re 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
the brief term of their engagement in 1812. They are full of tender
grace of expression and feminine modesty; pervaded by the deep piety to
which I have alluded as a family characteristic. I shall make one or two
extracts from them, to show what sort of a person was the mother of
Charlotte Bronte: but first, I must state the circumstances under which
this Cornish lady met the scholar from Ahaderg, near Loughbrickland. In
the early summer of 1812, when she would be twenty-nine, she came to
visit her uncle, the Reverend John Fennel, who was at that time a
clergyman of the Church of England, living near Leeds, but who had
previously been a Methodist minister. Mr. Bronte was the incumbent of
Hartshead; and