Mr. Birrell has said rather unkindly that he has no use for this young man.  Nobody had any use for him.  Not the editors to whom he used to write so hysterically.  Not the Leeds and Manchester Railroad Company.  And certainly not Mrs. Robinson, the lady for whom he conceived that insane and unlawful passion which has been made to loom so large in the lives of the Brontes.  After all the agony and indignation that has gathered round this episode, it is clear enough now, down to the last sordid details.  The feverish, degenerate, utterly irresponsible Branwell not only declared his passion, but persuaded himself, against the evidence of his senses, that it was returned.  The lady (whom he must have frightened horribly) told her husband, who instantly dismissed Branwell.

Branwell never got over it.

He was destined to die young, and, no doubt, if there had been no Mrs. Robinson, some other passion would have killed him.  Still, it may be said with very little exaggeration that he died of it.  He had not hitherto shown any signs of tuberculosis.  It may be questioned whether without this predisposing cause he would have developed it.  He had had his chance to survive. He had never been packed, like his sisters, first one of five, then one of three, into a closet not big enough for one.  But he drank harder after the Robinson affair than he had ever drunk before, and he added opium to drink.  Drink and opium gave frightful intensity to the hallucination of which, in a sense, he died.

It took him more than three years, from July, eighteen-forty-five, the date of his dismissal, to September, eighteen-forty-eight, the date of his death.

The Incumbent of Haworth has been much blamed for his son’s shortcomings.  He has been charged with first spoiling the boy, and then neglecting him.  In reality his only error (a most unusual one in an 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