The curious story of the struggles of the Bronte girls to get published hardly concerns us, and Emily’s work, Wuthering Heights,[24] is one of those isolated books which, whatever their merit, are rather ornaments than essential parts in novel history.  But this is not the case with Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1852), and The Professor (1857) (but written much earlier).  These are all examples of the determination to base novels on actual life and experience.  Few novelists have ever kept so close to their own part in these as Charlotte Bronte did, though she accompanied, permeated, and to a certain extent transformed her autobiography and observation by a strong romantic and fantastic imaginative element.  Deprive Thackeray and Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 Th. to 1 D., add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly:  and you have something very like Charlotte Bronte.  But it is necessary to add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift.  Her actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and more genial temper.  But the English novel would have been incomplete without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else, and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness.  Above all, they kept novel and romance together—­a deed which is great without any qualification or drawback.

    [24] Some will have it that this was really Charlotte’s:  but not
    with much probability.

Charles Kingsley is one of the most precious documents for the cynics who say that while, if you please the public in only one way, you may possibly meet with only tolerable ingratitude; if you attempt to please it in more ways than one, you are certain to be suspected, and still more certain to have the defects of your weakest work transferred to your best.  He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a preacher, a historian, and a critic.  His history, though less positively inaccurate than the “dead set” against him of certain notorious persons chose to represent it, was uncritical:  and his criticism, sometimes acute and luminous, was decidedly unhistorical.  But he was a preacher of remarkable merit, a charming and original essayist, a poet of no wide range but of true poetical quality, and a novelist of great variety and of almost the first class.  He let his weakest qualities go in with his strongest in his novels, and had also the still more unfortunate tendency to