In this way he unwittingly enlightens us in the trivial matter of the family name. Everybody has wondered how an English country parson came to have for patronymic Lord Nelson's second title, won in battle from the Mediterranean. This Mr. Reid explains by a short cut like the well-known solution of an extraordinary story: "The man lied." Bronte, with or without an unaccountable diaeresis on the last letter, was an assumed name, adopted by the first and last who bore it purely for the sake of euphony. Now, while we could believe anything sombre and stern of one sporting that deep, nasal and majestic appellative, we find it impossible to associate thoughts of unearthly gloom with the airy Milesian cognomen of Pat Prunty, even though weighted with the solemn prefix of "Reverend." Sure enough, we satisfy ourselves very speedily that the parent we have been accustomed to denounce as having blighted three or four young lives, and cheated English literature out of several good novels, was by no means the savage depicted by Mrs. Gaskell, or even by Mr. Reid. His worst recorded exploits have something of the bizarre about them, as when he cut into bits a dress presented to his wife by one to whom he was not willing she should be indebted, and fired off pocket-pistols at unseasonable hours and places. Mrs. Prunty does not appear to have run short in her wardrobe, nor did the pistols ever hit any one. The old gentleman, in spite of narrow circumstances, gave his daughters and son a good education and what social advantages lay within his reach. The world was clearly more open to them than it was to him. A widower from the infancy of all his children, he not unnaturally became a little peculiar and exacting. When, his only son having drunk himself to death, the last of three daughters who had reached elderly and acidulated maidenhood indicated a wish to marry a man she confesses she did not love, he objected. Yet he persisted in his opposition only a few months. As soon as he perceived Charlotte to be really anxious for the union, he gave his full and kindly consent. All his daughters used him and his scapegrace of a son freely as literary material, drawing from them the central figures of the most effective of the novels. Nor was he an unconscious or unwilling sitter. The writing of the tales soon ceased to be a secret to him. He criticised, suggested and otherwise assisted with some of them in a more active sense of the term than that in which it is applied to a spectator.