forsaken, her first impulse is to follow her faithless lover, her next to seek the refuge of death in the dark pool where the water-lilies grew. But as the angel of the Lord met Hagar by the fountain in the wilderness, so he met Ruth in her despair upon the moor, and brought her back by the hand of a poor, deformed, Dissenting minister to reason and repentance, and trust in God, and the patient bearing of that cross of shame, by means of which, out of her weakness she was made strong to endure persecution, to resist temptation such as few endure, few resist.

And here begin the moral difficulties of the story. Thurstan Benson, and his sister Faith, moved by the true spirit of Christian charity, agree to carry their compassion into active exercise, to take Ruth into their home, to comfort her in her misery, to shield her in her distress but with a reservation. Fear of their world, represented by Mr. Bradshaw, a hard, self-righteous, prosperous church member, perverts their honesty into gross deceit, and to screen Ruth and her unborn child from the penalties exacted from such as they, she is introduced to their friends at Eccleston as a near relation, early left a widow. Their old servant Sally, a capital character, detects the imposition at a glance; but others are less shrewd, and it succeeds for several years, during which Ruth cultivates her mind until she is fitted for a governess, in which capacity she is received into the family of Mr. Bradshaw. Her conduct here is that of a modest, gentle, refined, cultivated woman. Love for her child, gratitude to those who have succored her, have matured in her the seeds of good. When Mr. Bellingham sees her again, it is in this respected and trusted position; and he thinks she must have played her cards very well. She is lovelier than ever, and he would fain lure her back into sin, he even offers her marriage, but all her heart is now treasured up in their son, Leonard, and to save him from his father, she has fortitude to withstand all his pleadings, and her own weakness of tender remembrance. Close upon this follows the discovery of her false character, and Mr. Bradshaw drives her from his house with violence and contumely. Then ensues a heart

breaking revelation to Leonard of the disgrace that rests upon his mother and on himself, and the hard struggle to live which erring women encounter.

We may say here, once for all, that in its rigor of social law against wantonness we believe the world is right. There are men and women always ready, always willing to mitigate the law and receive to mercy those who, like Ruth, have sinned in ignorance, passion, and youth. But they distinguish. Few hearts would not be pitiful to such a case as hers. It is not "snow pure" simplicity that slips oftenest into sin. There are those whose vanity and idleness court temptation; there are others with vicious proclivities who cannot be kept out of it; and for these, perhaps the majority, the social law may justifiably be left as it is, will assuredly be left as it is, while Christian ideas of morality and English ideas of honor hold their ancient ground. But as individuals, it will be good to bear in mind that we can never do amiss in restraining harsh and bitter speech to the tempted, lest we urge mere weakness to wickedness, or in holding out a hand to help the fallen to a chance of redemption. To the unforgiving severity of virtuous women is commonly ascribed the ban which excludes their erring sisters from all hope of being restored to honor and good fame on this side of the grave; but Mrs. Gaskell, with a truer observation of what passes in real life, makes Ruth's chief adversary a pharisee amongst religious men ; one who values purity in his wife and daughters and truth between neighbors as pearls of price inestimable, but has no spark of that divine compassion which was the light Christ brought into the world when he came to seek and to save those that were lost.

Ruth's life, from the time she stands forth to the little world of Eccleston as the betrayed mother of a bastard child, is exquisitely sorrowful, exquisitely touching. The good minister, his sister, and old Sally love her and guard her as good Christians guard and love souls they have saved from death. Her child loves her with passionate devotion. She seeks work here, there, everywhere, and finds it, at last, in helping as she has been helped, in tending the sick, the poor, all that are in misery. And in the midst of

this work, God calls her home-" one of those who have passed through great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, and are before the throne of God forever." We are touched with so much pity at the last, that we are almost moved to erase our previous strictures. But let them stand.

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In "A DARK NIGHT'S WORK" have another story of a deception-a deception so much stranger than fiction that we are inclined to believe it founded on fact. A long and rather tedious preamble brings us acquainted with Mr. Wilkins, a country attorney, the son and grandson of attorneys, respectable practitioners in the town of Hamley, employed by the county magnates from generation to generation. Educated at Eton, handsome, elegant, a man of taste, refinement, and ambition, polished by foreign travel, he falls reluctantly into the hereditary groove; until his marriage with the pretty daughter of a méssalliance, who is also niece to Sir Frederick Holster, wins him a precarious footing amongst the county gentlefolks; which his eminent social qualities enable him to retain after he is left a widower with one beautiful child, Ellinor, whose deep affection for him, and his for her, are most tenderly and touchingly depicted.

The story proper does not begin until Ellinor is of an age to be wooed by a young gentleman of family, Ralph Corbet, who comes to Hamley during the Oxford vacations to read with Mr. Ness, the vicar. He is a lover whose intellect has always the mastery over his affections, but Ellinor's sweetness captivates him completely, and the disapproval of his own people confirms him in his attachment, which passes through all the phases of courtship into an avowed and admitted engagement. Ellinor is in tensely happy, and in her happiness is hardly observant enough of her father's gradual deterioration of conduct and character. His always liberal expenditure has become lavish, his easiness in business has become neglect, and a clerk from London, Dunster by name, has been installed in the attorney's office to educe order out of the confusion into which his affairs and those of others en

trusted to him professionally, have fallen. Dunster is a reserved man, very persistent in having things exactly done; and his precision proves a constant vexation to his superior, who finds it easier byand-by to admit him to partnership and responsibility than to keep him in his subordinate place. Such is the position of the chief personages of the story when the dark night's work is done which gives it a name.

Mr. Dunster returns from a dinnerparty with Mr. Wilkins to talk over some business matter; a disagreement arises, and Wilkins strikes his adversary a sudden blow-a fatal blow. Down from her chamber comes Ellinor, and finds Dunster dead on the floor of her father's study; and they two, at the suggestion and with the assistance of Dixon, Mr. Wilkins's factotum, bury the body in the flower-garden. The police of Hamley do not appear to have been very shrewd detectives, for they and everybody else credit the first rumor explaining Dunster's disappearance-namely, that he has decamped to America with so much of his principal's private and professional property, that his affairs are thrown into irretrievable confusion. But the three who have conspired to conceal what was no crime-or, at the worst, manslaughter

have spoiled their lives utterly. Terrors assail them on every side; their home is become a haunted place. Ellinor loses her lover, Mr. Wilkins dies insolvent, and seventeen years after, when, in making a cutting for a railway, Dunster's body is discovered, Dixon is arrested and tried for murder. The old servant keeps counsel so far as to let himself be condemned to death, but Ellinor flies to the rescue, and things are so pleasantly arranged in the end for the survivor's of the dark night's work, that it seems as if Dunster were only rightly served for making himself disagreeable. It is true that their consciences have been irksome; but, for the public good, it has been found so essential to supplement the work of conscience with penal inflictions, that we feel troubled in our sense of justice, when Mrs. Gaskell lets off assassins and their accessories without any pains and penalties beyond what looks most like the dread of being found out; for in this instance, the torment of conscience

does not lead to confession-the only trustworthy sign of a real repentance. Shortly after the death of Charlotte Bronté, in 1855, Mrs. Gaskell was requested to write the life of that gifted woman; and in the biography she produced, we have one of the fullest yet simplest and most touching records in our language-a record known and popular wherever our language is spoken. She had a subject in which all the world could feel an interest-a woman possessed of the highest intellectual power, whose conscientiousness and family affection withstood every temptation which extraordinary literary success throws in way of women; ambitious and worldfamed, yet living and suffering obscurely; the moral of her life, "the unconquerable strength of genius and goodness."

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Mrs. Gaskell's fine appreciation of scenery, especially of the wild, bleak, hill-country of Yorkshire and Lancashire, enables her to set before us in vivid relief the moorland parsonage of Haworth, where Charlotte Bronté was born and died, where her great faculties found their nurture, and where all the love of her passionate heart was garnered up. The biography was almost universally accepted as tender, just, and true, and if it has appeared to some that the happytempered, genial, motherly writer did not get at the core of the recluse, all whose joys were spiritual, all her miseries physical and external, it may arise from the fact that their personal intimacy was not close, more than from the lack of sympathy. A biography, written so immediately on the death of its subject, risks many perils, and of these it cannot be said that Mrs. Gaskell steered quite clear even of the most obvious. Reading the book now, we are impressed with the intense pain and mortification it must have inflicted on living persons, and with the absence of the judicial spirit which would have discerned that there must be something to be said on the other side of those matters of fact of which we are shown but one. In later editions the defects arising from prejudice or from partiality have been abated; and coming to the story with a calm mind, after the lapse of ten years, we are not always so far influenced by Mrs. Gaskell's power of narrative that we cannot perceive pri

mary causes other than those she sets forth to account for the family tragedy she has to record. We should ascribe to the needless privations and hardships of their early childhood, rather than to the neglects of Cowan Bridge, the foundation of that physical debility which marred the brief lives of all the Bronté girls, and to the absence of due paternal care and guidance in boyhood, the going astray of their unhappy brother. It is to be observed that in the selection made from Miss Bronté's letters, we have no word of causes, but only of consequences; that she lays no blame anywhere, and offers no plea in extenuation of the misconduct which made her home worse than a prison-house. Whether it was fair to reveal a half-truth with insinuations, where it was impossible to reveal the whole truth, is a matter for private rather than for critical opinion. In a literary point of view, we think the interest and reality of the life might have been retained with much less of painful reflection upon persons beyond the four walls of Haworth parsonage. But with all its over-statements or under-statements, the work undoubtedly remains what it was pronounced to be at the time of its publication, "one of the best biographies of a woman by a woman," that we possess.

We come now to Mrs. Gaskell's novels in her last manner, "SYLVIA'S LOVERS," and "WIVES AND DAUGHTERS," with the exquisite short story of "COUSIN PHILLIS" between. In "SYLVIA'S LOVERS," we are carried back to the war-time at the end of the last century, and to Monkshaven, a town on the north-eastern coast, which a hundred delicate descriptive touches enable us to identify with Whitby. We are made as well acquainted with its amphibious population as with the operatives of Manchester, and Sylvia Robson, the bonnie only child of a man who was a little of a farmer, a little of a seaman, a little of a smuggler, is as real to us in her joys and sorrows as Mary Barton, or any of the factory lasses with whom Mrs. Gaskell was personally familiar. She has the art of thoroughly clothing her conceptions in flesh and blood, of putting into their mouths articulate speech, individually appropriate, so that we are impressed by them, and

moved as by the doings and sufferings of men and women with whom we have actually known. As we read, they are not fictitious characters to us, but persons whose sentiments, motives, conduct, we feel inclined to analyze and discuss as if they had a literal bearing upon our own. Sylvia Robson is a charming rustic lassie for a heroine, and is first introduced to us perplexed with the prettiest and most innocent of feminine vanities, the choice of a new cloak-shall it be scarlet, shall it be grey? Her young love for a bit of gorgeous color inclines to scarlet, but her mother has spoken up for grey. She is on her road to Monkshaven, with Molley Corney, a neighbor's daughter, to sell her butter at the Market Cross, and by the way the girls debate the purchase which is to follow the sale of the butter.

"The girls were walking barefoot, and carrying their shoes and stockings in their hands during the first part of their way, but as they were drawing near Monkshaven they stopped and turned aside along a foot-path that led down from the main road to the banks of the Dee. There were great stones in the river about here, round which the waters gathered and eddied and formed deep pools. Molly sat down on the grassy bank to wash her feet, but Sylvia, more active (or perhaps lighterhearted with the notion of the cloak in the distance,) placed her basket on a gravelly bit of shore, and giving a long spring, seated herself on a stone almost in the middle of the

stream. Then she began dipping her little rosy toes in the cool rushing water, and whisking them out with childish glee.

"Be quiet wi' the', Sylvia. Thou'st splashing me all ower, and my feyther'll noane be so keen o giving me a new cloak as thine is seemingly.'

“Sylvia was quiet, not to say penitent, in a moment. She drew up her feet instantly, as if to take herself out of temptation, she turned away from Molly to that side of her stony seat on which the current ran shallow and broken by pebbles. But once disturbed in her play, her thoughts reverted to the

great subject of her cloak. She was now as still as a minute before she had been full of gambolling life. She had tucked herself up on the stone as if it had been a cushion, and she a little Sultana. Molly was deliberately washing her feet and drawing on her stockings, when she heard a sudden sigh, and her companion turned round so as to face her, and said, I wish mother had'nt spoken up for t' grey.'

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topped t' brow, as she did naught but bid thee think twice afore settling on scarlet.' Ay! but mother's words are scarce, and weigh heavy. Feyther's liker me, and we talk a deal o' rubble; but mother's words are liker to hewn stone. She puts a deal o' meaning in 'em. And then,' said Sylvia, as if she was put out by the suggestion, she bid me ask Cousin Philip for his opinion. I hate a man as has gotten an opinion on such-like things.

"Well! we shall never get to Monkshaven this day, either for to sell our stuff and eggs, or to buy thy cloak, if we're sitting here much longer. T' sun's for slanting low, so come along, lass, and let's be going!'

"But if I put on my stockings and shoon here, and jump back into yon wet gravel, I'se not be fit to be seen,' said Sylvia, in a pathetic tone of bewilderment, funnily childlike. She stood up, her bare feet curved round the curving surface of the stone, her slight figure balancing as if in the act to spring.

"Thou knows thou'll just have to jump back barefoot, and wash thy feet afresh, without making all that ado; thou should'st ha' folk. But thou's gotten no gumption.' done it at first, like me and all other sensible

'Molly's mouth was stopped by Sylvia's hand. She was already on the river's bank by her friend's side.

"Now dunnot lecture me; I'm none for a sermon hung on every peg o' words. I'm going to have a new cloak, lass, and I cannot heed thee if thou dost lecture. Thou shall have all the gumption, and I'll have my cloak.'"

A great event in Monkshaven-the coming into port of the Resolution, the first whaler of the season, from the Greenland seas-delays the purchase of the cloak, but it is accomplished at last, and scarlet wins the day, in spite of the advice of the shopman-that cousin Philip, in Sylvia's contemptuous dislike of whom we feel inclined to sympathize, from the moment we hear that he was a serious young man, tall, but with a slight stoop in his shoulders, and a long upper lip, which gave a disagreeable aspect to a face that might otherwise have been good-looking.

Sylvia's sweet warm-heartedness and sympathy are beautifully brought out in the events that ensue on the arrival of the whaler, down upon whose newly returned men-husbands, fathers, sons, the lovers-pounces These press-gang. legalized kidnappers furnish the tragedy of the story, which needs all the bright