in its transitions, such intimate symptomatic truth in its details, as to be at once a psychological and medical study. The book bore everywhere the stamp of high genius, though one looked back at the whole story as to a world of brilliant figures in an atmosphere of mist. Mr Dobell's judgment was confirmed by Matthew Arnold, who wrote of Emily as one

Whose soul

Knew no fellow for might, Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died.

Mr Swinburne in a noble panegyric reckons her the greatest genius of the Brontë sisters.

The attempts made by Dr Wright to find the origin of Wuthering Heights in Irish stories, and by Mrs Humphry Ward to connect the book with the German romantic movement, have failed. Equally without foundation is the story that Branwell Brontë had a share in the book. Charlotte Brontë writes after his death: 'My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature he was not aware that they had ever published anything.' She also points out that her sisters wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and their stores of observation. Emily Brontë remains the sphinx of literature.

Distraction.

She found childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made, and ranging them on the sheet according to their different species: her mind had strayed to other associations.

'That's a turkey's,' she murmured to herself, and this is a wild duck's; and this is a pigeon's. Ah, they put pigeons' feathers in the pillows-no wonder I couldn't die! Let me take care to throw it on the floor

when I lie down. And here is a moor-cock's; and this -I should know it among a thousand—it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor! It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the heath; the bird was not shot: we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old ones dared not come. I made him promise he'd never shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn't. Yes, here are more! Did he shoot my lapwings, Nelly? Are they red, any of them? Let me look.'

'Give over that baby work,' I interrupted, dragging the pillow away and turning the holes towards the mattress, for she was removing its contents by handfuls 'Lie down and shut your eyes: you're wandering. There's a mess! The down is flying about like snow.' I went here and there collecting it.

'I see in you, Nelly,' she continued dreamily, an aged woman you have grey hair and bent shoulders. This bed is the fairy cave under Penistone Crags, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers; pretending, while I am near, that they are only locks of wool. That's what you'll come to fifty years hence: I know you are not so now. I'm not wandering: you're mistaken, or else I should believe you really were that withered hag, and I should think I was under Penistone Crags; and I'm conscious it's night, and there are two candles on the table making the black press shine like jet.'

(From Wuthering Heights, Chap. XII.)

The Old Stoic.

Riches I hold in light esteem,

And Love I laugh to scorn; And lust of fame was but a dream, That vanished with the morn:

And if I pray, the only prayer

That moves my lips for me

Is, Leave the heart that now I bear, And give me liberty!'

Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'Tis all that I implore;

In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

Anne Brontë would have been forgotten if it had not been for her sisters. Born at Thornton in 1819, she died at Scarborough in May 1849. She had two unhappy experiences as a governess; but, with the exception of a visit to London, she only once left her native county. She was in every way more normal than her sisters, gentle, pleasing in appearance, and intellectually commonplace. She was devoutly evangelical, but declined to believe in the doctrine of eternal punishment. Her two books, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, have value as throwing light on the Brontë experience; in some of her religious poems she rises above mediocrity. But it is perhaps to be regretted that her novels, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, should continue to be reprinted. This was Charlotte Brontë's opinion. Anne had none of the power and fire of her sisters, but was almost as taciturn as they.

Practically everything that is known of Emily Brontë is to be found in Chapter VI. of Mr Shorter's Charlotte Bronte and her Circle. The Preface by Charlotte Brontë for the reprint of Wuthering Heights in 1850 is singularly affecting. Mr Dobell's article appeared in the Palladium for September 1850; the Palladium was an Edinburgh magazine written mainly by members of the 'spasmodic' school. It is reprinted in his Biography (vol. i. p. 163). Some of Emily's school exercises appear in The Woman at Home (vol. ii. p. 445). The volume on Emily Brontë by A. M. F. Robinson is of little value, and is mainly concerned with Branwell Brontë. For Anne, reference may be made to Currer Bell's biographical notice, and to the chapter in Mr Shorter's book.

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL.

Mrs Gaskell (ELIZABETH CLEGHORN STEVENSON) was born in Lindsay Row, now part of Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, on 29th September 1810. She was the daughter, by his first marriage, of William Stevenson, an ex-Unitarian minister, who, after a chequered career, had settled as Keeper of the Records to the Treasury in London. Her mother, who was a Miss Holland, daughter of Mr Holland of Sandlebridge in Cheshire, died within a month after the child's birth. The infant was transferred almost immediately to the care of her mother's sister, Mrs Lumb, at Knutsford in Cheshire, a quaint little country-town about fifteen miles from Manchester. Knutsford is the place she afterwards described as Cranford in her book bearing that title, and as Hollingford in Wives and Daughters; there Mrs Gaskell spent most of her childhood and girlhood, growing up a beautiful and accomplished girl. She was two years a pupil in a school at Stratford-on-Avon, and paid lengthened visits to London, Edinburgh, and Newcastle-onTyne. On 30th August 1832 she was married to the Rev. William Gaskell, minister of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester. Her first publication was a poem, written in conjunction with her husband and published in Blackwood, January 1837, under the title 'Sketches among the Poor.' It was followed by a sketch of Clopton Hall near Stratford-on-Avon, contributed to William Howitt's book, Visits to Remarkable Places (1838). In 1847 she finished her first novel, Mary Barton; the Scene was laid in Manchester, and the book dealt with the period of distress which suggested Disraeli's Sybil. Her aim was to represent the thoughts and feelings of the workman. The novel appeared anonymously in 1848, and was received with enthusiasm, winning the praise of Miss Edgeworth, Carlyle, and Landor. Early in 1850 Dickens invited Mrs Gaskell's co-operation in his new venture, Household Words, and the first number contained the beginning of a short story, 'Lizzie Leigh.' This was followed by many short stories and articles covering a long period. Her second important novel, Ruth, though written with more finish than Mary Barton, dealt, perhaps unsuccessfully, with a difficult, ethical problem, and was less popular. Her most enduring work, Cranford, appeared irregularly in Household Words from 1851 to 1853. It sold slowly, but its place in English literature is assured. It shows a specially clear and tender comprehension of a calm autumnal

existence, as clear as Miss Austen's and much more tender; it had a marked effect on the early work of George Eliot. More ambitious was her next novel, North and South, published in 1855, which returns to the problem of the working classes. In 1857 Mrs Gaskell published her biography of Charlotte Brontë, based on personal knowledge and full and accurate investigation, and written with conspicuous skill and charm. Recent investigations have only confirmed its substantial truth. It must be admitted, however, that Mrs Gaskell showed herself singularly reckless in her treatment of living people, and she had to withdraw various passages under threat

of libel. In 1859 she published a volume of short stories, under the title My Lady Ludlow. Sylvia's Lovers (1863), which is perhaps the least satisfactory of her novels, depends for its story on the press-gang at the close of the eighteenth century, its scene being laid in Whitby. To 1863 also belongs the beautiful little idyl, Cousin Phillis. Mrs Gaskell's last story, Wives and Daughters, is her fullest and ripest; but she did not live to finish it. On Sunday, 12th November 1865, without a moment's warning, she died from disease of the heart, in the company of her daughters, and at the country-house at Holybourne, Hampshire, which she had purchased with the proceeds of her last book. Mrs Gaskell wrote many articles, which have never been collected, in All the Year Round, Fraser's Magazine, and the Pall Mall Gazette. Her short stories have been collected in several volumes, and the complete edition of her novels and tales was issued in eight volumes in 1872-73. Though not a writer of

the first rank, she succeeded more than most in measuring her powers and in achieving her ambitions. Her work moves between the manufacturing cities and the quiet country-towns, and she is more successful in the latter than in the former; her effects are produced by a multitude of tender and delicate touches, rather than by dark shadows or brilliant lights. No one describes like her a society where the stage of life to which belonged vivid passion, forcible incident, and absorbing motives has passed by for the principal personages of her story, and has not yet arrived for the secondary characters.

There is no authorised Life of Mrs Gaskell; but see Mrs Gaskell, by Miss Flora Masson (1903), the article in the Encyclopædia Britannica by the same writer, and that in the Dictionary of National Biography by Dr. A. W. Ward. The best criticism is by William Minto in the Fortnightly Review (vol. xxiv.). See also the obituary notice in the Saturday Review (1865) by Mr John Morley (?).

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL.

JEAN INGELOW.

From a Photograph by Russell & Sons.

Jean Ingelow (1820-97) was the daughter of a banker at Boston in Lincolnshire, her mother being of Aberdeenshire stock, and lived in the fen country or at Ipswich till about 1863, when she settled permanently in London. Her first efforts in verse were published anonymously as A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings (1850). It was her second volume of Poems (1863), which ran through four impressions in a year, that revealed her gift and her accomplishment-seen especially perhaps in High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire in 1571. Much of her poetry is of a religious, introspective cast; simplicity, grace, tenderness,

pathos, and sympathy are conspicuous characteristics; perhaps the ballads best show her power to move. She wrote many admirable stories for and about children, like Mopsa the Fairy (5th ed. 1891) and Stories told to Children; and a series of successful novels, amongst them Off the Skelligs (1872), Fated to be Free (1875), Don John (1876), and Sarah de Berenger (1879). A one-volume edition of her poems was issued in 1898; Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow, published anonymously, appeared in 1901.

Eliza Cook (1818-89), daughter of a London brazier, contributed to magazines from an early age, and issued volumes of poetry in 1835 (Lays of a Wild Harp), 1838, 1864, and 1865. For five years she conducted Eliza Cook's Journal (18491854), and reissued great part of her contributions to it in Jottings from my Journal (1860). Diamond Dust (1865) contained aphorisms and apophthegms; her last book of verse, New Echoes, had appeared in 1864. The Englishman' ('There's a land that bears a well-known name') and 'The Rover's Song' ('I'm afloat-I'm afloat on the fierce rolling tide') are among her most successful things. 'The Old Arm-Chair,' 'God Speed the Plough,' and 'The Raising of the Maypole' also appealed to a wide audience; but many of her poems are very conventional and wooden. She sometimes affected a kind of imitation Scotch; apostrophised 'Charlie O'Ross, wi' the sloe-black een,' as 'the laddie wha blithely comes wooin' o' me;' and celebrated Burns's memory in stanzas with the refrain: 'Oh, bonnie sweet Robin is nae dead and gane.'

verses.

Adelaide Ann Procter (1825-64) inherited her poetic gift from her father, B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall;' see page 227), and at eighteen as contributor to a Book of Beauty was writing But most of her poems were published in Household Words (from 1853) and All the Year Round, though Dickens, her father's friend, did not for some time know who was the Miss Berwick' from whom her verses professedly came. Her poems were collected in two volumes, Legends and Lyrics, in 1858; a tenth edition appeared in 1866; and there were reprints in 1895, 1900, and 1901. Miss Procter, who became a Roman Catholic in 1851, took a lively interest in schemes for furthering the well-being of working women. The later years of her life were clouded by sickness, and she died of consumption after a long illness. Amongst the best known of her narrative poems are the legends of Provence and of Bregenz, 'The Angel's Story,' and 'The Story of a Faithful Soul.' Most of her best poetry is of a serious cast. 'Cleansing Fires' and 'The Lost Chord,' familiar as household words, are more solemn and significant than many hymns; and 'The Message' is grave and tender. Of her actual hymns two in common use are 'I do not ask, O Lord,' and 'My God, I thank Thee who hast made.'

George Eliot

is the name by which the great English novelist, MARY ANN or MARIAN EVANS, elected to be known as an author. The youngest daughter of the second family of Robert Evans, a Warwickshire land-agent, she was born at Arbury Farm, near Nuneaton, on the 22nd November 1819. Four months later her father removed to the farm of Griff, a charming, red-brick, ivy-covered house,' and this was her home for the first twenty-one years of her life. Evans was a man of strongly marked and strenuous character, many of the leading traits of which were transferred by his daughter to Adam Bede and Caleb Garth; and of the life at Griff, many of the features are given in the sketch of Maggie Tulliver's and Tom's childhood in The Mill on the Floss, especially her relation to her brother Isaac. Between five and nine she was at school at Attleboro, then at Nuneaton, and between thirteen and sixteen at Coventry. She lost her mother, whom she loved devotedly, in 1836, and from the marriage of her elder sister Christiana (1837) took entire charge of her father's house. Masters came over from Coventry to teach her German, Italian, and music; and of music she was passionately fond throughout life. She was also an immense reader. Her worship for Scott dated, she tells us, from the age of seven; 'and afterwards when I was grown up and living alone with my father, I was able to make the evenings cheerful for him during the last five or six years of his life by reading aloud to him Scott's novels.' In 1841 her brother Isaac married and took Griff, and her father removed to Coventry, where she became acquainted with Charles Bray, a writer on the philosophy of necessity from the phrenological standpoint, and with his brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, who had published in 1838 a rationalistic Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity. Evangelicalism had a strong hold on her from fifteen to two-and-twenty, and she seems at first to have hoped to convert her new friends; but by 1842 she had so greatly offended her father by refusing to go to church that he threatened to break up his household and go to live with his married daughter. Subsequently she withdrew her objection to church-going, and the breach was avoided. At the opening of 1844 the work of translating Strauss's Leben Jesu was transferred from Mrs Hennell to Marian Evans, and at this she worked laboriously and in very scholar-like fashion until its publication in 1846. Her father died in May 1849, and in June she went abroad with Mr and Mrs Bray, who left her at Geneva. In March 1850 she returned to England, and began to write for the Westminster Review; and in September 1851 she became its assistant-editor, and the centre of a literary circle, two of whose members were Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes (q.v.). It was then that she translated Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, the only book that bore her real name.

Gradually her intimacy with Mr Lewes grew, and in 1854 she formed a connection with him which lasted until his death in 1878. In the July of that year they went abroad together, staying three months at Weimar, where Lewes was preparing for his Life of Goethe. After a longer stay at Berlin, they returned and took up their abode first at Dover, then at East Sheen, and finally at Richmond. At Berlin she had read to him a bit of description of life in a farmhouse, and to Lewes's influence the impulse to novelwriting is almost certainly due; but if we judge from the defects of Lewes's own novels, we may doubt whether his influence on her work was

altogether for good. In 1856 she attempted her first story, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton; it came out in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, and at once showed that a new author of great power had risen. Mr Gilfil's Love Story and Janet's Repentance followed, the former based on an Arbury episode. All three were reprinted as Scenes from Clerical Life (1857), 'by George Eliot,' that pseudonym being adopted 'because George was Mr Lewes's Christian name, and Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced name.' The brilliant story of Adam Bede (1859) had the most marvellous success; but, to George Eliot's amazement and annoyance, a Mr Liggins, who had lived in the same district of the Midlands as herself, had the effrontery to claim the authorship, and Mr Blackwood had actually to intervene ere Liggins was discredited. The Mill on the Floss (1860) is, as has been said, largely autobiographical in its earlier part; but its 'St Ogg's' is Gainsborough, which George Eliot visited in September

extracted from it, yet that no power can really transfigure it, and that the more modest the aim, the less serious will be the inevitable disappointment. This subdued tone of regret that the highest human endeavour is destined to be baffled

The Legend of Jubal, and Armgart; and in 18711872 appeared Middlemarch, by some considered her greatest work. After that Daniel Deronda (1876), a Jewish story, showed a marked falling off; so, too, did Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), a volume of somewhat miscellaneous essays. Essays and Leaves from a Notebook (1884) consisted of old articles from the Westminster, Fraser's, and other serials.

After the death of Mr Lewes in 1878 George Eliot, who was always exceedingly dependent on some one person for affection and support, fell into a very melancholy state, from which she was roused by the solicitous kindness and attention of Mr John Cross, a friend of her own and of Mr Lewes's since 1869, and to him she was married on the 6th May 1880. Their married life lasted but a few months; she died in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, on the 22nd December of the same year, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, in the grave next to that of Mr Lewes.

As a novelist, George Eliot will probably always stand among the greatest of the English school; above Richardson, whom she greatly admired, and with whose painstaking and elaborate style of portraiture she had something in common, though in her preference for studies taken from simple rural life, from commonplace subjects so delineated as to bring out the humorous side of human shortcomings and the overmastering power of pitiable passions, she approached nearer to the still greater genius of Fielding. But her mind had not the movement and vivacity of Fielding's. If it had had that movement, that elasticity, that freedom of life in it, her genius would probably have shown itself much earlier than it did, and not waited till she was close upon forty before it betrayed even its existence. In early life she seems to have given her whole mind to the higher problems of life, and to have declared them virtually insoluble before she took refuge in portraying the disappointments, the breakdowns, the narrow discontents, as well as the generous hopes and unsatisfied ideals of other human beings. Having accepted with her usual too great docility the negative view of those who held that Christianity is a mere dream dreamt in the idealising mood of eager human aspiration, she passed on sadly to a pitying study of man in the frame of mind of one who is determined to make the best of a bad business. And she extracted, perhaps, from our human lot all the good that it is possible for any one to extract from it who has once come deliberately to the conclusion that, though something may be done to elevate, and a good deal to alleviate it, and though not a little amusement may be

doubted that their pervading melancholy is at least in some degree due to the false step which she herself, under the influence of a negative school of religious thought, had deliberately taken, when she sacrificed her own life to the ends of a connection out of which most of the joy, and almost all the sacredness, were taken by the unnatural and morally humiliating circumstances under which she entered upon it. It was greatly to her credit that in spite of these circumstances she steadily refused to lower the moral ideal at which she aimed, though she pursued it with scanty hope and without the assistance of the faintest trust in the help of any higher power.

George Eliot's mind was one of extraordinary reflective power, but deficient in vivid personal instincts. She notices in Silas Marner how slowly impressions grow up within us, and how little we are sometimes aware of the origin of even those impressions which are destined to produce the greatest effects upon our character and external life. 'Our consciousness,' she says, 'rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us. There have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.' Her Life and Letters appear to show that the suave and long-drawn melancholy and somewhat artificial condition of self-repression in which she lived grew upon her more and more as 'the sap circulated' and fed her ideal of the true relation of husband and wife. In story after story she attempted to impress upon others the absolute sacredness of the rela tions to which her own action had apparently shown her to be indifferent. Her most impressive stories, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda were all penetrated with the desire to show how selfish and desecrating what is called love may be without marriage, and how equally selfish and desecrating marriage may be without love; yet at every return to that subject there seems to be, in her treatment of the theme, less of hopefulness, less of awe, less of testimony to the sharp remorse which follows wrong-doing, less of vivid instinct, more of the tone of tragic warning, more of a tendency to acquiescence in inevitable misery.

Her studies of English farmers and tradesmen and of the lower middle class of the Midland counties are hardly surpassed in English literature, and give us at least as good a view of the life of the Midland counties, as masterly and fulllength portraits of the slow-moving, beef-consuming, habit-ridden population of those counties in the earlier nineteenth century, as Sir Walter Scott