earliest imaginative work, with its gracious union of ease and strength, its fullness and purity of outline, its clearness and accuracy of touch, its wise and tender equity, its radiant and temperate humour, its harmony and sincerity of tone, to the doubtful, heavy-gaited, floundering tread of Charlotte Brontë's immature and tentative genius, at its first start on the road to so triumphal a goal as lay ahead of it. No reader of average capacity could so far have failed to appreciate the delicate and subtle strength of hand put forth in the 'Scenes of Clerical Life' as to feel any wonder mingling with his sense of admiration when the same fine and potent hand had gathered its latter laurels in a wider field of work; but even the wise and cordial judgment which had discerned
