In fact, humor would at all times have been the poorest excuse to offer to Miss Brontë for any form of moral dereliction, for it was the one quality she lacked herself, and failed to tolerate in others. Sam Weller was apparently as obnoxious to her as was Falstaff, for she would not even consent to meet Dickens, when she was being lionized in London society,--a degree of abstemiousness on her part which it is disheartening to contemplate. It does not seem too much to say that every shortcoming in Charlotte Brontë’s admirable work, every limitation of her splendid genius, arose primarily from her want of humor. Her severities of judgment--and who more severe than she?--were due to the same melancholy cause; for humor is the kindliest thing alive. Compare the harshness with which she handles her hapless curates, and the comparative crudity of her treatment, with the surpassing lightness of Miss Austen’s touch as she rounds and completes her immortal clerical portraits. Miss Brontë tells us, in one of her letters, that she regarded _all_ curates as “highly uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex,” just as she found _all_ the Belgian school-girls “cold, selfish, animal, and inferior.” But to Miss Austen’s keen and friendly eye the narrowest of clergymen was not wholly uninteresting, the most inferior of school-girls not without some claim to our consideration; even the coarseness of the male sex was far from vexing her maidenly serenity, probably because she was unacquainted with the Rochester type. Mr. Elton is certainly narrow, Mary Bennet extremely inferior; but their authoress only laughs at them softly, with a quiet tolerance, and a good-natured sense of amusement at their follies. It was little wonder that Charlotte Brontë, who had at all times the courage of her convictions, could not, and would not, read Jane Austen’s novels. “They have not got story enough for me,” she boldly affirmed. “I don’t want my blood curdled, but I like to have it stirred. Miss Austen strikes me as milk-and-watery, and, to say truth, as dull.” Of course she did! How was a woman, whose ideas of after-dinner conversation are embodied in the amazing language of Baroness Ingram and her titled friends, to appreciate the delicious, sleepy small talk, in “Sense and Sensibility,” about the respective heights of the respective grandchildren? It is to Miss Brontë’s abiding lack of humor that we owe such stately caricatures as Blanche Ingram, and all the high-born, ill-bred company who gather in Thornfield Hall, like a group fresh from Madame Tussaud’s ingenious workshop, and against whose waxen unreality Jane Eyre and Rochester, alive to their very finger-tips, contrast like twin sparks of fire. It was her lack of humor, too, which beguiled her into asserting that the forty “wicked, sophistical, and immoral French novels,” which found their way down to lonely Haworth, gave her “a thorough idea of France and Paris,”--alas, poor misjudged