Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/391

 NOTES BY THE WAY. 315

views.' ' They were similar to those propounded by Charles Darwin many years later. The editor of Macphail was a thoroughly well-read man in English and foreign literature, and could read and speak with great fluency French, German, and Italian. In his young days he and his brother Myles, like Ebsworth, took a long walking tour in Europe, being away three years. In business he showed himself to be the ideal booklover more than the ideal bookseller, and his son records that he can remember the trouble it cost him to part with favourite volumes when purchasers claimed them for their own. He lost his wife and all his children but Alexander in early years, and from that time he lived for him and his loved books alone.

In the September number, 1859, an article from Ebs worth's pen appeared on Emily Bronte, from which I give the following extracts :

" For many years we have paid autumnal visits to Yorkshire, Emily for we love the place and the people. A robust, unaffected purity Bronte, is in the women a hearty frankness in the men ; whether on the hillside, or streets of Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield, Sheffield, and Wakefield. We love its moors, and dales where cultivation has scarcely penetrated, as well as the beautiful valleys where ruined abbeys are enshrined. The Scottish mountains or the classic shores of the Mediterranean are scarcely more dear to us than these. The novels by the sisters Bronte, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, best known under their literary disguise of Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, and Acton Bell, startled ordinary readers by their revelation of a mode of life and class of character that possessed the charm of strangeness. In ' Wuthering Heights ' by Emily Bronte, in ' The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ' by Anne, and in ' Jane Eyre ' by Charlotte, there was exhibited a series of examples of isolation that was even more remarkable than the incidents chronicled. People who lived almost all their days in a round of social frivolities, dissipation, and mercantile intrigue, were astonished and incredulous when these books gave evidence of stormy passions, aspirations, and com- manding intellect all working together in some retired district, whose name had scarcely been mentioned twelve miles away ; all exercised without regard, it seemed, for the opinion of that small Areopagus Society which holds its judgment seat in the West End, and dooms offenders by a code that it has learnt to consider almost infallible and universally revered. What cared Heathcliff, Jane Eyre, Rochester, and the rest for Belgravia or Exeter Hall ! Robinson Crusoe's Island was scarcely more removed from the visitation of ordinary critics than the retired glens of the West Riding. Some might doubt, a few tried to scoff, but the multitude joyfully accepted this introduction of a fresh element into lite- rature .... At Haworth's Parsonage Charlotte Bronte and her sisters

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