tion; but his later works are of much less value, save perhaps his children's story, The Boy in Grey (1871). He married in 1864, and settled at Wargrave near Henley, then migrated in 1869 to Edinburgh to become the editor of the Liberal Daily Review. It was not a success, and he was glad next year to turn war correspondent. His best novels are manly, pathetic, strong; yet even the best are full of most obvious faults-elementary solecisms, bad Irish and worse Scottish dialect, frequent improbabilities, and occasional impossibilities. Besides, as the critics have told us, they all lack distinction of style.' Yet how noble (he loved that epithet) they often are! That a story should move one to tears or laughter, better still to both, is a true test of excellence; Henry Kingsley's stories are hard to read aloud, for wanting to laugh, or else wanting not to cry. There is an edition of them, with a Memoir (1894) by Mr Clement Shorter.

A Bushranger.

It was one wild dreary day in the spring; a day of furious wind and cutting rain; a day when few passengers were abroad, and when the boatmen were gathered in knots among the sheltered spots upon the quays, waiting to hear of disasters at sea; when the ships creaked and groaned at the wharfs, and the harbour was a sheet of wind-driven foam, and the domain was strewed with broken boughs. On such a day as this, Major Buckley and myself, after a sharp walk, found ourselves in front of the principal gaol in Sydney.

We were admitted, for we had orders; and a small, wiry, clever-looking man, about fifty, bowed to us as we entered the whitewashed corridor, which led from the entrance-hall. We had a few words with him, and then followed him.

To the darkest passage in the darkest end of that dreary place; to the condemned cells. And my heart sank as the heavy bolt shot back, and we went into the first one on the right.

Before us was a kind of bed-place. And on that bed-place lay the figure of a man. Though it is twenty years ago since I saw it, I can remember that scene as though it were yesterday.

He lay upon a heap of tumbled blankets, with his face buried in a pillow. One leg touched the ground, and round it was a ring, connecting the limb to a long iron bar, which ran along beneath the bed. One arm also hung listlessly on the cold stone floor, and the other was thrown around his head-a head covered with short black curls, worthy of an Antinous, above a bare muscular neck, worthy of a Farnese Hercules. I advanced towards him.

The governor held me back. My God, sir,' he said, 'take care. Don't, as you value your life, go within length of his chain.' But at that moment the handsome head was raised from the pillow, and my eyes met George Hawker's. Oh Lord! such a piteous, wild look. I could not see the fierce, desperate villain who had kept our country-side in terror so long. No, thank God, I could only see the handsome curly-headed boy who used to play with James Stockbridge and myself among the gravestones in Drumston churchyard. I saw again

the merry lad who used to bathe with us in Hatherleigh water, and whom, with all his faults, I had once loved well. And seeing him, and him only, before me, in spite of a terrified gesture from the governor, I walked up to the bed, and, sitting down beside him, put my arm round his neck.

'George! George! Dear old friend!' I said: 'Oh George, my boy, has it come to this?'

I don't want to be instructed in my duty. I know what my duty was on that occasion as well as any man. My duty as a citizen and a magistrate was to stand at the farther end of the cell, and give this hardened criminal a moral lecture, showing how honesty and virtue, as in my case, had led to wealth and honour, and how yielding to one's passions had led to disgrace and infamy, as in his. That was my duty, I allow. But then, you see, I didn't do my duty. I had a certain tender feeling about my stomach which prevented me from doing it. So I only hung there, with my arm round his neck, and said, from time to time, 'Oh George, George!' like a fool.

He put his two hands upon my shoulders, so that his fetters hung across my breast, and he looked me in the face. Then he said, after a time, What! Hamlyn? Old Jeff Hamlyn! The only man I ever knew that I didn't quarrel with. Come to see me now, eh? Jeff, old boy, I'm to be hung to-morrow.'

'I know it,' I said. And I came to ask you if I could do anything for you. For the sake of dear old Devon, George.'

'Anything you like, old Jeff,' he said, with a laugh, so long as you don't get me reprieved. If I get loose again, lad, I'll do worse than I ever did yet, believe me. I've piled up a tolerable heap of wickedness as it is, though. I've murdered my own son, Jeff. Do you know that?'

I answered, 'Yes; I know that, George; but that was an accident. You did not know who he was.' 'He came at me to take my life,' said Hawker. 'And

I tell you, as a man who goes out to be hung to-morrow, that, if I had guessed who he was, I'd have blown my own brains out to save him from the crime of killing me. Who is that man?'

'Don't you remember him?' I said. 'Major Buckley.' The Major came forward, and held out his hand to George Hawker. You are now,' he said, 'like a dead man to me. You die to-morrow; and you know it, and face it like a man. I come to ask you to forgive me anything you may have to forgive. I have been your enemy since I first saw you: but I have been an honest and open enemy; and now I am your enemy no longer. I ask you to shake hands with me. I have been warned not to come within arm's-length of you, chained as you But I am not afraid of you.'

are.

The Major came and sat on the bed-place beside him. 'As for that little animal,' said George Hawker, pointing to the governor, as he stood at the farther end of the cell, if he comes within reach of me, I'll beat his useless little brains out against the wall, and he knows it. He was right to caution you not to come too near me. I nearly killed a man yesterday; and to-morrow, when they come to lead me out- But with regard to you, Major Buckley, the case is different. Do you know I should be rather sorry to tackle you; I'm afraid you would be too heavy for me. As to my having anything to forgive, Major, I don't know that there is anything.

'Poor devil!' said Hawker. Why, that man had gone through every sort of villainy, from' (so and so up to so and so, he said; I shall not particularise) 'before my beard was grown. Why, that man laid such plots and snares for me when I was a lad, that a bishop could not have escaped. He egged me on to forge my own father's name. He drove me on to ruin. And now, because it suited his purpose to turn honest, and act as faithful domestic to my wife for twenty years, he is mourned for as an exemplary character, and I go to the gallows. He was a meaner villain than ever I was.'

'George,' I asked, 'have you any message for your wife?'

'Only this,' he said; tell her I always liked her pretty face, and I'm sorry I brought disgrace upon her. Through all my rascalities, old Jeff, I swear to you that I respected and liked her to the last. I tried to see her last year, only to tell her that she needn't be afraid of me, and should treat me as a dead man; but she and her blessed pig-headed lover, Tom Troubridge, made such knife and pistol work of it that I never got the chance of saying the word I wanted. She'd have saved herself much trouble if she hadn't acted so much like a frightened fool. I never meant her any harm. You may tell her all this if you judge right, but I leave it to you. Time's up, I see. I ain't so much of a coward, am I, Jeff? Good-bye, old lad, good-bye.'

That was the last we saw of him; the next morning he was executed with four of his comrades.

(From Geoffry Hamlyn.)

F. HINDES GROOME.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), born in London, was the only child of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In her seventeenth year she eloped to the Continent with Shelley, and after living with him for two years, she was married to him when his first wife, Harriet, had committed suicide. In the summer of 1816 Byron, Shelley, and Mary were living on the banks of the Lake of Geneva; and the Shelleys often passed their evenings with Byron at his house at Diodati. Having during a week of rain amused themselves with reading German ghost-stories, they agreed to write something in imitation of them. Thus began Byron's tale of the Vampire, which Polidori, his physician, completed and published as his patron's. But the most memorable result of the story-telling compact was Mrs Shelley's romance of Frankenstein, recognised on its publication in 1817 as worthy of Godwin's daughter and Shelley's wife. It is on the model of St Leon. A native of Geneva, Frankenstein is sent to the University of Ingolstadt, where, having already dabbled in magic and mystery, he pores over books on physiology, makes chemical experiments, visits

sepulchres and dissecting-rooms, and after days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue succeeds in discovering the secret of life. Full of his discovery, he proceeds to create a man, and after revolting experiments constructs a gigantic figure eight feet high, and, a veritable modern Demiurgus, breathes into its nostrils the breath of life. The Monster ultimately becomes a terror to his creator, haunts him like a spell, murders his friend, and strangles his bride. Frankenstein pursues him to the Arctic regions, and then perishes of cold and anguish; while the Monster disappears from the scene, resolved to put a period to his unhallowed existence.

After the death of her husband, Mrs Shelleywho was left with an only surviving son to inherit the baronetcy-returned to London, and devoted herself to literary pursuits, producing Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck, Lodore (1835; largely autobiographical), and other works of fiction, none of which merited the success of Frankenstein, though several of them contain admirable passages. Her father-in-law, when making her an allowance, insisted on the suppression of the volume of Shelley's Posthumous Poems which she had issued in 1824. She wrote industriously and gracefully for the annuals, contributed biographies of foreign artists and men of letters to the Cabinet Cyclopædia, edited and wrote prefaces to Shelley's Poetical Works (1839), and also edited Shelley's Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840). Her last book

lessons, and their father told them the news. The three sisters, Charlotte, Emily Jane, and Anne, and their brother, Branwell, devoted themselves to writing, and Charlotte composed in a few years some twenty or thirty tales as well as many poems. In 1831 she went again to school at Roe Head, a country house between Leeds and Huddersfield, and made the friendship of Ellen Nussey and Mary and Martha Taylor. On her letters to Miss Nussey our knowledge of her life is mainly based. Mary and Martha Taylor suggested the Rose and Jessy Yorke of Shirley. Returning to her home in 1832, Miss Brontë found that her brother Branwell had contracted vicious habits, and he was to the last a source of increasing misery to the family. She had experiences as a school-teacher, and as a governess at a salary of £20 a year; the discipline of teaching was pronounced 'equally painful and priceless.' The sisters began to think of starting a school, and in February 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels in order to improve their knowledge of foreign languages. They entered the school kept by M. Héger and his wife in the Rue d'Isabelle.

There can be no doubt that this was the decisive event in Miss Brontë's life. It was then she began to live and to write out of her heart. She was nearly twenty-six, and had written incessantly but without the smallest success. Though she had received two proposals of marriage, her heart had never been touched. She had never met a man of intellect, culture, and imagination. Yet through all the years she craved for intellectual sympathy, and at last she found it. M. Héger, then twentysix, was a man of accomplishment, enthusiastic, passionate, tender, and religious in his nature. His pupil regarded him with steadily growing affection and admiration. He recognised her gifts and pitied her loneliness. After spending nine months at Brussels, the Brontë girls returned to Haworth Vicarage on the death of their aunt. Emily remained at home to keep house for her father, but Charlotte returned to Brussels. She wrote to Miss Nussey: 'I returned to Brussels after aunt's death against my conscience, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish folly by a total withdrawal, for more than two years, of happiness and peace of mind.' The attempts to explain away these words make them only more significant. During her second period at Brussels Charlotte Brontë instructed M. Héger and his brother-inlaw in English. She suffered much from low spirits, and on one occasion paid a visit to the confessional. She says to Emily: 'I actually did confess a real confession,' a confession doubtless not of sin but of pain. By the advice of her friend Mary Taylor she suddenly returned on 18th January 1844. A month after she wrote: "I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think however long I live I shall not forget what the parting with M. Héger cost me.' She carried on a corre

spondence with her teacher for eighteen months, but it was sharply ended through the intervention of Madame Héger. There was nothing dishonourable in the episode, and it is obvious that M. Héger never felt for his pupil anything more than friendship. But the result was deep and abiding.

Her

She returned to a very gloomy home. brother Branwell, who had become thoroughly vicious-an opium-eater, a drunkard, and a confirmed liar-was dismissed from a situation as tutor, returned to his father's house, and after years of steady deterioration, during which his sisters endured unspeakable agonies, died in September 1848. He was intellectually the weakest of the family; there is little trace of talent in his writings. The enforced contact with shameless vice from which the sisters had to suffer left its mark upon their works.

Miss Brontë's thoughts turned to literature, and the three sisters put together a little volume of verses, published at their expense, in May 1846, by Messrs Aylott & Jones. The sisters adopted the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. These corresponded with their initials. One or two critics recognised the excellence of Ellis Bell's work, but it appears that only two copies of the book were sold. Later on Miss Brontë reissued the volume, with additional poems from the literary remains of Ellis and Acton Bell. Miss Brontë had written a novel, The Professor, based on her Brussels experience, and sent it to various publishers. The manuscript shows that the title originally chosen was The Master. It went to six publishers, and was returned without comment; but Mr W. S. Williams, the reader to Messrs Smith, Elder, & Co., and a critic of rare discernment, saw its value, and Miss Bront was advised to write a novel of the threevolume size. The Professor made only two regulation volumes; otherwise it would probably have been accepted. The book did not appear till after Miss Brontë's death, and has been unaccountably depreciated by critics; it is, however, an exquisitely fresh and tender love-story, and the heroine, Frances Evans Henri, is perhaps the most charming in Charlotte Brontë's gallery. It gives full proof of the writer's power, and Miss Brontë herself never swerved in her high estimate of its value. It is a story of the love between a master and his pupil, a subject from which Miss Brontë's thoughts never moved far. Messrs Smith and Elder couched their refusal of the tale in such reasonable and courteous terms as were almost an encouragement. Miss Brontë replied that she had a second narrative in three volumes now in progress and nearly completed, to which she had endeavoured to impart a more vivid interest than belonged to The Professor. The publishers desired to see the manuscript, which was despatched to them on 24th August. It was accepted, printed, and published by 16th October, and in a very short time, and without the aid of the critics, attained a great success. One of its

reviewers thus commenced his article: 'Since the publication of Grantley Manor no novel has created so much sensation as Jane Eyre.' The secret of Miss Brontë's triumph is not at all obscure. She combined passion with power of expression. The glow and energy of the story held its readers captive. Very soon there came fierce protests against its unconventionality. Miss Rigby (see page 387), in the Quarterly Review, went so far as to suggest that the writer might be a woman 'who for some sufficient reason had long forfeited the society of her sex ;' and the North British Review followed suit by saying that 'if Jane Eyre be the production of a woman, she

CHARLOTTE BRONTË.

From an Engraving after the Drawing by G. Richmond, R.A., by permission of Messrs Smith, Elder, & Co.

must be a woman unsexed.' Doubtless the book was unusually outspoken. The obsession of Branwell's conduct and conversation at the time she wrote it goes further than anything else to account for this. There is also abundant testimony that her father and one or two men who visited her home talked before her, if not to her, with as little reticence as Rochester talked to Jane Eyre. Her experience of Brussels schoolgirls must also be reckoned. However, the main point to be noted is that the subject in itself was absolutely unconventional. In this, as in all her novels, she describes love not from the man's but from the woman's point of view. She lifts the veil from the love-agonies of her heroines, and expresses the suffering which women are doomed to bear in silence. It has often been said that Charlotte Brontë's books are autobiographical,

and this is true in a very real sense. She drew her characters from life; some of them, she admitted, were merely photographs. But in another sense, cqually important, her books do not render the outward part of her own experience. As we know her, Charlotte Brontë was a martyr to her sense of duty. She lived for her family-her father, her sisters, her brother, her servants. She would suffer nothing to shake the supremacy of her home duties, and almost denied herself the solace of friendship. But her heroines have no tie to home or family: they are able to choose and shape their destinies; they enter the world free, and yet with qualities of culture and feeling that bring to them at last the full investiture of life through love. She writes much of love requited; but her main theme is the suffering of love which is in doubt, the pain of unrequited affection. Did she know it? For answer we quote her own words: 'Details, situations which I do not understand and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world meddle with. . . . Besides, not one feeling on any subject, public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience.' The grounds of the main objections that have been taken to Miss Brontë's novels are their occasional outspokenness and their unsparing revelations of the heart. The second edition of Jane Eyre, with a dedication to Thackeray, appeared in January 1848. Thackeray had already expressed his admiration of the book, though he complained that the plot was familiar to him. Miss Brontë said meekly that she had read few novels, and that she imagined the plot was original. Her intense but strictly critical and qualified admiration of Thackeray seems to have been based entirely on Vanity Fair, the first number of which appeared in January 1847 and the last in July 1848.

There was eager speculation on the authorship of Jane Eyre. Many critics thought the book must have been written by a man. Others believed that a man and a woman had been at work together, and the names of Barry Cornwall and his wife were suggested. But one, the able critic in the Christian Remembrancer, said: "We, for our part, cannot doubt that the work is written by a female, and, as certain provincialisms indicate, by one from the north of England.' It is impossible to trace the literary connections of Jane Eyre, but it has been suggested that in Charlotte Brontë's conception of love there are distinct traces of Harriet Martineau's forgotten novel, Deerbrook. There are also hints of the influence of Pamela, which, we know, was read by her father, and imitated by him in a little book. The attempts to suggest foreign origin are not plausible.

Miss Brontë, who had kept her secret even from her publishers, went up to London in July 1846 with her sister Anne and revealed herself. After a short visit, they returned to a sorely tried home. Branwell Brontë died, as we have said, in September