I was elected about this time a member of the Savile Club, which then had its home in Savile Row. My proposer was Mr. J. F. McLennan, the author of "Primitive Marriage," and I owed my immediate election chiefly to his good offices, but partly to the fact that my book on Charlotte Brontë had found favour with the reading public. A great deal has been written since then about the Brontës. Some of our ablest literary critics have discussed their genius with a penetrating insight that has opened up for us the secrets of their wonderful laboratory, whilst industrious investigators have brought to light many facts which were unknown to Mrs. Gaskell at the time when she wrote her famous Memoir. A Brontë Society has been formed in Yorkshire, and no man would now be justified in maintaining either that the Brontës are not fully appreciated in the world of letters, or that in their own county their fame is neglected or despised. I myself have added very little to the literature which has been poured forth upon the subject since the appearance of Mr. Swinburne's "Note." I shrank from doing so, because I was not in sympathy with the public curiosity which aspired to know everything that there was to tell about the Brontës without regard to its intrinsic interest, or to that decent reticence which even the dead have a right to expect from us. I did not, for example, in my "monograph" publish the remarkable letters in which Charlotte told Miss Nussey the story of her strange love affair with Mr. Nicholls. Mr. Nicholls was still living, and I felt that these letters could not decently be published during his lifetime. Twenty years later, however, they were published by Mr. Shorter, not only during the lifetime of Mr. Nicholls, but with that gentleman's full consent. My chief contribution to the Brontë controversy after the publication of the "monograph" was a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution in 1895 on Emily Brontë and the authorship of "Wuthering Heights," in which I set forth the theory that Emily had, in part, been inspired in her description of the mad Heathcliffe and his terrible ravings by the bitter experiences through which she passed as an eyewitness of her brother Branwell's last days. My theory has met with a certain amount of acceptance among Brontë students, and I still adhere to it as the most probable explanation of a literary problem of no common difficulty.