evening to declarations of fictitious love, how is it possible the young actress should view life from the calm and temperate view of her more fortunate sisters, who live entrenched behind the barriers necessity and experience have taught mankind are necessary for the preservation of social morality.
Rachel had not passed through Saint Cyr, as she said herself. Indeed, when we remember what her early surroundings were—those corroding years of poverty and squalor, when the bloom and ingenuousness of youth were rubbed off—singing songs of doubtful morality and expression through the streets of Paris, "that great, wicked, intelligent city," as she herself calls it, and (fatal ingredient of all theatrical representation for female modesty and virtue), obliged to seek applause and popularity at all hazards, and purchase it by all concessions. Seeing little of her mother, whose time was taken up with the cares of a young family, exposed to the constant companionship of her sister Sarah, a frivolous, pleasure-loving soul, we can only wonder that she preserved as much refinement and dignity as she did.
"Rachel was not good," is the verdict passed upon her by Charlotte Brontë. According to no law, human or divine, can we, who have undertaken to write her biography, say she was good. We should not be relating a fair and impartial story if we said she was "good." We only seek to mitigate the severity of the sentence that has already been passed by endeavouring to show that, amid the passionate violences with which she now and then disfigured her life, there were noble instincts, the sentiment of great and beautiful things, and that for years of her girlhood she was animated by an ardent love for intellectual plea-
