four sisters and a brother before she was more than thirty-three, to have been sole survivor of a large household, to have passed a life of continual weakness, toil, and suffering—­and then to be cut off after nine months of marriage,—­all this touched the sympathies of the world as the private life of few writers touches them.  And then the shock of her sudden death came upon us as a personal sorrow.  Such genius, such courage, such perseverance, such promise—­and yet but three books in all, published at intervals of two and of four years!  There was meaning in the somewhat unusual form in which Mrs. Gaskell opens her Life of Charlotte Bronte, setting out verbatim in her first chapter the seven memorial inscriptions to the buried family in Haworth Church, and placing on the title-page a vignette of Haworth churchyard with its white tombstones.  Charlotte Bronte was a kind of prosaic, most demure and orthodox Shelley in the Victorian literature—­with visible genius, an intense personality, unquenchable fire, an early and tragic death.  And all this passion in a little prim, shy, delicate, proud Puritan girl!

To this sympathy our great writer, whom she herself called “the first social regenerator of the day,” did full justice in that beautiful little piece which he wrote in the Cornhill Magazine upon her death and which is the last of the Roundabout Papers in the twenty-second volume of Thackeray’s collected works.  It is called The Last Sketch:  it is so eloquent, so true, so sympathetic that it deserves to be remembered, and yet after forty years it is too seldom read.

Of the multitude that have read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate?  Which of her readers has not become her friend?  Who that has known her books has not admired the artist’s noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman?  What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors!

He goes on to deplore that “the heart newly awakened to love and happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, had ceased to beat.”  He speaks of her “trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes.”  He speaks of his recollections of her in society, of “the impetuous honesty” which seemed the character of the woman—­

I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals.  She gave me the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, and high-minded person.  A great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always.  Such, in our brief interview, she appeared to me.  As one thinks of that life so noble, so lonely,—­of that passion for truth—­of those nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies,