plays were established: 'Young Men,' June 1826; 'Our Fellows,' July 1827; 'Islanders,' December 1827. These are our three great plays that are not kept secret. Emily's and my best plays were established the 1st of December, 1827; the others, March 1828. Best plays mean secret plays; they are very nice ones. All our plays are very strange ones; their nature I need not write on paper, for I think I shall always remember them. The 'Young Men' play took its rise from some wooden soldiers Bramwell had; 'Our Fellows,' from Æsop's Fables'; and 'The Islanders,' from several events which happened. I will sketch out the origin of our plays more explicitly, if I can. First Young Men.' Papa bought Bramwell some wooden soldiers at Leeds. When papa came home it was night, and we were in bed; so next morning Bramwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and I snatched up one and exclaimed, 'This is the Duke of Wellington! This shall be the Duke!' When I had said this, Emily likewise took up one and said it should be hers; when Anne came down, she said one should be hers. Mine was the prettiest of the whole, and the tallest, and the most perfect in every part. Emily's was a grave-looking fellow, and we called. him 'Gravey.' Anne's was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we called him 'Waiting Boy.' Bramwell chose his, and called him 'Buonaparte.'

It must be confessed that this is wholly unlike the composition of an ordinary girl of twelve or thirteen,

and one might reasonably infer from it that the writer was a child of exceptional mental gifts, developed under exceptional conditions. No one would suppose it to have been written by the average boarding-school "young lady," or by the prim and prosaic product of respectable British Philistinism,-the girl who can play a little, and draw a little, but whose mind, whatever its natural tendencies and powers, has been carefully crushed down to one fixed traditional system. There is something fresh and original in its quaint simplicity, and one finds oneself wishful to know more about those "best plays" which were secret plays," and about the little critic who can censure John Bull as "very violent," and pronounce, with an edifying air of authority, that Blackwood's is "the most able periodical there is."

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Well, in very truth, the writer was endowed with exceptional powers of mind, and was brought up under exceptional influences. I suppose the story of Charlotte Brontë's child-life is as pathetic a chapter as literature affords. It seems to me one of extraordinary psychological interest, for never did "the girl" more assuredly "make the woman "-never was the flower more distinctly the natural development from the seed. Nor do we often meet with a more striking and interesting illustration of the effect of external circumstances upon the growth of a powerful mind.

The father of Charlotte Brontë, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, was a native of Down, in Ireland. But having been educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, he

took orders in the Church of England; and obtained a curacy in Essex, whence he removed to Hartshead, in Yorkshire. There he married Miss Maria Bramwell, a lady of considerable natural gifts and gentle disposition, and there two daughters were born to him-Maria and Elizabeth, both of whom died in childhood. From Hartshead Mr. Brontë was preferred to a small living at Thornton, which in due time became the birthplace of Charlotte, her brother Patrick, and her sisters Emily and Anne. From the birth of the latter, Mrs. Brontë, who unhappily transmitted a delicate constitution to her children, began to decline in health; and in September 1821, about a year and a half after her husband's removal to the rectory of Haworth, she passed away. At that time Maria, her eldest surviving child, was scarcely nine years old.

If from their mother they inherited their constitutional weakness, it was from their father they derived their mental power and singular force of character. He was no common man; and in a different sphere, and under more fortunate conditions, would probably have risen to distinction. But his reserve and self-concentration amounted almost to eccentricity, and he lived a life of strange and even gloomy seclusion, which could not but influence the young minds growing up around him. For lack of companionship they were driven in upon themselves; and none of those sweet domesticities fell to their lot which, in most cases, so happily round off the angularities of childhood. Gifted with altogether