t is well for the perpetual
fellowship of mankind that no child should read this life and not take
therefrom a perdurable scar, albeit her heart was somewhat frigid towards
childhood, and she died before her motherhood could be born.

Mistress of some of the best prose of her century, Charlotte Bronte was
subject to a Lewes, a Chorley, a Miss Martineau: that is, she suffered
what in Italian is called _soggezione_ in their presence. When she had
met six minor contemporary writers--by-products of literature--at dinner,
she had a headache and a sleepless night. She writes to her friend that
these contributors to the quarterly press are greatly feared in literary
London, and there is in her letter a sense of tremor and exhaustion. And
what nights did the heads of the critics undergo after the meeting?
Lewes, whose own romances are all condoned, all forgiven by time and
oblivion, who gave her lessons, who told her to study Jane Austen? The
others, whose reviews doubtless did their proportionate part in still
further hunting and harrying the tired English of their day? And before
Harriet Martineau she bore herself reverently. Harriet Martineau, albeit
a woman of masculine understanding (we may imagine we hear her
contemporaries give her the title), could not thread her way safely in
and out of two or three negatives, but wrote--about this very Charlotte
Bronte: "I did not consider the book a coarse one, though I could not
answer for it that there were no traits which, on a second leisurely
reading, I might not dislike." Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with no
consciousness of anything amiss.

As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the methods of Jane Austen, it served
one only sufficient purpose. Itself is not quoted by anyone alive, but
Charlotte Bronte's rejoinder adds one to our little treasury of her
incomparable pages. If they were twenty, they are twenty-one by the
addition of this, written in a long-neglected letter and saved for us by
Mr. Shorter's research, for I believe his is the only record: "What sees
keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what
throbs fast and full, though hidden, what blood rushes through, what is
the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--that Miss
Austen ignores."

When the author of _Jane Eyre_ faltered before six authors, more or
less, at dinner in London, was it the writer of her second-class English
who was shy? or was it the author of the p