of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labors of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven be pleased to make the teeth rot out of them all, therefore! Make them a reproach, and all that pass by them to loll out their tongues at them! Blind mouths! as Milton somewhere calls them." Poor Elia! Of crazy stock; himself in a mad-house for six weeks at the end of his twentieth year; his sister insane at intervals throughout her life; his mother hopelessly bed-ridden till killed by her daughter in a fit of frenzy; his father pitifully imbecile; his old maiden aunt home from a rich relation's to be nursed till she died--all dependent upon him, his more prosperous brother declining to bear any part of the burden; his work for more than thirty years monotonous, and most of it performed at the same desk in the same back office; pinched all the time by adversity; with no ear for music; the list of his few friends, to use his own words, "in the world's eye, a ragged regiment,"--including the poet Lloyd, who died insane, and the scholar Dyer, who was so absent-minded as at one time to empty the contents of his snuff-box into the tea-pot when he was preparing breakfast for a hungry friend, at another, with staff in hand, and at noonday, to walk straight into the river,--the humor, we say, of dear, wretched, gentle Charles Lamb must stand a wonder in English literature. Not less incredible was the steady growth of the prodigious genius of Charlotte Bronte, under circumstances hardly less awfully depressing. Think of the woful life of that suffering prodigy, in that cheerless village of forbidding stone houses, whose grim architecture illustrated the rigid hardness of their inhabitants. Above, below, all around, were rocks and moors, "where neither flowers nor vegetables would flourish, and where even a tree of moderate dimensions might be hunted far and wide; where the snow lay long and late; and where often, on autumnal and winter nights, the four winds of heaven seemed to meet and rage together, tearing round the houses as if they were wild beasts striving to find an entrance." Stone dikes were used in place of hedges. The cold parsonage, at the top of the one desolate street, with its stone stairs and stone floors in the passages and parlors, was surrounded on three sides by the "great old church-yard," which was "terribly full of upright tomb-stones," and which poisoned the water-springs of the pumps. The funeral bells, tolling, tolling, and the "chip, chip" of the mason, as he cut the grave-stones in a shed close by, were habitual sounds. The pews in the old church were of black oak, with high divisions, with the names of the owners painted in white letters on the doors. Her father, the clergyman, harsh, hard, and unsocial; at all times denying flesh food to his puny children; at dinner permitting them only potatoes, and rarely or never taking his meals with them; with a temper so violent and