144 Mr. J. H. Balfour Browne [June 1, 



and respect in her irascible husband, and died when her Httle 

 children ^Yere too young to know a mother's love. Her sister came 

 to Haworth to mother or stepmother his children after Mrs. Bronte's 

 death. She never took kindly to the austere Yorkshire home to which 

 she came, and her aging spinster thoughts seem to have been much 

 with Cornwall. Anne Bronte must have taken after her mother, and 

 never had any of the wild-fire of her father in her. She was a gentle, 

 almost pretty, woman. She, like her more famous sisters, WTote. She 

 wrote two novels which are not very praiseworthy — they were written 

 out of the penury of her experiences. "Agnes Grey" was a small 

 canto in the Odyssey of the Governess, to which Charlotte made more 

 notable contributions ; and "The Tenant of AVildfell Hall," which was 

 a novel with a purpose, and was informed with a good deal of her own 

 bitter home experiences of a brother who had been spoiled by his 

 father and his sisters, and was spoiled far more by himself. Her 

 books do not really repay the reading of them, and she died sadly 

 enough with the family disease of " home sickness " as an inter- 

 current phase of her consumption, strong upon her, at Scarborough, 

 in a shy May of 1849. She was, we may say, a "sweet woman," but 

 we generally say that when there is nothing else to be said. Her 

 poems are pious and prosy, but I believe some of them survive as 

 lugul)rious hymns. 



Of Branwell Bronte, the son, it is difficult to speak with the 

 patience that his father seems to have suffered him. He had talent, 

 and succeeded in nothing he put his unsteady hand to. He was 

 going to be an artist, but seems to have had none of the gifts which 

 would have carried him to success in that direction. He was an 

 unsatisfactory railway booking clerk, and as private tutor he achieved 

 disgrace. The originality of his death — if it is true that he stood up 

 to face death and died on his feet — is dramatic, but it is too 

 theatrical to impress one with admiration of a youth who was content 

 to be the boon-companion of chance guests at the " Black Bull " — 

 the pot-house in the viUage— where it is supposed he seasoned poor 

 liquor with better wit. He had a reputation amongst those who 

 found pleasant social intercourse at funeral feasts, or " arvills," but 

 as for the proofs of the genius he was credited with by his sisters, 

 they are not to be found. His letter to AVordswortb, which has been 

 preserved by Mrs. Gaskell, is clever and bumptious, but the verses he 

 sent with it, which have also been preserved, are trash. 



That he was a Imi'den in this liumdrum parsonage we can well 

 beheve, but that his sottishness or opium- eating and disgrace was the 

 cause of Charlotte Bronte's two years of suffering and sorrow after 

 her return from Brussels, as Mrs. Gaskell would have us believe, is 

 for those who look at the evidence far from the true verdict. 



Just as their father had been a teacher, there was nothing for it 

 but that all the three girls should be governesses ; but they all 

 nourished the aml)ition to rise to the proud position of keeping a 



