she is made to attain the smit of human being written at all, but is poured out rather happiness, and, as far as Jane Eyre's own in the heat and hurry of an instinct, which statement is concerned, no one would think flows ungovernably on to its object, indifthat she owed anything either to God above ferent by what means it reaches it, and or to man below. She flees from Mr. unconscious too. As regards the author's Rochester, and has not a being to turn to. chief object, however, it is a failure-that, Why was this? The excellence of the pre- namely, of making a plain, odd woman, dessent institution at Casterton, which suc- titute of all the conventional features of ceeded that of Cowan Bridge near Kirkby feminine attraction, interesting in our sight. Lonsdale-these being distinctly, as we We deny that he has succeeded in this. hear, the original and the reformed Lo- Jane Eyre, in spite of some grand things woods of the book-is pretty generally about her, is a being totally uncongenial to known. Jane had lived there for eight our feelings from beginning to end. We years with 110 girls and 15 teachers. Why acknowledge her firmness-we respect her had she formed no friendship among them? determination we feel for her struggles; Other orphans have left the same and simi- but, for all that, and setting aside higher lar institutions, furnished with friends for considerations, the impression she leaves life, and puzzled with homes to choose on our mind is that of a decidedly vulgarfrom. How comes it that Jane had ac-minded woman-one whom we should not quired neither? Among that number of care for as an acquaintance, whom we should associates there were surely some excep- not seek as a friend, whom we should not tions to what she so presumptuously stig- desire for a relation, and whom we should matises as 'the society of inferior minds.' scrupulously avoid for a governess. Of course it suited the author's end to represent the heroine as utterly destitute of the common means of assistance, in order to exhibit both her trials and her powers of self-support-the whole book rests on this assumption-but it is one which, under the circumstances, is very unnatural and very unjust.

Altogether the autobiography of Jane 'Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God's appointment-there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God's word or in God's providence-there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact, has at the present day to contend with. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Evre.

There seem to have arisen in the novelreading world some doubts as to who really wrote this book; and various rumours, more or less romantic, have been current in Mayfair, the metropolis of gossip, as to the authorship. For example, Jane Eyre is sentimentally assumed to have proceeded from the pen of Mr. Thackeray's governess, whom he had himself chosen as his model of Becky, and who, in mingled love and revenge, personified him in return as Mr. Rochester. In this case, it is evident that the author of Vanity Fair,' whose own pencil makes him grey-haired, has had the best of it, though his children may have had the worst, having, at all events, succeeded in hitting that vulnerable point in the Becky bosom, which it is our firm belief no man born of woman, from her Soho to her Ostend days, had ever so much as grazed. To this ingenious rumour the coincidence of the second edition of Jane Eyre being dedicated to Mr. Thackeray has probably given rise. For our parts, we see no great interest in the question at all. The first edition of Jane Eyre purports to be edited by Currer Bell, one of a trio of brothers, or sisters, or cousins, by names Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell, already known as the joint-authors of a volume of The second edition the same-de

Still we say again this is a very remark-poems. able book. We are painfully alive to the dicated, however, by the author,' to Mr. moral, religious, and literary deficiencies of Thackeray; and the dedication (itself an the picture, and such passages of beauty indubitable chip of Jane Eyre) signed Curand power as we have quoted cannot re-rer Bell. Author and editor therefore are deem it, but it is impossible not to be spell- one, and we are as much satisfied to accept bound with the freedom of the touch. It this double individual under the name of would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call' Currer Bell,' as under any other, more or it 'fine writing.' It bears no impress of less euphonious. Whoever it be, it is a per

employers is not one which will take care to this statement-that there are many govof itself, as in the case of a servant. If she ernesses who are treated with an almost sits at table she does not shock you-if she undue equality and kindness-that there are opens her mouth she does not distress you- many who suffer from slights which they her appearance and manners are likely to be entirely make for themselves, and affect a as good as your own-her education rather humility which is never needed-and also better; there is nothing upon the face of the that there is no class in which there are thing to stamp her as having been called to women so encroaching, so exigeantes, and a different state of life from that in which it so disagreeable. But still these are excephas pleased God to place you; and there- tions, let them be ever so numerous. The fore the distinction has to be kept up by a broad and real characteristics of the goverfictitious barrier which presses with cruel ness's qualifications, position, and trials are weight upon the mental strength or consti- such as we have described, and must be tutional vanity of a woman. People talk of such. Nor have we brought them forward the prevailing vanity of governesses, and with any view, or hope, or even with any we grant it in one sense fully-but how wish to see them remedied, for in the inheshould it not be so? If a governess have rent constitution of English habits, feelings, a grain of vanity in her composition, it is and prejudices, there is no possibility that sought and probed for by every species of they should be. We say English, for forslight and mortification, intentional or not, eign life is far more favourable to a govertill it starts into unnatural life beneath the ness's happiness. In its less stringent doirritation. She must be a saint, or no wo-mestic habits, the company of a teacher, for man at all, who can rise above those perpe- she is nothing more abroad, is no interruptual little dropping-water trials to which the tion--often an acquisition; she herself, self-love of an averagely-placed governess again, is pleased with that mere surface of is exposed. That fearful fact that the luna- politeness and attention which would not tic asylums of this country are supplied with satisfy an Englishwoman's heart or pride; a larger proportion of their inmates from the the difference of birth, too, is more obvious, ranks of young governesses than from any from the non-existence in any other country other class of life, is a sufficient proof how of an untitled aristocracy like our own. But seldom she can. But it is not her vanity all this cannot be altered with us. We which sends her there, but her wounded shall ever prefer to place those immediately vanity-the distinction is great-and wound- about our children who have been born and ed vanity, as all medical men will tell us, is bred with somewhat of the same refinement the rock on which most minds go to pieces. as ourselves. We must ever keep them in Man cannot live by the head alone, far a sort of isolation, for it is the only means less woman. A governess has no equals, for maintaining that distance which the reand therefore can have no sympathy. She serve of English manners and the decorum is a burden and restraint in society, as all of English families exact. That true jusmust be who are placed ostensibly at the tice and delicacy in the employer which same table and yet are forbidden to help would make a sunshine even in a barren themselves or to be helped to the same schoolroom must ever be too rare to be deviands. She is a bore to almost any gen-pended upon. That familiarity which should tleman, as a tabooed woman, to whom he is interdicted from granting the usual privileges of the sex, and yet who is perpetually crossing his path. She is a bore to most ladies by the same rule, and a reproach too--for her dull, fagging, bread-and-water life is perpetually putting their pampered listlessbess to shame. The servants invariably detest her, for she is a dependant like themselves, and yet, for all that, as much their superior in other respects as the family they both serve. Her pupils may love her, and she may take the deepest interest in them, but they cannot be her friends. She must, to all intents and purposes, live alone, or she transgresses that invisible but rigid line which alone establishes the distance between herself and her employers.

We do not deny that there are exceptions

level all distinction a right-thinking governess would scorn to accept ;-all this must be continued as it is. But there is one thing, the absence of which need not be added to the other drawbacks of her lot; which would go far to compensate to her for the misfortunes which reduced her to this mode of life, and for the trials attendant upon it-for the years of chilly solitude through which the heart is kept shivering upon a diet that can never sufficiently warm it, and that in the longing season of youthfor the nothing less than maternal cares and solicitudes for which she reaps no maternal reward-for a life spent in harness from morning till night, and from one year's end to another-for the old age and incapacity creeping on and threatening to deprive her even of that mode of existence which habit

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has made endurable-there is something that [ question is in truth whether they have the would compensate for all this, and that is means or the excuse to keep a governess at better pay. We quite agree with Mr. Ro- all? Whether it be conscientiously honest chester, in answer to one of Jane's senten- to engage the best years of a hard-working, tious speeches, that most freeborn things penniless woman, without the power of will submit to anything for a salary;' in making her an adequate return? The fineother words, that most men and women of ladyism of the day has, we regret to observe, average sense will put up with much that is crept into a lower class than that one was fatiguing to do, or irksome to bear, if you wont to associate it with, and where, from make it worth their while; and we know of its greater sacrifice of the comforts and no process of reasoning by which it can be rights of others, it is still more objectionable. proved that governesses, as is too often re- Women, whose husbands leave them in quired from them, can dispense with this peace from morning till night, for countingpotent stimulus. houses or lawyers' offices-certainly leave them with nothing better to do than to educate and attend to their children-must now, forsooth, be keeping ill-paid governesses for those duties which one would hope a peeress only unwillingly relinquishes. Women, from whom society requires nothing but that they should quietly and unremittingly do that for which their station offers them the happy leisure, must now treat themselves to one of those pro-mammas who, owing to various causes, more or less distressing, have become so plentiful that they may be had cheap! If more governesses find a penurious maintenance by these means, more mothers are encouraged to neglect those duties, which, one would have thought, they would have been as jealous of as of that first duty of all that infancy requires from them. It is evident, too, that by this unfair demand the supply has been suddenly increased. Farmers and tradespeople are now educating their daughters for governesses as a mode of advancing them a step in life, and thus a number of underbred young women have crept into the profession who have brought down the value of salaries and interfered with the rights of those whose birth and misfortunes leave them no other refuge.

There is something positively usurious in the manner with which the misfortunes of the individual or the general difficulty of the times is now-a-days constantly taken advantage of to cut the stipend of the governess down to the lowest ratio that she will accept. The Jew raises his rate of interest because the heedless spendthrift will pay anything to get that loan he needs; and by the same rule the Christian parent lowers the salary because the friendless orphan will take anything rather than be without a situation. Each traffics with the necessities, and not with the merits of the case; but the one proceeding is so much the harder than the other, because it presses not upon a selfish, thoughtless, extravagant man, but upon a poor, patient, and industrious woman. And they are very glad to get that, I can tell you,' is the cold-hearted rejoinder, if you expostulate on the injustice of throwing all the labour of the teacher and many of the chief duties of a parent upon the shoulders of a young woman, for the remuneration of thirty or even twenty pounds a-year. It may be quite true that she is glad to get even this; and if so, it is very deplorable: but this has no relation to the services exacted and the assistance given; and these should be more especially the standard Even in the highest rate of salary—in the where the plaintiff, as in the case of the go-hundred, and hundred and twenty guineas, verness, possesses no means of resistance. which so few now enjoy-so very few get Workmen may rebel, and tradesmen may beyond-the advantage is too much on the combine, not to let you have their labour or one side not to be, in some respects, an intheir wares under a certain rate; but the justice to the other There has been no governess has no refuge-no escape; she is luxury invented in social life equal to that a needy lady, whose services are of far too which gives a mother all the pleasure of her precious a kind to have any stated market children's society, and the reward of their value, and is therefore left to the mercy, or improvement, and at the same time relieves what they call the means, of the family that her of the trouble of either. At the highest engages her. salary, it is the cheapest luxury that can be had; and yet a mother satisfies her conscience when she gives the patient drudge, who not only retails to her children every accomplishment and science of the day, but also performs the part of maternal factotum in every other department, the notable sum of 401. or 501. a-year; and then, when she

But is not this an all-sufficient plea? it may be urged. If parents have not the means to give higher salaries, what can they do? We admit the argument, though it might be easily proved how often the cheap governess and the expensive servant are to be found in the same establishment; but the