But

many heedlessnesses of grammar and construction. his industry can never be questioned. He wrote more book-pages of fiction than any other Englishman who ever lived. His published stories number fifty, while his other ten books-travels, biographies, etc.-bring his total penwork up to 30,000 printed pages, or a million and a half of words!

He rates his novel-writing contemporaries in the following order as to merit: Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Charles Lever, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, Anne Thackeray, and Rhoda Broughton. He also names Disraeli, but only to disparage him bitterly -unjustly. "Hair - oil and false jewels."

However readers may disagree regarding his relative place as to general eminence, all will admit that he stands at or near the head of the realistic school. He quotes with pride what Nathaniel Hawthorne said of his novels, before they became generally known:

Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste-just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they are being made a show. I should think that human

nature would give them [the novels] success everywhere.

What would we not give for a Trollopean novel of the twelfth century or any earlier age? History itself tends toward becoming a life-like record of common folks' joys and sorrows, rather than of the result of wars and the succession of kings. So long as readers like to have romance made to seem like reality, and reality to seem like romance, so long will such novels as Trollope's be cherished. How long will that be? Judging the future by the past, no bound can be set, short of the day when words, written and spoken, shall perish in a perishing world.

CHAPTER LVI.

CHARLES KINGSLEY. THE BRONTËS. GEORGE ELIOT. HARLES KINGSLEY (1819-75), clergyman, poet and novelist, was the son of an English clergyman, and on his mother's side a descendant of generations of West-Indian slave-holders. He was finely educated, and graduated (with high honors) at Magdalen College, Cambridge. After being eighteen years rector of the parish of Eversley, in Hampshire, he was appointed professor of modern history in Cambridge University. His culture was wide and varied and his powers great; he being (like Sydney Smith and many other Church-of-England clergymen) distinguished for wit as well as learning and piety; and for remarkable conversational powers.

His large-heartedness tended to make him sympathetic with the interests of the lower classes, and he was one of the few churchmen who espoused what was called "Christian Socialism;" which not only sided with the poor but attacked the rich and the system of social order which produced, or at least countenanced, the chasm that divides the two. He spent much time and strength in the effort to ameliorate and Christianize the working people, and to establish coöperative industry; that is, work wherein the laborer shall share the profit.

It was at this time that he wrote his most striking and memorable novels; "Yeast," and "Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet"; works which created the greatest interest and exercised immense influence; which interest and influence are still alive, and are impelling the minds of men to results which can not yet be fully foreseen or even guessed at. In one of his novels ("Two Years Ago") he shows knowledge of and sympathy with the negro race that may

have had something to do with the slave-holding traditions of his family.

His next most marked book was "Hypatia;" a historical novel treating of the times of early Christianity in Egypt, and the martyrdom of a grand and lovely Greek Pagan woman forms the tragedy of the book. In most of his novels the plot is very simple; and in all of them the reader has the impression that he had something to say for which the story serves only as a vehicle. His book of travels in the West Indies, however, is charming and delightful for its own. sake, giving a picture so lifelike as to place the reader in the midst of the scenes the writer describes.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) was the third child of a poor clergyman settled in Haworth in Yorkshire, and most of her early life was spent at that small country town. She was one of six children, five girls and one boy. Three of the girls, Charlotte (whose pseudonym was Currer Bell), Anne (Acton Bell), and Emily (Ellis Bell), afterward became writers.

The mother fell into ill-health, and the children were left to themselves, and so grew up rather quiet, delicate and reserved. They were brought up on a vegetable diet, their father not considering flesh - meat, as he called it, to be good for them. He had the theory, then very common, that exposure and privation made children grow up strong and hardy, and he enforced it with cruel and destructive determination.

Mrs. Brontë soon died, and the children lived more alone than ever, rarely meeting any one out of their own family. Each was sent, at about twelve years old, to a boardingschool, which Charlotte afterward described as "Lowood" in "Jane Eyre," and from the poor food and well-meant cruelties of which she suffered all her life. The girls walked two miles over a shelterless country to church, even in the coldest weather, carrying a cold dinner with them, and

there attended morning and afternoon service in an utterly cold building. Charlotte's two elder sisters, delicate before they went to "Lowood," died within three years, in consequence of the treatment they received there. This left Charlotte the eldest of the family, and she devoted her life, with grave sweetness, to the care of the rest.

At fourteen we find her producing stories, essays, dramas and poems, which she wrote in an extremely minute hand in twenty-two small volumes of sixty to one hundred pages each. At fifteen she is described as a little, short-sighted, nervous, wise, beloved, set, antiquated girl, quiet in manner and quaint in dress. She was now sent to another school, Miss Wooler's, which was a delightful contrast to the dreadful place where she had suffered so much. She stayed there one happy year, then went home to educate her sisters. At nineteen she returned to Miss Wooler's as a teacher, and remained there several years. She next became a private governess, at the pitiful salary of £16 a year! All these experiences helped to mould the literary work which was to Occupy herself and sisters, as did also her residence in Brussels, whither she and her sister Emily went to study in preparing themselves to set up a school of their own.

When Charlotte was twenty-eight, her father lost his sight for a time and (her brother having died a wretched drunkard) the entire care of the family fell upon her. At thirty she and her sisters published at the authors' cost a volume of poems by "Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell." They paid the entire expense of the publication and got back almost nothing. Then they published, on joint-account with the bookseller, three volumes containing three tales, one by each of them. This also failed to win popular favor. Next she offered "The Professor" for publication, but it was declined. Nothing daunted, she began and persevered in writing the book which was to bring to her fortune and lasting fame; the wonderful novel "Jane Eyre." She was thirty-one at this time.

The welcome to "Jane Eyre" was not sudden or tumultuous; but it was such as to yield a little money just when that was most sorely needed, and to call within a year for a second edition; in which its author wrote a dedication to Thackeray.

Emily Brontë, author of "Wuthering Heights," died in 1847, and Anne, author of "Agnes Grey" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," in 1849. The deaths of her brother and both her sisters had occurred while Charlotte was writing "Shirley," and it was published in the latter year, when its brave writer was thirty-three. Up to this time the secret of authorship had been kept; now it became known and Charlotte might have been, if she had chosen, "a literary lion;" but she would none of it. She did go a little into London society, and there she met Thackeray, who gives an interesting account of the occurrence. For herself, she says she never could tell whether he was speaking in jest or earnest; and remarks; "I felt sufficiently at my ease with all but Thackeray; with him I was fearfully stupid." As to her supposed effect upon others, she says, "I believe most of them expected me to come out in a more marked, executive, striking light. They desired more to admire and more to blame." She returned to her country parsonage-home with relief and content. But her fame followed her and the post came loaded with letters. Other women had written books, but no woman books so manly as hers. "Mental Equality of the Sexes" was proclaimed by the reviews.

Her sisters' books are not without conspicuous ability; but scarcely comparable with Charlotte's, though she, in her sisterly love, was disposed to make them out her equals if not her superiors. Emily's "Wuthering Heights" may be called really great, but its atmosphere of gloom and horror is unnatural. In 1854, when thirty-eight years old, she married Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, who had long loved her as did every one who ever knew her. This was the