early Victorian father) was that he believed in his son's genius. When
London and the Royal Academy proved beyond him he had him taught at
Bradford. He gave him a studio there. He had already given him an
education that at least enabled him to obtain tutorships, if not to keep
them. The Parsonage must have been a terrible place for Branwell, but it
was not in the Vicar's power to make it more attractive than the Bull
Inn. Branwell was not a poet like his sisters, and moors meant nothing
to him. To be sure, when he went into Wales and saw Penmaenmawr, he
wrote a poem about it. But the poem is not really about Penmaenmawr. It
is all about Branwell; Penmaenmawr _is_ Branwell, a symbol of his
colossal personality and of his fate. For Branwell was a monstrous
egoist. He was not interested in his sisters or in his friends, or
really in Mrs. Robinson. He was interested only in himself. What could a
poor vicar do with a son like that? There was nothing solid in Branwell
that you could take hold of and chastise. There was nothing you could
appeal to. His affection for his family was three-fourths
sentimentalism. Still, what the Vicar could do he did do. When Branwell
was mad with drink and opium he never left him. There is no story more
grim and at the same time more poignant and pathetic than that which
Mrs. Gaskell tells of his devotion to his son in this time of the boy's
ruin. Branwell slept in his father's room. He would doze all day, and
rage all night, threatening his father's life. In the morning he would
go to his sisters and say: "The poor old man and I have had a terrible
night of it. He does his best, the poor old man, but it is all over with
me." He died in his father's arms while Emily and little Anne looked on.

They say that he struggled to his feet and died standing, to prove the
strength of his will; but some biographer has robbed him of this poor
splendour. It was enough for his sisters--and it should be enough for
anybody--that his madness left him with the onset of his illness, and