we have always seen them there together in blackberry season, and do not wonder about it nor think about it at all.Inferior writers, even some writers who are highly accounted, would have revelled in the 'contrast.'
persuaded that they were doing a fine anatomical dramatic thing by bringing it out at every opportunity.To the author of Wives and Daughters this sort of anatomy was mere dislocation.She began by having the people of her story born in the usual way, and not built up like the Frankenstein monster; and thus when Squire Hamley took a wife, it was then provided that his two boys should be as naturally one and diverse as the fruit and the bloom on the bramble.'It goes without speaking.' These differences are precisely what might have been expected from the union of Squire Hamley with the town-bred, refined, delicate-minded woman whom he married; and the affection of the young men, their kind-ness (to use the word in its old and new meanings at once) is nothing but a reproduction of those impalpable threads of love which bound the equally diverse father and mother in bonds faster than the ties of blood.
But we will not permit ourselves to write any more in this vein.It is unnecessary to demonstrate to those who know what is and what is not true literature that Mrs Gaskell was gifted with some of the choicest faculties bestowed upon mankind; that these grew into greater strength and ripened into greater beauty in the decline of her days; and that she has gifted us with some the truest, purest works of fiction in the language.And she was herself what her works show her to have been - a wise, good woman.
- [ED., C.M.]
Edited by Frederick Greenwood.