the wide range of his characters suggests the Human Comedy of Balzac.  His masterpiece is Barchester Towers (1857).  This is a study of life in a cathedral town, and is remarkable for its minute pictures of bishops and clergymen, with their families and dependents.  It would be well to read this novel in connection with The Warden (1855), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), and other novels of the same series, since the scenes and characters are the same in all these books, and they are undoubtedly the best expression of the author’s genius.  Hawthorne says of his novels:  “They precisely suit my taste,—­solid and substantial, and ... just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all the inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.”

CHARLOTTE BRONTe.  We have another suggestion of Thackeray in the work of Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855).  She aimed to make her novels a realistic picture of society, but she added to Thackeray’s realism the element of passionate and somewhat unbalanced romanticism.  The latter element was partly the expression of Miss Bronte’s own nature, and partly the result of her lonely and grief-stricken life, which was darkened by a succession of family tragedies.  It will help us to understand her work if we remember that both Charlotte Bronte and her sister Emily[242] turned to literature because they found their work as governess and teacher unendurable, and sought to relieve the loneliness and sadness of their own lot by creating a new world of the imagination.  In this new world, however, the sadness of the old remains, and all the Bronte novels have behind them an aching heart.  Charlotte Bronte’s best known work is Jane Eyre (1847), which, with all its faults, is a powerful and fascinating study of elemental love and hate, reminding us vaguely of one of Marlowe’s tragedies.  This work won instant favor with the public, and the author was placed in the front rank of living novelists.  Aside from its value as a novel, it is interesting, in many of its early passages, as the reflection of the author’s own life and experience. Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853) make up the trio of novels by which this gifted woman is generally remembered.

BULWER LYTTON.  Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was an extremely versatile writer, who tried almost every kind of novel known to the nineteenth century.  In his early life he wrote poems and dramas, under the influence of Byron; but his first notable work, Pelham (1828), one of the best of his novels, was a kind of burlesque on the Byronic type of gentleman.  As a study of contemporary manners in high society, Pelham has a suggestion of Thackeray, and the resemblance is more noticeable in other novels of the same type, such as Ernest Maltravers (1837), The Caxtons (1848-1849), My Novel (1853),