dmittedly autobiographical.
So also Shirley is her sister Emily, the curates who pester her appear
to have been almost in case to enter libel actions if they thought
proper, and _Villette_ is little more than an embroidered version of the
Brussels sojourn. How successful an appeal of this kind is, the
experience of Byron and many others has shown; how dangerous it is,
could not be better shown than by the same experience. It was Charlotte
Bronte's good fortune that she died before she had utterly exhausted her
vein, though those who fail to regard Paul Emanuel with the affection
which he seems to inspire in some, may think that she went perilously
near it. But fate was kind to her: some interesting biographies and
brilliant essays at different periods have revived and championed her
fame: and her books--at least _Jane Eyre_ almost as a whole and parts of
the others--will always be simply interesting to the novel-reader, and
interesting in a more indirect fashion to the critic. For this last will
perceive that, thin and crude as they are, they are original, they
belong to their own present and future, not to their past, and that so
they hold in the history of literature a greater place than many books
of greater accomplishment which are simply worked on already projected
and accepted lines. Emily's work, though too small in bulk and too
limited in character to be put really high, has this original character
in intense equality.

The mantle of Charlotte Bronte fell almost directly from her shoulders
on those of another novelist of her sex. The author of _Jane Eyre_ died,
as has been said, in the spring of 1855. In the autumn of the next year
was written, and in the January issue of _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1857
appeared, the first of a series of _Scenes of Clerical Life_. The
author, then and for some time afterwards unknown, was Mary Ann or
Marian Evans, who took various styles during her life, but wrote
habitually under the _nom de guerre_ of "George Eliot." Miss Bronte had
not been a very precocious novelist; but Miss Evans did not begin to
write novels till she was nearly as old as Miss Bronte was when she
died. Her time, however, had been by no means wasted. Born on 22nd
November 1819, at Arbury in Warwickshire, where her father was
land-steward to Mr. Newdigate, she moved, after twenty years' life in
the country or at school, with her father into Coventry, and became
acquainted with a set of Unitarians who had pra