Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/25

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CHARLOTTE BRONTË.
11

side of Shakespeare which certain critics of the hour are prompt alike to assign alternately to the author of 'Adam Bede' and to the author of 'Queen Mary.' Only in the eyes of such critics as these, or in the glassy substitutes which serve their singular kind as proxies for a human squint, will it seem to imply a want of serious interest and respect in the former direction, of loyal and grateful admiration in the latter, if I confess that to my unaided organs and limited capacities of sight the one comparison appears as portentously farcical as the other in its superhuman or subsimious absurdity; that I should find it as hard an article of religion to digest and assimilate into the body of a living faith, which bade me believe in the assumption of the goddess as