bitterness, and in a kindly spirit withal, and for that reason the book is a valuable addition to the history of the life and manners of the century. _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, her second novel, was a peculiar book to have shaped itself in the brain of the gentle youngest daughter of the Vicar of Haworth. But Anne Brontë had seen phases of life which must have sorely wounded her pure spirit. She had been governess at Thorp Green, where her brother Branwell was tutor, and where he formed that unfortunate attachment for the wife of his employer, which, with the help of liquor and opium, deranged his mind. Anne wrote in her diary at this time, "I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature." As we picture Anne Brontë, with her light brown hair, violet-blue eyes, shaded by pencilled eyebrows, and transparent complexion, she seems a spirit of goodness and purity made to behold daily a depth of evil in the nature of one dear to her, which fills her with wonderment and horror. Mr. Huntingdon of Wildfell Hall was drawn from personal observation of her brother. She wrote with minuteness, because she believed it her duty to hold up his life as a warning to others. The gradual change in Mr. Huntingdon from the happy confident lover to the ruined debauchee is well traced; the story of his infatuation for the wife of his friend, so reckless that he attempted no concealment, is realistic in the extreme. But what a change in the novel! A hundred years before, Huntingdon would have made a fine hero of romance, but here he is disgraced to the position of chief villain, and the reader feels for him only pity and loathing. Probably a man's pen would have touched his errors more lightly, but Anne Brontë painted him as he appeared to her. The author attributes such a character as Huntingdon's to false education, and makes her heroine say: "As for my son--if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a man of the world,--one that has 'seen life,' and glories in his experience, even though he should so far profit by it as to sober down, at length, into a useful and respected member of society--I would rather that he died to-morrow--rather a thousand times."