appreciation of the chief character they are quite indispensable too.  The whole course of the work may be viewed as the Wander-Jahre of a far cleverer female, Wilhelm Meister.  We have watched her in the ups-and-downs of life—­among the humble, the fashionable, the great, and the pious—­and found her ever new, yet ever the same; but still Becky among the students was requisite to complete the full measure of our admiration.

“Jane Eyre,” as a work, and one of equal popularity, is, in almost every respect, a total contrast to “Vanity Fair.”  The characters and events, though some of them masterly in conception, are coined expressly for the purpose of bringing out great effects.  The hero and heroine are beings both so singularly unattractive that the reader feels they can have no vocation in the novel but to be brought together; and they do things which, though not impossible, lie utterly beyond the bounds of probability.  On this account a short sketch of the plan seems requisite; not but what it is a plan familiar enough to all readers of novels—­ especially those of the old school and those of the lowest school of our own day.  For Jane Eyre is merely another Pamela, who, by the force of her character and the strength of her principles, is carried victoriously through great trials and temptations from the man she loves.  Nor is she even a Pamela adapted and refined to modern notions; for though the story is conducted without those derelictions of decorum which we are to believe had their excuse in the manners of Richardson’s time, yet it stamped with a coarseness of language and laxity of tone which have certainly no excuse in ours.  It is a very remarkable book:  we have no remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such horrid taste.  Both together have equally assisted to gain the great popularity it has enjoyed; for in these days of extravagant adoration of all that bears the stamp of novelty and originality, sheer rudeness and vulgarity have come in for a most mistaken worship.

The story is written in the first person.  Jane begins with her earliest recollections, and at once takes possession of the readers’ intensest interest by the masterly picture of a strange and oppressed child she raises up in a few strokes before him.  She is an orphan, and a dependant in the house of a selfish, hard-hearted aunt, against whom the disposition of the little Jane chafes itself in natural antipathy, till she contrives to make the unequal struggle as intolerable to her oppressor as it is to herself.  She is, therefore, at eight years of age, got rid of to a sort of Dothegirls Hall, where she continues to enlist our sympathies for a time with her little pinched fingers, cropped hair, and empty stomach.  But things improve:  the abuses of the institution are looked into.  The Puritan patron, who holds that young orphan girls are only safely brought up upon the rules of La Trappe, is superseded by an enlightened