Charlotte Brontë was surely a marvellous woman. If it could be right to judge the work of a novelist from one small portion of one novel, and to say of an author that he is to be accounted as strong as he shows himself to be in his strongest morsel of work, I should be inclined to put Miss Brontë very high indeed. I know no interest more thrilling than that which she has been able to throw into the characters of Rochester and the governess, in the second volume of _Jane Eyre_. She lived with those characters, and felt every fibre of the heart, the longings of the one and the sufferings of the other. And therefore, though the end of the book is weak, and the beginning not very good, I venture to predict that _Jane Eyre_ will be read among English novels when many whose names are now better known shall have been forgotten. _Jane Eyre_, and _Esmond_, and _Adam Bede_ will be in the hands of our grandchildren, when _Pickwick_, and _Pelham_, and _Harry Lorrequer_ are forgotten; because the men and women depicted are human in their aspirations, human in their sympathies, and human in their actions. In _Villette_, too, and in _Shirley_, there is to be found human life as natural and as real, though in circumstances not so full of interest as those told in _Jane Eyre_. The character of Paul in the former of the two is a wonderful study. She must herself have been in love with some Paul when she wrote the book, and have been determined to prove to herself that she was capable of loving one whose exterior circumstances were mean and in every way unprepossessing.