twenty years ago.  A bereavement of this kind gives one a glimpse of the feeling those must have who have seen all drop round them, friend after friend, and are left to end their pilgrimage alone.  But tears are fruitless, and I try not to repine.”

During this winter, Charlotte employed her leisure hours in writing a story.  Some fragments of the manuscript yet remain, but it is in too small a hand to be read without great fatigue to the eyes; and one cares the less to read it, as she herself condemned it, in the preface to the “Professor,” by saying that in this story she had got over such taste as she might once have had for the “ornamental and redundant in composition.”  The beginning, too, as she acknowledges, was on a scale commensurate with one of Richardson’s novels, of seven or eight volumes.  I gather some of these particulars from a copy of a letter, apparently in reply to one from Wordsworth, to whom she had sent the commencement of the story, sometime in the summer of 1840.

“Authors are generally very tenacious of their productions, but I am not so much attached to this but that I can give it up without much distress.  No doubt, if I had gone on, I should have made quite a Richardsonian concern of it . . .  I had materials in my head for half- a-dozen volumes . . .  Of course, it is with considerable regret I relinquish any scheme so charming as the one I have sketched.  It is very edifying and profitable to create a world out of your own brains, and people it with inhabitants, who are so many Melchisedecs, and have no father nor mother but your own imagination . . .  I am sorry I did not exist fifty or sixty years ago, when the ‘Ladies’ Magazine’ was flourishing like a green bay-tree.  In that case, I make no doubt, my aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement, and I should have had the pleasure of introducing Messrs. Percy and West into the very best society, and recording all their sayings and doings in double-columned close-printed pages . . .  I recollect, when I was a child, getting hold of some antiquated volumes, and reading them by stealth with the most exquisite pleasure.  You give a correct description of the patient Grisels of those days.  My aunt was one of them; and to this day she thinks the tales of the ‘Ladies’ Magazine’ infinitely superior to any trash of modern literature.  So do I; for I read them in childhood, and childhood has a very strong faculty of admiration, but a very weak one of criticism . . .  I am pleased that you cannot quite decide whether I am an attorney’s clerk or a novel- reading dress-maker.  I will not help you at all in the discovery; and as to my handwriting, or the ladylike touches in my style and imagery, you must not draw any conclusion from that—­I may employ an amanuensis.  Seriously, sir, I am very much obliged to you for your kind and candid letter.  I almost wonder you took the trouble to read and notice the novelette