Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/71

 But what shall be said of her successes? Let us again take a single instance in witness of what one woman, and one only in all time, has done for proof of what the greatest of her kind can do in the loftiest way of moral insight and dramatic imagination. Cervantes alone among all men has done the like; for Sterne has not; for Thackeray has not. There is no first sense of weakness or faultiness or moral grotesque on his part, of pity or question or amusement but half compatible with reverence and tender respect on our own, to overcome in the case of Uncle Toby; if from the first we have to smile at him, we never from the first have to wince or start as at something incongruous with the qualities which evoke our general and affectionate regard. And in the case of