In the middle of the summer of 1835, a great family plan was mooted at the parsonage.  The question was, to what trade or profession should Branwell be brought up?  He was now nearly eighteen; it was time to decide.  He was very clever, no doubt; perhaps to begin with, the greatest genius in this rare family.  The sisters hardly recognised their own, or each others’ powers, but they knew his.  The father, ignorant of many failings in moral conduct, did proud homage to the great gifts of his son; for Branwell’s talents were readily and willingly brought out for the entertainment of others.  Popular admiration was sweet to him.  And this led to his presence being sought at “arvills” and all the great village gatherings, for the Yorkshiremen have a keen relish for intellect; and it likewise procured him the undesirable distinction of having his company recommended by the landlord of the Black Bull to any chance traveller who might happen to feel solitary or dull over his liquor.  “Do you want some one to help you with your bottle, sir?  If you do, I’ll send up for Patrick” (so the villagers called him till the day of his death, though in his own family he was always “Branwell").  And while the messenger went, the landlord entertained his guest with accounts of the wonderful talents of the boy, whose precocious cleverness, and great conversational powers, were the pride of the village.  The attacks of ill health to which Mr. Bronte had been subject of late years, rendered it not only necessary that he should take his dinner alone (for the sake of avoiding temptations to unwholesome diet), but made it also desirable that he should pass the time directly succeeding his meals in perfect quiet.  And this necessity, combined with due attention to his parochial duties, made him partially ignorant how his son employed himself out of lesson-time.  His own youth had been spent among people of the same conventional rank as those into whose companionship Branwell was now thrown; but he had had a strong will, and an earnest and persevering ambition, and a resoluteness of purpose which his weaker son wanted.

It is singular how strong a yearning the whole family had towards the art of drawing.  Mr. Bronte had been very solicitous to get them good instruction; the girls themselves loved everything connected with it—­all descriptions or engravings of great pictures; and, in default of good ones, they would take and analyse any print or drawing which came in their way, and find out how much thought had gone to its composition, what ideas it was intended to suggest, and what it did suggest.  In the same spirit, they laboured to design imaginations of their own; they lacked the power of execution, not of conception.  At one time, Charlotte had the notion of making her living as an artist, and wearied her eyes in drawing with pre-Raphaelite minuteness, but not with pre-Raphaelite accuracy, for she drew from fancy rather than from nature.