He and his wife lived to see all their children grown up, and died within a year of each other--he in 1808, she in 1809, when their daughter Maria was twenty- five or twenty-six years of age.

I have been permitted to look over a series of nine letters, which were addressed by her to Mr.Bronte, during the brief term of their engagement in 1812.

They are full of tender grace of expression and feminine modesty; pervaded by the deep piety to which I have alluded as a family characteristic.

I shall make one or two extracts from them, to show what sort of a person was the mother of Charlotte Bronte: but first, I must state the circumstances under which this Cornish lady met the scholar from Ahaderg, near Loughbrickland.

In the early summer of 1812, when she would be twenty-nine, she came to visit her uncle, the Reverend John Fennel, who was at that time a clergyman of the Church of England, living near Leeds, but who had previously been a Methodist minister.