Such is the outline of a tale in which, combined with great materials for power and feeling, the reader may trace gross inconsistencies and improbabilities, and chief and foremost that highest moral offence a novel writer can commit, that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of the reader.  Mr. Rochester is a man who deliberately and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of God and man, and yet we will be bound half our lady readers are enchanted with him for a model of generosity and honour.  We would have thought that such a hero had had no chance, in the purer taste of the present day; but the popularity of Jane Eyre is a proof how deeply the love for illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature.  Not that the author is strictly responsible for this.  Mr. Rochester’s character is tolerably consistent.  He is made as coarse and as brutal as can in all conscience be required to keep our sympathies at a distance.  In point of literary consistency the hero is at all events impugnable, though we cannot say as much for the heroine.

As to Jane’s character—­there is none of that harmonious unity about it which made little Becky so grateful a subject of analysis—­nor are the discrepancies of that kind which have their excuse and their response in our nature.  The inconsistencies of Jane’s character lie mainly not in her own imperfections, though of course she has her share, but in the author’s.  There is that confusion in the relations between cause and effect, which is not so much untrue to human nature as to human art.  The error in Jane Eyre is, not that her character is this or that, but that she is made one thing in the eyes of her imaginary companions, and another in that of the actual reader.  There is a perpetual disparity between the account she herself gives of the effect she produces, and the means shown us by which she brings that effect about.  We hear nothing but self-eulogiums on the perfect tact and wondrous penetration with which she is gifted, and yet almost every word she utters offends us, not only with the absence of these qualities, but with the positive contrasts of them, in either her pedantry, stupidity, or gross vulgarity.  She is one of those ladies who puts us in the unpleasant predicament of undervaluing their very virtues for dislike of the person in whom they are represented.  One feels provoked as Jane Eyre stands before us—­for in the wonderful reality of her thoughts and descriptions, she seems accountable for all done in her name—­with principles you must approve in the main, and yet with language and manners that offend you in every particular.  Even in that chef-d’oeuvre of brilliant retrospective sketching, the description of her early life, it is the childhood and not the child that interests you.  The little Jane, with her sharp eyes and dogmatic speeches, is a being you neither could fondle nor love.  There is a hardness in her infantine earnestness, and a spiteful precocity in her reasoning,