lement. Deprive Thackeray and
Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of
the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 _Th_. to 1 _D_.,
add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic
tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly: and
you have something very like Charlotte Bronte. But it is necessary to
add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of
the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her
sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her
actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case
have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more
literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and
more genial temper. But the English novel would have been incomplete
without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else,
and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness.
Above all, they kept novel and romance together--a deed which is great
without any qualification or drawback.

[24] Some will have it that this was really Charlotte's: but not
with much probability.

Charles Kingsley is one of the most precious documents for the cynics
who say that while, if you please the public in only one way, you may
possibly meet with only tolerable ingratitude; if you attempt to please
it in more ways than one, you are certain to be suspected, and still
more certain to have the defects of your weakest work transferred to
your best. He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a preacher, a
historian, and a critic. His history, though less positively inaccurate
than the "dead set" against him of certain notorious persons chose to
represent it, was uncritical: and his criticism, sometimes acute and
luminous, was decidedly unhistorical. But he was a preacher of
remarkable merit, a charming and original essayist, a poet of no wide
range but of true poetical quality, and a novelist of great variety and
of almost the first class. He let his weakest qualities go in with his
strongest in his novels, and had also the still more unfortunate
tendency to "trail coats" of the most inconceivably different colours
for others to tread upon. Liberals, Radicals, and Tories; Roman
Catholics, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and No-Churchmen;
sentimentalists and cynics; people who do not like literary and
historical allus