everything save their cordial admiration for each other, bore down all
opposition in the reading world: William Makepeace Thackeray, in 1846,
in spite of the discouragement of publishers, started his "Vanity
Fair," and Charlotte Bronte, from the primitive seclusion of an old-
fashioned Yorkshire parsonage, took England by storm with her
impassioned, unconventional "Jane Eyre." The fame of these two books,
while the authors were still in a great measure unknown, rang through
the country.

Art in England was still following the lines laid down for the last
twenty or thirty years, unless in the case of Turner, who had entered
some time before on the third period of his work, the period marked by
defiance and recklessness as well as by noble power.




CHAPTER VI.


INSTALLATION OF PRINCE ALBERT AS CHANCELLOR OF CAMBRIDGE.

One thousand eight hundred and forty-seven began with the climax of
the terrible famine in Ireland, and the Highlands, produced by the
potato disease, which, commencing in 1845, had reappeared even more
disastrously in 1846. In the Queen's speech in opening Parliament, she
alluded to the famine in the land with a perceptibly sad fall of her
voice.

In spite of bad trade and bad times everywhere, two millions were