assages here to follow?--and
therefore one for whom the national tongue was much the better? There
can be little doubt. The Charlotte Bronte who used the English of a
world long corrupted by "one good custom"--the good custom of Gibbon's
Latinity grown fatally popular--could at any time hold up her head
amongst her reviewers; for her there was no sensitive interior solitude
in that society. She who cowered was the Charlotte who made Rochester
recall "the simple yet sagacious grace" of Jane's first smile; she who
wrote: "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering
child in a cold cradle"; who wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowly
lifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would have
thought the sun's fire quenched in last night's floods." This new genius
was solitary and afraid, and touched to the quick by the eyes and voice
of judges. In her worse style there was no "quick." Latin-English,
whether scholarly or unscholarly, is the mediate tongue. An unscholarly
Latin-English is proof against the world. The scholarly Latin-English
wherefrom it is disastrously derived is, in its own nobler measure, a
defence against more august assaults than those of criticism. In the
strength of it did Johnson hold parley with his profounder sorrows--hold
parley (by his phrase), make terms (by his definition), give them at last
lodging and entertainment after sentence and treaty.

And the meaner office of protection against reviewers and the world was
doubtless done by the meaner Latinity. The author of the phrase "The
child contracted a partiality for his toys" had no need to fear any
authors she might meet at dinner. Against Charlotte Bronte's sorrows her
worse manner of English never stands for a moment. Those vain phrases
fall from before her face and her bared heart. To the heart, to the
heart she took the shafts of her griefs. She tells them therefore as she
suffered them, vitally and mortally. "A great change approached.
Affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look back
on, grief. My sister Emily first declined. Never in all her life had
she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger
now. She made haste to leave us." "I remembered where the three were
laid--in what narrow, dark dwellings." "Do you know this place? No, you
never saw it; but you recognize the nature of these trees, this
foliage--the cypress, the willow, the yew. St