Funebre de la Reine d’Angleterre,” and show how in this he was considered entirely from the religious point of view, as an instrument in the hands of God, preordained to His work.  Then he would make them read Guizot, and see how, in this view, Cromwell was endowed with the utmost power of free-will, but governed by no higher motive than that of expediency; while Carlyle regarded him as a character regulated by a strong and conscientious desire to do the will of the Lord.  Then he would desire them to remember that the Royalist and Commonwealth men had each their different opinions of the great Protector.  And from these conflicting characters, he would require them to sift and collect the elements of truth, and try to unite them into a perfect whole.

This kind of exercise delighted Charlotte.  It called into play her powers of analysis, which were extraordinary, and she very soon excelled in it.

Wherever the Brontes could be national they were so, with the same tenacity of attachment which made them suffer as they did whenever they left Haworth.  They were Protestant to the backbone in other things beside their religion, but pre-eminently so in that.  Touched as Charlotte was by the letter of St. Ignatius before alluded to, she claimed equal self-devotion, and from as high a motive, for some of the missionaries of the English Church sent out to toil and to perish on the poisonous African coast, and wrote as an “imitation,” “Lettre d’un Missionnaire, Sierra Leone, Afrique.”

Something of her feeling, too, appears in the following letter:—­

   “Brussels, 1842.

“I consider it doubtful whether I shall come home in September or not.  Madame Heger has made a proposal for both me and Emily to stay another half-year, offering to dismiss her English master, and take me as English teacher; also to employ Emily some part of each day in teaching music to a certain number of the pupils.  For these services we are to be allowed to continue our studies in French and German, and to have board, &c., without paying for it; no salaries, however, are offered.  The proposal is kind, and in a great selfish city like Brussels, and a great selfish school, containing nearly ninety pupils (boarders and day pupils included), implies a degree of interest which demands gratitude in return.  I am inclined to accept it.  What think you?  I don’t deny I sometimes wish to be in England, or that I have brief attacks of home sickness; but, on the whole, I have borne a very valiant heart so far; and I have been happy in Brussels, because I have always been fully occupied with the employments that I like.  Emily is making rapid progress in French, German, music, and drawing.  Monsieur and Madame Heger begin to recognise the valuable parts of her character, under her singularities.

“If the national character of the Belgians is to be measured by the character of most of the girls is this school, it in a character