know by our own experience how very much others affect our lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have the same effect upon others.'

I cannot but recall at the same time what another friend once told me of George Eliot's vivid suffering and susceptibility to outer influences, to criticism. People of an imaginative nature buy their experience dearly, and perhaps over-estimate the importance of the opinions which disturb them. Miss Brontë suffered much in the same way, and I have known similar instances even among literary men. At the time when I knew George Eliot her name was famous, Middlemarch' and Daniel Deronda' had issued like fertilising tides, lagging sometimes, then again carrying everything along with them. She had written that noble opening chapter to Romola,' that 'Proem,' as she chooses to call it, in which she stands upon the Ponte Vecchio looking over Florence and evoking its past and its present, and describing with so sure a touch the little children in the old city making another sunlight amid the shadows of age.'

I have sometimes tried to define to myself the differences between the great women-writers of my youth. George Eliot and Mrs. Oliphant seem to be Rulers in their different kingdoms of fancy; George Eliot watching her characters from afar, Mrs. Oliphant in a like way describing, but never seeming subject to, the thronging companies she evokes. Mrs. Gaskell, on the contrary, became the people she wrote about. When she wrote of Charlotte Brontë, for instance, she saw with her eyes and imbibed her impressions. In the same way in her stories she seems inspired by each character in turn, whether it is Molly Gibson or her step-mother, or Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, or shall we instance Philip Hepburn in Sylvia's Lovers,' walking along the downs in the darkness, looking towards the lights in the distant valley and listening to the clang of the New Year bells ?

Currer Bell wrote some years before George Eliot began to publish. There is an amusing and indignant letter addressed to George Lewes in 1850, when Currer Bell, in correspondence with him, complains of a review (in the Edinburgh') he had written of her work. Some one once asked Miss Yonge what she felt when the reviewers cut her up. She laughed, and said: 'Well, I don't cry all day long as Miss Brontë does when she reads an adverse review.' But Miss Brontë's standard is quite

different from Miss Yonge's. For her everybody struck a note, and was to be reckoned with. She concludes her letter to Lewes in these words:

I shake hands with you, you have excellent points, you can be generous. I still feel angry and think I do well to be angry, but it is the anger one experiences for rough play rather than foul play. I am yours with a certain respect and more chagrin,

CURRER BELL.

Endless histories of the Brontës have been written of late, but the stories of Jane Eyre,' of Shirley,' of 'Villette,' are each in turn biographies of Charlotte Brontë and of her sisters, told by her with that passion which coloured everything she touched, We have no need to be taught to admire her. She was a Sibyl indeed with oracles at her command. She flashed her inspirations upon her readers, and all through the sadness of her life and its surroundings one realises the passionate love which pervaded it, both for the people who belonged to her, and the places and things to which she belonged. She was a poet. She owned, as only poets can own, the world all round about her. The freehold of the fells and the moors was hers, and of the great Yorkshire vault overhead; and above all that eager heart was hers, throbbing in the little frail body.

'If you knew,' she writes to a friend, my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, you would pity and, I dare say, despise me, but I know the treasures of the Bible, I love them and adore them, I can see the well of Life in all its clearness, but when I stoop down to drink, the pure waters fly from my lips as if I were Tantalus.'

No more spontaneous honour was ever offered by one woman of genius to another, than when Mrs. Gaskell wrote the life of Charlotte Brontë. The opening of the book is very remarkable; the wild West Riding country is there, the weather is there, the country people are made to talk-how old Tabby lives in the stone Parsonage along with the Parson and his wonderful children! We see those girls growing up as time goes on, growing into tiny gigantic women, so timid, so strong, for whom life was so

1 There is a pretty story told in Mrs. Romanes' Life of Charlotte Yonge, who was frightened by the popularity of The Heir of Redclyffe, and who went to consult Keble, fearing her own undue elation. 'Do you care for such things?' said kind Keble; and then he quoted the concluding words of the 90th Psalm; 'Prosper thou the work of our hands upon us, O prosper thou our handiwork.

great a matter, who thought the world was made for them, who faced death with such calm and courageous dignity.

Any one who has ever studied the work of the Brontës must have realised that gift of description which was theirs. I remember once being in Brussels, having lost my way, when I came to a place off the high street which was strangely familiar to me, a place where steps led from the street to a lower level; and there stood a fine old house with closed doors and shutters, and a walled garden, and summer trees overgrowing the walls. Surely

this had all been seen before by me, and I had an odd impression. of a figure flitting from the doorway; then I suddenly recognised the house in Villette,' where Lucy Snow spent that long and lonely summer time. On my return to the hotel I found that I had not been mistaken. Alas! according to an article published not long ago in Blackwood,' the Pension Héger and its inhabitants also recognised the pictures in Villette,' I can imagine the interest and the dissatisfaction they must have given, most especially to the mistress of the establishment. The writer of the article, an American girl who had herself been at the school, describes all that M. Héger and his wife told her of their admiration and respect for their pensionnaire, and their dismay when they discovered the impression they themselves had made upon her. For years afterwards, by Madame's decree, no English pupils were received into the establishment; and what they subsequently thought of the American girl's article I do not know.

As a child I can remember Charlotte Brontë talking to my father with odd inquiring glances; as a girl I heard of her from her friends and admirers. Only the other day a characteristic story was told me by Mr. Reginald Smith. When his father-inlaw, Mr. George Smith, wished to have Miss Brontë's portrait done he applied to Mr. George Richmond, the great painter, who agreed to make the attempt but who found it almost impossible to catch the likeness, so utterly dull and unresponsive was her expression. For a long time he tried in vain to interest her and awaken any gleam of life; at last by chance he happened to mention that he had seen the Duke of Wellington the day before. Immediately the mask came to life, the light flashed forth, and all was well.

Some years after her death I visited the shrine to which such hundreds of pilgrims have climbed in turn. We came from Keighley, toiling up the steep hill at some hour when the women were leaving

their work at the mills, and the echo of their wooden clogs, striking upon the stones, followed us all the way. We reached Haworth on the hill-top with its scattered cottages and distant wolds and the grim, stately church uprearing in the churchyard. We stopped at the doorway of the inn, of which we had read and which Branwell Brontë frequented. The days of which I am speaking are so long ago that the host was still alive who had known the Brontës, and he described how Branwell used to linger in the bar late into the night, and finally be sent hurrying home by a back door and a short cross-road that leads to the parsonage. We, too, followed the road, hoping to see the rooms in the little rectory where the great visions had been evoked for all the world to wonder at. The then dwellers at the parsonage, naturally exasperated by an unending stream of uninvited visitors, refused to admit us, and, this being so, we crossed the adjacent churchyard and came to the church, where a pew-opener showed us the old pew and the monuments, and we heard her discoursing, somewhat too familiarly I thought, of those whose dead memories still outshine the living presences. Nay, the very creatures of their imaginations still seemed more alive than many of us. Who shall limit the life of visionary friends, of dream children after the dreamers are gone?

Just as archæologists trace buried cities, so I have lately heard of an American critic who has, with a personally conducted party of compatriots and Norwegians interested in books and education, followed the traces of Mrs. Gaskell's advance and travelled from America via Norway to Knutsford in Cheshire to see the actual home of Miss Mattie at 'Cranford,' so as to be able to describe it to the classes at home.

What a kind gift to the world was this 'Cranford,' that city of refuge! Charlotte Brontë, writing to Mrs. Gaskell in 1853, says of a letter: It was as pleasant as spring showers, as reviving as a friend's visit, in short, very like a page of "Cranford."'

Cranford' is no heroic school of life, no scene of passion: it is daily bread, it is merry kindness. It proves the value of little things, it is the grain of mustard seed, it reveals the mighty secret of kindness allied to gentle fun. Parson Primrose would have been at home there, so would Sir Roger de Coverley and Colonel Newcome. There should be a proposal to give the freedom of the city to certain favoured heroes and heroines-we might each select them for ourselves.

I have quoted elsewhere the description given to me by Mrs.

Murray Smith, when I asked her what she remembered of Mrs. Gaskell. She answered, 'Many have written of her, nobody has ever quite expressed her as she was, nor given the charm of her presence, the interest of all she said, of her vivid memory and delightful companionship.'

As for Charlotte Brontë, most of the later happiness of her life came from Mrs. Gaskell's protecting element of common sense and kindly friendship. Do we not all know that true greatness is single, oblivious of self and prone to unselfish unambitious attachments?' wrote the author of Cranford.' Her daughter, speaking of her long after, once exclaimed this was in truth her mothersimple, forgetting her own interests in trying to help others.

I have wished in this little address to recall these four wellknown Sibyls of my early youth-George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Currer Bell, Mrs. Oliphant. Of all these, Mrs. Oliphant's life is the one most familiar to me, and with my remembrance of her I will conclude. Her presence is still vivid for all who knew her, that white-haired, bright-eyed lady, sitting in her sunny room at Windsor, with her dogs at her feet, with flowers round about, with the happy inroads of her boys and their friends, with girls making the place merry and busy, and a curious bodyguard of older friends, somewhat jealous and intolerant of any affections of later date than their own. It was good to see her among them all, ever serene in attention and interest, the most noteworthy mistress of the house, welcoming courteously, speaking definitely and to the point with her pretty racy Scotch accent and soft tones. Her work was never-ceasing, but it scarcely seemed to interfere with her hospitable life among her associates.

I knew her abroad as well as at home. I was once staying in a hotel at Grindelwald with the Leslie Stephens. Mrs. Oliphant and her young people were there also, and our parties joined company. We used to dine together, walk together; I used to see her at her daily task, steadily continuing, notwithstanding all the interruptions of nature and human nature-the changing lights on the mountains, the exclaiming of youthful excursionists, the many temptations to leave her task. I was always struck, when I saw her writing, by her concentration and the perfect neatness of her arrangements-the tiny inkstand of condensed ink, into which she poured a few drops of water enough for each day's work, the orderly manuscript, her delicate, fine pen. When she had