irresistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer. She thought it
necessary to explain how they came by their knowledge of evil.

This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indictment of her
brother to anybody who knew enough to read between the lines. Charlotte
may have innocently supposed that nobody knew or ever would know enough.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Gaskell knew; and when it came to vindicating
Charlotte, she considered herself justified in exposing Charlotte's
brother because Charlotte herself had shown her the way.

But Charlotte might have spared her pains. Branwell does not account for
Heathcliff any more than he accounts for Rochester. He does not even
account for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only for
himself. He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the
Brontës. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his
sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He
shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and
intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knack
of missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity. He was given to
silences which in anybody but Anne would have been called morose. It was
her fate to be associated with him in the hour and in the scene of his
disgrace. And he was offered up unwittingly by Charlotte as a sacrifice
to Anne's virtue.

* * * * *

Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows for ever gentle, and, in
spite of an unconquerable courage, conquered. And yet there was more in
her than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and least considerable
of the Brontës, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold,