his parish, Mr. Tighe, he
was on his way from Ireland to St. John's College, Cambridge. It was in
1802 that Patrick Bronte went to Cambridge, and entered his name in the
college books. There, indeed, we find the name, not of Patrick Bronte,
but of Patrick Branty, {28} and this brings us to an interesting point as
to the origin of the name. In the register of his birth his name is
entered, as are the births of his brothers and sisters, as 'Brunty' and
'Bruntee'; and it can scarcely be doubted that, as Dr. Douglas Hyde has
pointed out, the original name was O'Prunty. {29} The Irish, at the
beginning of the century, were well-nigh as primitive in some matters as
were the English of a century earlier; and one is not surprised to see
variations in the spelling of the Bronte name--it being in the case of
his brothers and sisters occasionally spelt 'Brontee.' To me it is
perfectly clear that for the change of name Lord Nelson was responsible,
and that the dukedom of Bronte, which was conferred upon the great sailor
in 1799, suggested the more ornamental surname. There were no Irish
Brontes in existence before Nelson became Duke of Bronte; but all
Patrick's brothers and sisters, with whom, it must be remembered, he was
on terms of correspondence his whole life long, gradually, with a true
Celtic sense of the picturesqueness of the thing, seized upon the more
attractive surname. For this theory there is, of course, not one scrap
of evidence; we only know that the register of Patrick's native parish
gives us Brunty, and that his signature through his successive curacies
is Bronte.

From Cambridge, after taking orders in 1806, Mr. Bronte moved to a curacy
at Weatherfield in Essex; and Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us, with
that singular literary charm of his, how the good-looking Irish curate
made successful love to a young parishioner--Miss Mary Burder. Mary
Burder would have married him, it seems, but for an obdurate uncle and
guardian. She was spirited away from the neighbourhood, and the lovers
never met again. There are doubtful points in Mr. Birrell's story. Mary
Burder, as the wife of a Nonconformist minister, died in 1866, in her
seventy-seventh year. This lady, from whom doubtless either directly or
indirectly the tradition was obtained, may have amplified and exaggerated
a very innocent flirtation. One would like further evidence for the
statement that when Mr. Bronte lost his wife in 1821 he asked his old