SOURCE: Drinkwater, John. “Patrick Branwell Brontë and His ‘Horace.’” In A Book for Bookmen: Being Edited Manuscripts and Marginalia with Essays on Several Occasions, pp. 43-59. London: Dulau & Company, Ltd., 1926.

In the following essay, privately printed in 1924, Drinkwater considers Brontë's poetic merits in light of the constant criticism that his was a talent unrealized and misused. Drinkwater finds Brontë's translations of the first book of Horace's Odes his finest poetic accomplishment.

I

Patrick Branwell Brontë died in 1848, at the age of thirty-one. Little celebrated for any achievement of his own, he is a not unfamiliar figure to students of the ever-increasing volume of Brontë literature. Through the life-story of his more famous sisters, already sufficiently tragic in itself, his failure of character sounds, perhaps, the most unhappy note of all. The scourge of disease that destroyed the family, and the incessant problem of ways and means...