Inside, Fox How was comfortably spacious, and I remember what a palace
it appeared to my childish eyes, fresh from the tiny cabin of a 400-ton
sailing-ship, and the rough life of a colony. My grandmother, its
mistress, was then sixty-one. Her beautiful hair was scarcely touched
with gray, her complexion was still delicately clear, and her soft brown
eyes had the eager, sympathetic look of her Cornish race. Charlotte
Bronte, who saw her a few years earlier, while on a visit to Miss
Martineau, speaks of her as having been a "very pretty woman," and
credits her and her daughters with "the possession of qualities the most
estimable and endearing." In another letter, however, written to a less
familiar correspondent, to whom Miss Bronte, as the literary lady with a
critical reputation to keep up, expresses herself in a different and
more artificial tone, she again describes my grandmother as good and
charming, but doubts her claim to "power and completeness of character."
The phrase occurs in a letter describing a call at Fox How, and its
slight pomposity makes the contrast with the passage in which Matthew
Arnold describes the same visit the more amusing.

At seven came Miss Martineau, and Miss Bronte (Jane Eyre); talked to
Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about the prospects of the
Church of England, and, wretched man that I am, promised to go and see
her cow-keeping miracles to-morrow, I who hardly know a cow from a
sheep. I talked to Miss Bronte (past thirty and plain, with expressive
gray eyes, though) of her curates, of French novels, and her education
in a school at Brussels, and sent the lions roaring to their dens at
half-past nine.

No one, indeed, would have applied the word "power" to my grandmother,
unless he had known her very well. The general impression was always one
of gentle sweetness and soft dignity. But the phrase, "completeness of