And then, there was such personal interest in the writer's self, in her intense individuality, in her strong character; there was so much sympathy with her hard and lonely life; there was such pathos in her family history and the tragedy which threw gloom over her whole life, and cut it off in youth after a few months of happiness. To have lived in poverty, in a remote and wild moorland, almost friendless and in continual struggle against sickness, to have been motherless since the age of five, to have lost four sisters and a brother before she was more than thirty-three, to have been sole survivor of a large household, to have passed a life of continual weakness, toil, and suffering--and then to be cut off after nine months of marriage,--all this touched the sympathies of the world as the private life of few writers touches them. And then the shock of her sudden death came upon us as a personal sorrow. Such genius, such courage, such perseverance, such promise--and yet but three books in all, published at intervals of two and of four years! There was meaning in the somewhat unusual form in which Mrs. Gaskell opens her _Life of Charlotte Bronte_, setting out verbatim in her first chapter the seven memorial inscriptions to the buried family in Haworth Church, and placing on the title-page a vignette of Haworth churchyard with its white tombstones. Charlotte Bronte was a kind of prosaic, most demure and orthodox Shelley in the Victorian literature--with visible genius, an intense personality, unquenchable fire, an early and tragic death. And all this passion in a little prim, shy, delicate, proud Puritan girl! To this sympathy our great writer, whom she herself called "the first social regenerator of the day," did full justice in that beautiful little piece which he wrote in the _Cornhill Magazine_ upon her death and which is the last of the _Roundabout Papers_ in the twenty-second volume of Thackeray's collected works. It is called _The Last Sketch_: it is so eloquent, so true, so sympathetic that it deserves to be remembered, and yet after forty years it is too seldom read. Of the multitude that have read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist's noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors!