Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/394

 318 NOTES BY THE WAY.

of critical examiners ; great, however, is the honour confer'd on those who excel. After you will have taken your Degree, you intend to take Holy Orders, and enter our Apostolical Church as one of Her Watchmen. In this new and most important situation, all the knowledge you will have acquired will be wanted, and above all, a saving knowledge of things human and Divine.

I pray that God may bestow that knowledge upon you abund- antly, both for your own sake, and for their sakes who shall be committed to your charge.

I remain, Dear Sir,

Yours very sincerely and truly,

P. BRONTE. J. Woodfall Ebsworth, Esq., Edinburgh.

The two letters of Patrick Bronte are printed by the kind permission of Mrs. Nicholls.

Fourteen months after the second was written, on June 7th, 1861, the kindly old man passed to his rest, all his loved ones having gone before him. He became Minister of Haworth in 1820 ; his wife died in the following year, and one by one he followed his children to the grave. Charlotte, as is well remembered, was the last. Her death took place at Haworth on the Saturday before Easter, the 31st of March, 1855, when, " early in the morning, 5 ' the solemn tolling of Haworth Church bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house (Mrs. Gaskell's ' Life of Charlotte Bronte ').

Macaulay. To the number of Macphail for February, 1860, Ebsworth

contributed an article on Macaulay. This, the Magazine being out of print, he carefully transcribed for me in his own small, beautiful handwriting. In it he states that he " was present at the political meeting in Edinburgh several years ago [1847] when Macaulay was baited publicly by local busy bodies, elated at their opportunity for taunting a man so celebrated. They questioned him about the consent to what was termed ' the May- nooth grant ' ; they insinuated, they clamoured, they fumed ; they spirted their paltry venom against him ; and each one ' did all that a dog so diminutive can.' It was a repetition of the once familiar spectacle, cited by the showman, of the lion assailed by a pack of curs. Now and again he turned on them and flashed a glance of haughty rebuke, or brushed one aside by the movement of a limb. But he disdained to indulge in such womanish scolding as they revelled in and desired to provoke in recrimination. At length, tortured out of patience by their snarling and petulance, and after he had manfully declared that he would accept the repre- sentation of Edinburgh solely if untrammelled by making pledges,

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