Charlotte and Emily Brontë this innate personal quality was manifested, as far as my knowledge or power of comparison extends, at a quite incomparable degree of excellence; of perfection, I would have written, but for the fear of giving too Irish a turn to the parting phrase of my sentence. It is a quality as hard to define as impossible to mistake; even the static and dynamic terms of definition so freely and scientifically misused in the latest school of feminine romance would scarcely help us much towards an adequate apprehension or expression of it. But its absence or its presence is or should be anywhere and always recognisable at a glance, whether dynamic or merely static, of a skilful or unskilful eye to discern the systole from the diastole of human com-
