Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/81

 It is certainly no subject for a boast—perhaps it properly should rather be matter for a blush—that Landor's little favourite among all the deathless children begotten by the genius of Dickens should never have had power to work such transformation on my eyes as many a line of his own in verse or prose has wrought so many a time upon them: for if ever that sovereign power of perfection was made manifest in human words, such words assuredly were his, whether English or Latin, who wrote that epitaph on the martyred patriots of Spain, as far exceeding in its majesty of beauty the famous inscription for the Spartan three hundred as the law of the love of liberty exceeds all human laws of mere obedience; who gave back Iphigenia to Agamemnon for