h to all readers of novels--
especially those of the old school and those of the lowest school of our
own day. For Jane Eyre is merely another Pamela, who, by the force of
her character and the strength of her principles, is carried
victoriously through great trials and temptations from the man she
loves. Nor is she even a Pamela adapted and refined to modern notions;
for though the story is conducted without those derelictions of decorum
which we are to believe had their excuse in the manners of Richardson's
time, yet it stamped with a coarseness of language and laxity of tone
which have certainly no excuse in ours. It is a very remarkable book: we
have no remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such
horrid taste. Both together have equally assisted to gain the great
popularity it has enjoyed; for in these days of extravagant adoration of
all that bears the stamp of novelty and originality, sheer rudeness and
vulgarity have come in for a most mistaken worship.

The story is written in the first person. Jane begins with her earliest
recollections, and at once takes possession of the readers' intensest
interest by the masterly picture of a strange and oppressed child she
raises up in a few strokes before him. She is an orphan, and a dependant
in the house of a selfish, hard-hearted aunt, against whom the
disposition of the little Jane chafes itself in natural antipathy, till
she contrives to make the unequal struggle as intolerable to her
oppressor as it is to herself. She is, therefore, at eight years of age,
got rid of to a sort of Dothegirls Hall, where she continues to enlist
our sympathies for a time with her little pinched fingers, cropped hair,
and empty stomach. But things improve: the abuses of the institution are
looked into. The Puritan patron, who holds that young orphan girls are
only safely brought up upon the rules of La Trappe, is superseded by an
enlightened committee--the school assumes a sound English character--
Jane progresses duly from scholar to teacher, and passes ten profitable
and not unhappy years at Lowood. Then she advertises for a situation as
governess, and obtains one immediately in one of the midland counties.
We see her, therefore, as she leaves Lowood, to enter upon a new life--a
small, plain, odd creature, who has been brought up dry upon school
learning, and somewhat stunted accordingly in mind and body, and who is
now thrown upon the world as ignorant of its ways, and