e topic by Mr. Clement Shorter
seems, however, to fix the authorship of the notice on Lady Eastlake, at
that time Miss Driggs.

But hostile criticism of the book and its mysterious author could not
injure its popularity. The story swept all before it--press and public.
Whatever might be the source, the work stood there and spoke for itself
in commanding terms. At length the mystery was cleared. A shrewd
Yorkshireman guessed and published the truth, and the curious world knew
that the author of 'Jane Eyre' was the daughter of a clergyman in the
little village of Haworth, and that the literary sensation of the day
found its source in a nervous, shrinking, awkward, plain, delicate young
creature of thirty-one years of age, whose life, with the exception of
two years, had been spent on the bleak and dreary moorlands of
Yorkshire, and for the most part in the narrow confines of a grim gray
stone parsonage. There she had lived a pinched and meagre little life,
full of sadness and self-denial, with two sisters more delicate than
herself, a dissolute brother, and a father her only parent,--a stern and
forbidding father. This was no genial environment for an author, even if
helpful to her vivid imagination. Nor was it a temporary condition; it
was a permanent one. Nearly all the influences in Charlotte Bronte's
life were such as these, which would seem to cramp if not to stifle
sensitive talent. Her brother Branwell (physically weaker than herself,
though unquestionably talented, and for a time the idol and hope of the
family) became dissipated, irresponsible, untruthful, and a
ne'er-do-weel, and finally yielding to circumstances, ended miserably a
life of failure.

But Charlotte Bronte's nature was one of indomitable courage, that
circumstances might shadow but could not obscure. Out of the meagre
elements of her narrow life she evolved works that stand among the
imperishable things of English literature. It is a paradox that finds
its explanation only in a statement of natural sources, primitive,
bardic, the sources of the early epics, the sources of such epics as
Caedmon and Beowulf bore. She wrote from a sort of necessity; it was in
obedience to the commanding authority of an extraordinary genius,--a
creative power that struggled for expression,--and much of her work
deserves in the best and fullest sense the term "inspired."

[Illustration: Charlotte Bronte]

The facts of her life are few in number, but they have a dire