the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature, and
still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or
intellectual kind. Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting,
generally ending in drunkenness, were what they most delighted in.
Smuggling was carried on to a great extent; and drunkenness, and a low
state of morals, were naturally associated with it. Whilst smuggling was
the means of acquiring wealth to bold and reckless adventurers,
drunkenness and dissipation occasioned the ruin of many respectable
families."

I have given this extract because I conceive it bears some reference to
the life of Miss Bronte, whose strong mind and vivid imagination must
have received their first impressions either from the servants (in that
simple household, almost friendly companions during the greater part of
the day,) retailing the traditions or the news of Haworth village; or
from Mr. Bronte, whose intercourse with his children appears to have been
considerably restrained, and whose life, both in Ireland and at
Cambridge, had been spent under peculiar circumstances; or from her aunt,
Miss Branwell, who came to the parsonage, when Charlotte was only six or
seven years old, to take charge of her dead sister's family. This aunt
was older than Mrs. Bronte, and had lived longer among the Penzance
society, which Dr. Davy describes. But in the Branwell family itself,
the violence and irregularity of nature did not exist. They were
Methodists, and, as far as I can gather, a gentle and sincere piety gave
refinement and purity of character. Mr. Branwell, the father, according
to his descendants' account, was a man of musical talent. He and his
wife lived to see all their children grown up, and died within a year of
each other--he in 1808, she in 1809, when their daughter Maria was twenty-
five or twenty-six years of age. I have been permitted to look over a
series of nine letters, which were addressed by her to Mr. Bronte, during