'C. BELL.'

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

'_May_ 12_th_, 1848.

'MY DEAR SIR,--I take a large sheet of paper, because I foresee that
I am about to write another long letter, and for the same reason as
before, viz., that yours interested me.

'I have received the _Morning Chronicle_, and was both surprised and
pleased to see the passage you speak of in one of its leading
articles. An allusion of that sort seems to say more than a regular
notice. I _do_ trust I may have the power so to write in future as
not to disappoint those who have been kind enough to think and speak
well of _Jane Eyre_; at any rate, I will take pains. But still,
whenever I hear my one book praised, the pleasure I feel is chastened
by a mixture of doubt and fear; and, in truth, I hardly wish it to be
otherwise: it is much too early for me to feel safe, or to take as my
due the commendation bestowed.

'Some remarks in your last letter on teaching commanded my attention.
I suppose you never were engaged in tuition yourself; but if you had
been, you could not have more exactly hit on the great
qualification--I had almost said the _one_ great
qualification--necessary to the task: the faculty, not merely of
acquiring but of imparting knowledge--the power of influencing young
minds--that natural fondness for, that innate sympathy with,
children, which, you say, Mrs. Williams is so happy as to possess.
He or she who possesses this faculty, this sympathy--though perhaps
not otherwise highly accomplished--need never fear failure in the
career of instruction. Children will be docile with them, will
improve under them; parents will consequently repose in them
confidence. Their task will be comparatively light, their path
comparatively smooth. If the faculty be absent, the life of a
teacher will be a struggle from beginning to end. No matter how
amiable the disposition, how strong the sense of duty, how active the
desire to please; no matter how brilliant and varied the
accomplishments; if the governess has not the power to win her young
charge, the secret to instil gently and surely her own knowledge into
the growing mind intrusted to her, she will have a wearing, wasting
existence of it. To _educate_