Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/115

Rh gift to her husband, when she died suddenly of heart disease, about 5 o'clock on Sunday evening, November 2, 1865. Her remains were carried to the churchyard of the Old Presbyterian Meeting-house at Knutsford, where her childhood and girlhood had been spent, and which she had left as a bride, three-and-thirty years before. A memorial tablet in memory of Mrs Gaskell was erected by her husband’s congregation, in Cross Street Chapel, Manchester—a tribute not only to her genius, and the spirit in which it was exercised, but to the “tenderness and ﬁdelity” of the wife and mother who had lived long amongst them. With this knowledge of the facts of Mrs Gaskell’s life, it is not difficult to trace the sources of her inspirations. Some of her shorter tales, it is true, seem to have been suggested merely by her readings; and, carefully as she collected their materials, these are the least satisfactory of her writings. but by far the most of what she wrote was founded on observation and experience. Mrs Gaskell has reproduced, with slight variations, in her novel North and South, the Lincident in her father’s youth, when he and his friend and fellow-student, the Rev. George Wicke of Monton, believing it wrong to be “hired teachers of re- ligion,” resigned their ministries and sought a livelihood otherwise. The beautiful story in “ Mary Barton ” of the two working-men who brought the baby from London to Manchester is a version of an anecdote about Mrs Gaskell’s own infancy, of her being taken to Knutsford, after her mother’s death, by a friend who chanced to be travelling that way. The little county town of “ Cranford”-—with its population of widows and maiden ladies, and its horror of the masculine portion of society—-is Knutsford, so long Mrs Gaskell’s home. In Cranford every character, if not every incident, is real; and the pathetic little story of Poor Peter can have been suggested only by the disap- pearance of that sailor brother who used to visit Mrs Gaskell in her girlhood, and whose mysterious loss also must have interested her always afterwards in “ disappear- ances ”—the title of one of her papers in Household Words. Pleasant months spent at Morecambe Bay and Silver- dale initiated her in the mysteries of rural and farm life. Her visits to France were the origin of her tales of the lluguenots and the French refugees at the time of the Revolution. The Edinburgh of her girlhood appears in one or two of her stories, brieﬂy but vividly sketched. Her schooldays at Stratford-on-Avon are remembered in Lois the ll-"i'tch.; and, if only in a little story like the visit to H eppenheini, we can trace her excursions from Heidelberg along the broad, white Bergstrasse. But it is most of all in J[a-ry Barton, a story of the trials and sorrows of the poor in Manchester, whom she had had so many oppor- tunities of observing, that Mrs Gaskell gave her personal knowledge and experience to the world. Her severest critic, .Ir W. R. Greg, admits Mrs Gaskell’s knowledge of her subject, but objects to the impression left by the novel on the mind of the reader as inaccurate and harmful. “Were .l[(u-y Barton,” he says, “to be only read by Man- chester men and master manufacturers, it could scarcely fail to be serviceable, because they might proﬁt by its suggestions, and would at once detect its exaggerations and mistakes,” but on the general public he fears its effect will be “mischievous in the extreme.” One doubts whether a calm solution of a great economic diffi- culty, such as that which Mrs Gaskell treats of, could ever be given in a novel; and certainly the warm-hearted, uiipiilsive authoress of Zlfary Barton had no such aim in view. It is probable that she wrote without any distinct economic theories. Earnest, benevolent intentions she no doubt had, but she was far more of an artist than a reformer. Had it not been so, Jlary Barton would not rank so high in the literature of ﬁction as it does. It is no work of occasion, the chief interest of which departs when the occasion itself is over. It is a thoroughly artistic production, and for power of treatment and intense interest of plot has seldom been surpassed. It is as the aiithoress of Jlfary Barton that Mrs Gaskell will be remembered. Of her other works, Ruth is singularly inferior to its predeces- sor; but North and South, which takes the side of the master manufacturers, as Jllary Barton did that of the men, has been scarcely less popular with the public. Perhaps the two best of Mrs Gaskell’s productions, each in its own way, are the exquisitely humorous Cranford and Cousin Plzillis, which has been fitly called an idyll in prose. Wives and Daughters, even in its uncompleted state, is artistically almost faultless, and full of a quiet restful beauty entirely its own. George Sand was a great admirer of this novel, and Mrs Gaskell’s family still cherish a saying of hers about it :—“ It is a book,” she once said to Lord Houghton, “that might be put into the hands of an inno- cent girl, while at the same time it would rivet the attention of the most blasé man of the world.” Her one work which is not a novel——her Life of Charlotte Bronte——it is difficult to praise too highly, either as a biography proper, or as a narrative written with the consummate skill of the novelist. Some people, indeed, have thought that Mrs Gaskell transgressed the bounds of the biographer in pub- lishing so many details of Miss Bronte’s domestic and private life; but the case was a peculiar one. The char- acter of Charlotte Bronte’s writings made it advisable that her reader, in order properly to understand her, should be admitted to some of the hitherto hidden facts of her short, sad life. ilrs Gaskell, knowing and esteeming Charlotte Bronte in the character of friend, daughter, and wife, hoped in some degree to justify to the world the morbid, unhealthy tone which pervaded her genius ; and surely, if any hand was to draw the curtain, none could have done it more tenderly than that of her friend.  GASSENDI, (–1655), one of the most eminent French philosophers, was born of poor but respectable parentage at Champtercier, near Digne, in Provence, on the 22d January. At a very early age he gave indications of remarkable mental powers, and at the instance of his uncle, the cure of his native village, he was sent to the college at Digne. He made rapid progress in his studies, showing particular aptitude for languages and mathematics, and it is said that at the age of sixteen he was invited to lecture on rhetoric at the college. He cannot have retained this post for any length of time, for soon afterwards he entered the university of Aix, to study philosophy under Fesaye. In he was called to the college of Digne to lecture on theology. Four years later he received the degree of doctor of theology at Avignon, and in he took orders as a priest. In he was called to the chair of philosophy at Aix, and seems gradually to have withdrawn from theological study and teaching. At Aix he lectured principally on the Aristotelian philo- sophy, conforining as far as possible to the orthodox methods. At the same time, however, he prosecuted his favourite studies, physics and astronomy, and by the dis- eoveries of Galileo, Kepler, and others became more and more dissatisﬁed with the Peripatetic system. It was, indeed, the very period of violent revolt against the autho- rity of Aristotle, and Gassendi shared to the full the practical and empirical tendencies of the age. He, too, began to draw up in form his objections to the Aristotelian philosophy, but did not at ﬁrst venture to publish them. The portion shown to his friends Peiresc and Gautier, however, was so vehemently approved by them that in 1624, after he had left Aix for a canonry at Grenoble, ‘he printed the ﬁrst part of his E.'rerc'Ltat§_mes paradoxtcw