ly on the assumption that she had a novelist's
satisfaction in the romance which the 'bad woman' theory supplied. She
wasted a considerable amount of rhetoric upon it. 'When the fatal attack
came on,' she says, 'his pockets were found filled with old letters from
the woman to whom he was attached. He died! she lives still--in May
Fair. I see her name in county papers, as one of those who patronise the
Christmas balls; and I hear of her in London drawing-rooms'--and so on.
There were no love-letters found in Branwell Bronte's pockets. {19} When
Mrs. Gaskell's husband came post-haste to Haworth to ask for proofs of
Mrs. Robinson's complicity in Branwell's downfall, none were obtainable.
I am assured by Mr. Leslie Stephen that his father, Sir James Stephen,
was employed at the time to make careful inquiry, and that he and other
eminent lawyers came to the conclusion that it was one long tissue of
lies or hallucinations. The subject is sufficiently sordid, and indeed
almost redundant in any biography of the Brontes; but it is of moment,
because Charlotte Bronte and her sisters were so thoroughly persuaded
that a woman was at the bottom of their brother's ruin; and this belief
Charlotte impressed upon all the friends who were nearest and dearest to
her. Her letters at the time of her brother's death are full of censure
of the supposed wickedness of another. It was a cruel infamy that the
word of this wretched boy should have been so powerful for mischief.
Here, at any rate, Mrs. Gaskell did not show the caution which a
masculine biographer, less prone to take literally a man's accounts of
his amours, would undoubtedly have displayed.

Yet, when all is said, Mrs. Gaskell had done her work thoroughly and
well. Lockhart's _Scott_ and Froude's _Carlyle_ are examples of great
biographies which called for abundant censure upon their publication; yet
both these books will live as classics of their kind. To be interesting,
it is perhaps indispensable that the biographer should be indiscreet, and
certainly the Branwell incident--a matter of two or three pages--is the
only part of Mrs. Gaskell's biography in which indiscretion becomes
indefensible. And for this she suffered cruelly. 'I did so try to tell
the truth,' she said to a friend, 'and I believe _now_ I hit as near to
the truth as any one could do.' 'I weighed every line with my whole
power and heart,' she said on another occasion, 'so that every line
should go to i