1917] on The Brontes: A Hundred Years After 143 



Enough has been written about Charlotte and Emily Bronte's 

 youth and the drab surroundings of the dull days of their girlhood. 

 Haworth village, which clambers up the hill to the moors, and the 

 moors themselves are well known to every, even casual, student. 

 The bare facts of their uneventful lives in the staring parsonage, 

 surrounded on three sides by graves, are exceedingly simple. The 

 father, Patrick Bronte, was an ambitious Irishman, born in County 

 Down, where at sixteen he became a schoolmaster when really he 

 could have had very little to teach ; but ignorance is a fact that 

 never deters instructors. 



But having taught Irish boys for five years, he went to Cam- 

 bridge, then into the Church ; had a curacy in Essex, where he had 

 his first love affair, which, like many that are tried with a " prentice 

 hand," did not prosper. After that he was a curate in Shropshire, 

 at Dewsbury, incumbent of Hartshead in Yorkshire, wrote some 

 poems that were not poetry, became Vicar of Thornton, where he 

 married, and where he afterwards speaks of having been happy, and 

 from this he went to Haworth with his family, an ailing wife, six 

 weird children, and his belongings, in seven carts, in 1820. Here 

 through his eccentric days he remained nntil he died in 186 1. He 

 was not in any way remarkable, although he was a good deal out of 

 the common. His conduct as a clergyman may have been excellent. 

 His principles may have been as pure and as stiff as the starched 

 white neck-cloth which made a rampart about his throat and chin, 

 but he was as bleak in his character as Haworth Moor. His eccen- 

 tricities leaned to madness side. Finding that Tabby had put out 

 some boots to warm at the fire, for the shoes of the little mites who 

 had been out on the moor in the rain had got wet, he burned them, 

 tliat the children might not be pampered by what the Yorkshire 

 people call " changing their feet." He cut up into shreds his wife's 

 one piece of finery — a dress which had been given her — and which, 

 although it was too fine to wear, was often looked at with a pleased 

 gleam of satisfaction. He stuffed the hearth-rug up the chimney, 

 and was properly nearly choked by the pungent smoke. He took 

 his meals alone, and after the death of his gentle timid wife, of 

 cancer, he left the children to themselves to build castles in the grim 

 and nipping Yorkshire air, or sent them to starve at the Cowan 

 Bridge School. He carried a pistol about with him for self-defence, 

 but used to discharge it at a harmless barn door when his feelings 

 required something more than ordinary articulate expression. A 

 sort of swearing by deputy. There was nothing very admirable, 

 nothing very remarkable, nothing very lovable about the dour old 

 man. He was like good timber which had been warped in the 

 drying, and as far as his religion went it was more of what the 

 Scotch call " a bee in his bonnet " than the adventure of a soul. 



His wife. Miss Branwell of Penzance, was estimable as a weak 

 gentlewoman, who had the heart-ability to discern something to love 



