Thenceforth Charlotte went steadily in for Authorship. Volume after volume flowed from her fertile pen; most of them for children; many of them exceedingly amusing; all of them definitely designed to teach something. One is rather disposed to fancy that in the writing of these books there may have been, in the beginning, something of a struggle. Charlotte was by nature ambitious; and her literary gift was considerable; and some of its potentialities appear to have been sacrificed to her ardent desire for usefulness. Whether she ever could or would have made her mark in any of the higher walks of literature is a question which could only have been decided by actual experiment; but at least she must have felt it to lie within the bounds of possibility. Some people may think that her desire for usefulness was a little too ardent in its manifestation, since it led to so extremely didactic a mode of writing as that of many among her books. No one can deny that some of the said volumes do contain a large amount of direct ‘preaching’; not merely of life-lessons, interwoven with the story in such wise that the one could not be read and the other missed, but rather of little sermons so alternating with the story that a child might read the latter and skip the former. Probably, most children, when reading to themselves, did follow this plan. Directness to a fault was, however, a leading characteristic of Charlotte all through life. The same tendency,--many would say in plain terms, the same mistake--is apparent in the later years of her Indian work, in the mode of her Zenana teaching.