misgivings, the intolerable
premonitions.

That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs.
Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that mature
and wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense
could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has always
proved too much for the Bronte biographers. Madame Duclaux published it
again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs.
Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might have
been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no,
they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if
drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit
him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet,
the most able of recent critics of the Brontes, thinks and maintains
against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness.
He will not give up the sordid tragedy _a trois_. He thinks he knows
what Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, and what awful secret she was
hinting at, and what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth.
He argues that Anne Bronte saw and heard things, and that her testimony
is not to be set aside.

What did Anne Bronte see and hear? She saw her brother consumed by an
illegitimate passion; a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature of
the lady. The lady had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had been
angelically kind. Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious return
for her kindness. Further than that the lady hardly counted in Anne's
vision. Her interest was centred on her brother. She saw him taking
first to drink and then to opium. She saw that he was going mad, and he
did go mad. One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is a
tendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell
suffered from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such a
hallucination and depravity. But there is not a shadow of evidence that
she thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it she
made Charlotte and Emily think it too. Branwell's state was quite enough
in itself to break their hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John Brown,
the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful vividness every
phase of his obsession.

It is inconceivable that such letters should have been kept, still more
inconceivable that they should have been publis