The personal interest of the two last years of Charlotte Bronte’s life centres on her relations with her father’s curate, the Rev. A.B.  Nicholls.  In 1853, he asked her hand in marriage.  He was the fourth man who had ventured on the same proposal.  Her father disapproved, and Mr. Nicholls resigned his curacy.  Next year, however, her father relented.  Mr. Nicholls again took up the curacy, and the marriage was celebrated on June 29, 1854.  Henceforward the doors of home are closed upon her married life.

On March 31, 1855, she died before she had attained to motherhood, her last recorded words to her husband being:  “We have been so happy.”  Her life appeals to that large and solemn public who know how to admire generously extraordinary genius, and how to reverence all noble virtue.

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EDWARD GIBBON

Memoirs

Gibbon’s autobiography was published in 1796, two years after his death, by his friend, Lord Sheffield, under the title “Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq., with Memoirs of His Life and Writings, Composed by Himself.”  “After completing his history,” says Mr. Birrell, “Gibbon had but one thing left him to do in order to discharge his duty to the universe.  He had written a magnificent history of the Roman Empire; it remained to write the history of the historian.  It is a most studied performance, and may be boldly pronounced perfect.  It is our best, and best known, autobiography.”  That the writing was studied is shown by the fact that six different sketches were left in Gibbon’s handwriting, and from all these the published memoirs were selected and put together.  The memoir was briefly completed by Lord Sheffield.  Bagehot described the book as “the most imposing of domestic narratives.”  Truly, it was impossible for Gibbon to doff his dignity, but through the cadenced formality of his style the reader can detect a happy candour, careful sincerity, complacent temper, and a loyalty to friendship that recommend the man as truly as the writer.  (See also HISTORY.)

I.—­Birth and Education

I was born at Putney, in the county of Surrey, April 27, in the year 1737, the first child of the marriage of Edward Gibbon, Esq., and Jane Porten.

From my birth I have enjoyed the right of primogeniture; but I was succeeded by five brothers and one sister, all of whom were snatched away in their infancy.  So feeble was my constitution, so precarious my life, that in the baptism of each of my brothers my father’s prudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that, in the case of the departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might be still perpetuated in the family.

To preserve and to rear so frail a being the most tender assiduity was scarcely sufficient, and my mother’s attention was somewhat diverted by an exclusive passion for her husband and by the dissipation of the world; but the maternal office was supplied by my aunt, Mrs. Catherine Porten, at whose name I feel a tear of gratitude trickling down my cheek.