of an anonymous scribe, who had not even the manners to tell you whether he was a man or a woman, or whether his ‘C.  T.’ meant Charles Timms or Charlotte Tomkins.”

There are two or three things noticeable in the letter from which these extracts are taken.  The first is the initials with which she had evidently signed the former one to which she alludes.  About this time, to her more familiar correspondents, she occasionally calls herself “Charles Thunder,” making a kind of pseudonym for herself out of her Christian name, and the meaning of her Greek surname.  In the next place, there is a touch of assumed smartness, very different from the simple, womanly, dignified letter which she had written to Southey, under nearly similar circumstances, three years before.  I imagine the cause of this difference to be twofold.  Southey, in his reply to her first letter, had appealed to the higher parts of her nature, in calling her to consider whether literature was, or was not, the best course for a woman to pursue.  But the person to whom she addressed this one had evidently confined himself to purely literary criticisms, besides which, her sense of humour was tickled by the perplexity which her correspondent felt as to whether he was addressing a man or a woman.  She rather wished to encourage the former idea; and, in consequence, possibly, assumed something of the flippancy which very probably existed in her brother’s style of conversation, from whom she would derive her notions of young manhood, not likely, as far as refinement was concerned, to be improved by the other specimens she had seen, such as the curates whom she afterwards represented in “Shirley.”

These curates were full of strong, High-Church feeling.  Belligerent by nature, it was well for their professional character that they had, as clergymen, sufficient scope for the exercise of their warlike propensities.  Mr. Bronte, with all his warm regard for Church and State, had a great respect for mental freedom; and, though he was the last man in the world to conceal his opinions, he lived in perfect amity with all the respectable part of those who differed from him.  Not so the curates.  Dissent was schism, and schism was condemned in the Bible.  In default of turbaned Saracens, they entered on a crusade against Methodists in broadcloth; and the consequence was that the Methodists and Baptists refused to pay the church-rates.  Miss Bronte thus describes the state of things at this time:—­

“Little Haworth has been all in a bustle about church-rates, since you were here.  We had a stirring meeting in the schoolroom.  Papa took the chair, and Mr. C. and Mr. W. acted as his supporters, one on each side.  There was violent opposition, which set Mr. C.’s Irish blood in a ferment, and if papa had not kept him quiet, partly by persuasion and partly by compulsion, he would have given the Dissenters their kale through the reek—­a Scotch proverb, which I will