18 



of Charlotte, Emily, and Amie Bronte as tlie aubject of a paper 

 to be read before the Literary Club of Burnley. Many associa- 

 tions cluster round the border hills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. 

 These are the " wasteful hills" of Spenser. Wordsworth places 

 the scene of some of his finest Avritings hard by. The moors on 

 the boundary were the favourite resort of P. G. Hamerton, and 

 the eastern slope of the hills inspired much of the beauty of the 

 writings of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. We should cherish all 

 such remembrances. The places wherefrom great souls have 

 gone away and taken leave of this dull earth — nay the very work- 

 shops whereat these souls when in the flesh have toiled— become 

 " fanes and altars where the world may worship." Standing in 

 the vale of A.voca whose charms he had so often sung, Tom 

 Moore could not help looking on the scene with a degree of pride, 

 almost of ownership, feeling that his " property in it might per- 

 haps be as durable as its waters." And so Haworth has become 

 the possession of the Bronte family. The Church with its old- 

 fashioned pews with their name plates informing all whom it con- 

 cerned that Susan Sugden had 5i seats in one, and Jonas Smith 

 G| seats in another, has been replaced by a handsome structure. 

 In many respects the village remains the same as in the days of 

 the Three Sisters. The cultivated American when making a tour 

 of Britain rarely fails to visit the resting place of Charlotte Bronte, 

 on his way from Stratford-on-avon to Grasmere and Abbotsford. 

 Many of the characteristics of the district are similar to those of 

 fifty years ago. 



Time was when it was considered wicked for a woman to write 

 a novel. It was conceded that in common life a woman had 

 keener insight into character than a man possessed. But that 

 she should write a book containing under the guise of fiction, the 

 record of events and conversations she had seen or heard, was a 

 crime only excelled in its enormity by the dreadful female, who 

 went a step farther and imagined a world of her own, peopling 

 that world with the creatures of her own fancy. Writing in 1848, 

 Macaulay said that the novels we owed to women, formed no 

 small part of the literary glory of our country, and that tliere 

 was no class of work more honourably distinguished by fine 

 observation, grace, dehcate wit, and pure moral feeling. Since 

 that date the list of female novelists had been enriched by the 

 names of Ehzabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Charlotte and 

 Emily Bronte. 



Charlotte's history in many respects is singularly like the 

 authoress of " Mansfield Park." Jane Austen came of a family 

 of whom all the members were noteworthy, and the authorship 

 of her fictions was such a profound secret that not until after 

 her death did the pubhc learn that " Pride and Prejudice " and 

 her other works were the productions of the daughter of a country 



