. Each of these writers in his own way
held "the mirror up" to English human nature, and showed "the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure," with manly boldness
indeed, but with due artistic reticence also; each knew how to be
vivid without being vicious, to be realistic without being revolting;
and despite the sometimes offensive caricature in which the one
indulged, despite the seeming cynicism of the other their influence
must be pronounced healthy. Thackeray did not, like Dickens, use his
pen against particular glaring abuses of the time, nor insist on the
special virtues that bloom amid the poor and lowly; but he attacked
valiantly the crying sins of society in all time--the mammon-worship
and the mercilessness, the false pretences and the fraud--and never
failed to uphold for admiration and imitation "whatsoever things are
true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever thing are pure, whatsoever things are lovely." And though
both writers were sometimes hard on the professors of religion,
neither failed in reverence of tone when religion itself was
concerned.

[Illustration: Charlotte Bronte.]

The sudden death of both these men, in the very prime of life and in
the fulness of power, was keenly felt at the time: each had a
world-wide fame, and each awakened a blank, distressful sense of
personal loss in his many admirers as he was suddenly called away
from incomplete work and faithful friendship. Contemporary literature
has not benefited by the removal of these two men and the gradual
diminishing of the influence they so strongly exerted while yet they
"stood up and spoke." The work of Charlotte Bronte--produced under a
fervent admiration for "the satirist of Vanity Fair," whom she deemed
"the first social regenerator of his day"--is, with all its
occasional morbidness of sensitive feeling, far more bracing in moral
tone, more inspiring in its scorn of baseness and glorifying of
goodness, than is the work of recent Positivist emulators of the
achievements of George Eliot. Some romances of this school are vivid
and highly finished pictures of human misery, unredeemed by hope, and
hardly brightened by occasional gleams of humour, of the sardonic
sort which may stir a mirthless smile, but never a laugh. Herein they
are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half
hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her
"Dutch painter's"