visiting was almost entirely confined to tea-parties, which assembled at three o’clock, broke up at nine, and the amusement of the evening was commonly some round game at cards, as Pope Joan, or Commerce.  The lower class was then extremely ignorant, and all classes were very superstitious; even the belief in witches maintained its ground, and there was an almost unbounded credulity respecting the supernatural and monstrous.  There was scarcely a parish in the Mount’s Bay that was without a haunted house, or a spot to which some story of supernatural horror was not attached.  Even when I was a boy, I remember a house in the best street of Penzance which was uninhabited because it was believed to be haunted, and which young people walked by at night at a quickened pace, and with a beating heart.  Amongst the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature, and still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or intellectual kind.  Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting, generally ending in drunkenness, were what they most delighted in.  Smuggling was carried on to a great extent; and drunkenness, and a low state of morals, were naturally associated with it.  Whilst smuggling was the means of acquiring wealth to bold and reckless adventurers, drunkenness and dissipation occasioned the ruin of many respectable families.”

I have given this extract because I conceive it bears some reference to the life of Miss Bronte, whose strong mind and vivid imagination must have received their first impressions either from the servants (in that simple household, almost friendly companions during the greater part of the day,) retailing the traditions or the news of Haworth village; or from Mr. Bronte, whose intercourse with his children appears to have been considerably restrained, and whose life, both in Ireland and at Cambridge, had been spent under peculiar circumstances; or from her aunt, Miss Branwell, who came to the parsonage, when Charlotte was only six or seven years old, to take charge of her dead sister’s family.  This aunt was older than Mrs. Bronte, and had lived longer among the Penzance society, which Dr. Davy describes.  But in the Branwell family itself, the violence and irregularity of nature did not exist.  They were Methodists, and, as far as I can gather, a gentle and sincere piety gave refinement and purity of character.  Mr. Branwell, the father, according to his descendants’ account, was a man of musical talent.  He and his wife lived to see all their children grown up, and died within a year of each other—­he in 1808, she in 1809, when their daughter Maria was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age.  I have been permitted to look over a series of nine letters, which were addressed by her to Mr. Bronte, during the brief term of their engagement in 1812.  They are full of tender grace of expression and feminine modesty; pervaded by the deep piety to which I have alluded as a family characteristic.  I shall make