has never drawn a character that is not an ideal; the other cautiously avoids crossing the limits of the actual. If Dickens had a bad heart, and his moral aim as a writer was just the reverse of what it is, his humour and imaginative powers would still secure him the high rank he holds in our literature. But Thackeray's success is almost solely owing to his moral influence. Much as we respect his intellectual powers, we have a far higher admiration of his heart-that noble courageous generosity for which language has no word. He is emphatically the true gentleman of our generation, who has appealed to our best and most chivalric sympathies, and raising us from the slough and pollution of the Regency has made us once more a nation of gentlemen."

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Mr. Thackeray has acquired fame, and is generally understood to have secured wealth with it. We wish that of the life he has yet before him between this and the grave, he would devote a portion of the leisure he does not require for money-taking, to writing his biography, as faithfully and philosophically as he has written his novels. The world will want it when he is gone. It will be instructive to watch the world dealing with his reputation when he is no longer one of it. We believe that his memory "standing up in the past, in colossal calm, will be the object of more love, than the applauding world will ever give him during his life.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHARLOTTE (BRONTE) NICHOLLS.

THE rudeness and barbarism of the more retired districts of the Northern counties are, at this day, such as Southcountrymen, who have not visited them, find it difficult to imagine. In the manufacturing neighbourhoods of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the common people are characterised by obtuseness of feelings and sharpness of intellects; and their manners are the language of dogged ferocity and brutal insolence. During the present generation of railroads and social intercourse, they have perceptibly improved in morality, but their harshness of demeanour and savage instincts still remain. Thirty years ago, and even more recently, their wealthier gentry were devoted to pleasures and crimes, the bare mention of which makes us shudder; their nearest approach to love of art was a passion for "the ring" and "cock-fighting;" and their county magistrates, when they began to be weary of drunkenness, of oppressing their wretched tenants, and of the ordinary sensual indulgences, sought a novel excitement in deeds of lustful violence and murder.

In a part of Yorkshire where these pleasant practices remained in full vigour after they had disappeared in more favoured vicinities, stands Bradford. Nigh to Bradford is Keighley, and about four miles from Keighley is Haworth, the parish that now especially interests us. The neighbourhood is populous, and abounds with wealth; but its aspect is bleak and desolate, and it is the home of impoverished, lawless, improvident, and rebellious multitudes.

The lords of it are the wealthy manufacturers;—the people are herds of wretched slaves who hold their destitution and bondage up to contempt by prating of their rights and privileges as freemen. The parish itself contains some two thousand eight hundred persons, who alternately starve and toil in the production of our national greatness. The village is composed of houses built of grey stone, ample and durable, but devoid of architectural graces or adornment of any kind. No flower gardens are to be seen, partly because the climate is hostile to them, principally because the inhabitants have neither leisure nor desire to cultivate the beautiful. Around are tracts of moor-land, on which the snow lies almost till midsummer, and over which the cold, biting winds sweep, plaining miserably, and unbroken by a single tree. Damp and ill-drained, this hamlet is frightfully unhealthy; in certain seasons it is scarcely better than a pest-house; every spring typhus rages in it, and the ill-fated population, unprovided with medicines, fuel, food, and wine, necessary to make head against the terrible disease, is decimated.

One of the chief residences is the parson's house, an oblong erection of stone, containing about eight rooms; it stands alone, hard and graceless, unprotected by a single tree, surrounded on three sides by a foul grave-yard, its front looking out on an ugly-looking little church, its back abutting on the moors. The massive tenement has one, and only one, recommendation-it is strong enough to bear the winds that unceasingly beat against it, and the torrents of rain that almost without cessation pour upon it during nine months of the year.

To this parsonage came, in the February of 1820, "a new parson." He was a tall, fine man, over forty years of age, having been born in 1777; and he was accompanied by a dying wife, and six little children. The man had a character-but not in all respects an agreeable one.

He was one of nature's aristocracy whom fortune had not smiled on, and whom foiled ambition had soured. The son of an Irish cottier (or small peasant farmer) he had early applied himself to the task of self-education, and from sixteen to twenty-four years of age, maintained himself as a village-schoolmaster; had then gone into a private gentleman's family, as a tutor, and thence, by the aid of a sizarship at St. John's College, had worked on to a B.A. degree at Cambridge, and holy orders. He had cherished literary aspirations destined to be disappointed; and now he found himself with a poor dying wife (a gentle creature, the daughter of a Cornish tradesman)-six wee brats, and scarce any means, save the income derived from the small incumbency to which he had been appointed-the perpetual curacy of Haworth, valued in the " Clergy List" at £170 per annum.

He found his parish a hot-bed of dissent, and distracted with sectarian contentions; but he found a way of rendering himself agreeable to all parties, and became, in a certain way, popular. "What kind of a clergyman have you?" one of his parishioners was once asked. “A rare good one," was the reply; "he minds his own business, and ne'er troubles himself with ours." He was neither a bad man, nor naturally an unamiable man; but bodily suffering and unkind circumstances had reduced him to a state of gloomy egotism-usually called misanthropy. He lived much apart from his family; had his meals alone; and though he associated in some sort with his children, he would not stoop to them, but made them strain up to him; he did not play with them, and tell them fairy stories, but they, ere they could well lisp, were in the habit of hearing him read the parliamentary debates, and discoursing with him on the characters of statesmen and the principles that ought to regulate taxation. His digestion was bad, and he was in consequence full of sombre crotchets and humours.

He schooled himself into believing that disappointment was the lot of man, and he found a fanatic's elysium in contemplating his creed. On the education of children he was an advocate of all the visionary egotistic nonsense of Rousseau; and in the manner in which he trained his offspring, he followed in the steps of Mr. Edgeworth and Mr. Day. He allowed them only a vegetable diet, and nothing but potatoes; and so that the love of dress should not be fostered in their innocent breasts, he burnt up all their little coloured shoes. He was not less decided on the simplicity he liked in female attire, for the one silk dress his poor wife had-never wearing it because it annoyed her husband, but treasuring it in a secret-drawer-he contrived to get hold of, and rip into strips. He had a violent temper, and struggled against it manfully; but the demon demanded some vent for its savage force, and he was in the habit of relieving himself by firing off pistols in rapid succession into the air, or sawing the backs from chairs, and so reducing them to the condition of stools; and on one occasion, he found peace for his troubled spirit by stuffing his hearth-rug into the fire, and sitting over it till its last. thread was destroyed-enjoying the smoke and stench. He walked prodigiously, and was always armed with a loaded pistol. Ought I not to be thankful," his amiable wife used to say, "that he never gave me an angry word ?"

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Mrs. Brontë died in September, 1821, leaving behind her six children-Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane, and Anne. Charlotte was born on the 21st of April, 1816. After the decease of their mother the children led even a more quiet, and monotonous, and sombre life than before. None of the sunny treats and bright revels of childhood fell to their lot; their father's poverty cut them off from expensive indulgences, and his whims deprived them of many of those little pleasures which even the indigent can procure. Thinly clad, poorly