ds. Here the
writer is reminded of the necessity of preserving a certain
verisimilitude: Moses might from his elevation see mountains and plains,
groups of maidens and herds of cattle, but could hardly perceive the
details of dress, or the ornaments of the head.

When they had made further progress, M. Heger took up a more advanced
plan, that of synthetical teaching. He would read to them various
accounts of the same person or event, and make them notice the points of
agreement and disagreement. Where they were different, he would make
them seek the origin of that difference by causing them to examine well
into the character and position of each separate writer, and how they
would be likely to affect his conception of truth. For instance, take
Cromwell. He would read Bossuet's description of him in the "Oraison
Funebre de la Reine d'Angleterre," and show how in this he was considered
entirely from the religious point of view, as an instrument in the hands
of God, preordained to His work. Then he would make them read Guizot,
and see how, in this view, Cromwell was endowed with the utmost power of
free-will, but governed by no higher motive than that of expediency;
while Carlyle regarded him as a character regulated by a strong and
conscientious desire to do the will of the Lord. Then he would desire
them to remember that the Royalist and Commonwealth men had each their
different opinions of the great Protector. And from these conflicting
characters, he would require them to sift and collect the elements of
truth, and try to unite them into a perfect whole.

This kind of exercise delighted Charlotte. It called into play her
powers of analysis, which were extraordinary, and she very soon excelled
in it.

Wherever the Brontes could be national they were so, with the same
tenacity of attachment which made them suffer as they did whenever they
left Haworth. They were Protestant to the backbone in other things
beside their religion, but pre-eminently so in that. Touched as
Charlotte was by the letter of St. Ignatius before alluded to, she
claimed equal self-devotion, and from as high a motive, for some of the
missionaries of the English Church sent out to toil and to perish on the
poisonous African coast, and wrote as an "imitation," "Lettre d'un
Missionnaire, Sierra Leone, Afrique."

Something of her feeling, too, appears in the following letter:--

"Brussels, 1842.

"I consider it doubtful whether I s