There is a gentle myth abroad that preachers are “called,” while other men adopt a profession or get a job, but no Protestant Episcopal clergyman I have ever known, and I have known many, ever made any such claim.  They take up the profession because it supplies honors and a “living.”  Then they can do good, too, and all men want to do good.  So they hie them to a divinity school and are taught the mysteries of theological tierce and thrust; and interviewing a clerical tailor they are ready to accept the honors and partake of the living.  After a careful study of the life of Patrick Bronte I can not find that his ambition extended beyond the desirable things I have named—­that is to say, inclusively, honors and a living.

He was tall, athletic, dark, and surely a fellow of force and ambition to set his back on the old and boldly rap for admittance at the gates of Cambridge.  He was a pretty good student, too, although a bit quarrelsome and sometimes mischievous—­throwing his force into quite unnecessary ways, as Irishmen are apt to do.  He fell in love, of course, and has not an Irishman in love been likened to Vesuvius in state of eruption?  We know of at least one charming girl who refused to marry him, because he declined, unlike Othello, to tell the story of his life.  And it was assumed that any man who would not tell who “his folks” were, was a rogue and a varlet and a vagrom at heart.  And all the while Monsieur Bronte had nothing worse to conceal than that he was from County Down and his name Prunty.  He wouldn’t give in and tell the story of his life to slow music, and so the girl wept and then stormed, and finally Bronte stormed and went away, and the girl and her parents were sure that the Frenchman was a murderer escaping justice.  Fortunate, aye, thrice fortunate is it for the world that neither Bronte nor the girl wavered even in the estimation of a hair.

Bronte got through school and came out with tuppence worth of honors.  When thirty, we find him established as curate at the shabby little town of Hartshead, in Yorkshire.  Little Miss Branwell, from Penzance, came up there on a visit to her uncle, and the Reverend Mr. Bronte at once fell violently in love with her dainty form and gentle ways.  I say “violently,” for that’s the kind of man Bronte was.  Darwin says, “The faculty of amativeness is not aroused except by the unfamiliar.”  Girls who go away visiting, wearing their best bib and tucker, find lovers without fail.  One-third of all marriages in the United States occur in just this way:  the bib and tucker being sprung on the young man as a surprise, dazzles and hypnotizes him into an avowal and an engagement.