'Wuthering Heights'--Reception of the Book by the Public--It is Misunderstood--Its Authorship--Mr. Dearden's Account--Statements of Mr. Edward Sloane and Mr. Grundy--Remarks by Mr. T. Wemyss Reid--Correspondences between 'Wuthering Heights' and Branwell's Letters--The 'Carving-knife Episode'--Further Correspondences-- Resemblances of Thought in Branwell and Emily. We have now become acquainted with the principal features of Branwell's career, have obtained some insight into his character, and learned much respecting his genius. We have gained also some knowledge of the history of the Brontë sisters in that most crucial period of their lives, when they returned again to literature with the new earnest which led them to fame. We have seen that it was Branwell who first seriously undertook the production of a novel, and we have noticed Mr. Grundy's statement concerning the authorship of 'Wuthering Heights.' Here, then, is the proper place in which to say something on this question; for there have not been wanting others also to assert that Branwell was, in great part, the writer of it. Miss Robinson, in her 'Emily Brontë,' dismisses the assertion as altogether untrue; but she rightly says, as all will agree, that 'in the contemptuous silence of those who know their falsity, such slanders live and thrive like unclean insects under fallen stones.' It cannot, therefore, be inappropriate, in such a work as the present, to record, as clearly and succinctly as may be, what has been said on the subject, and to make a suggestion--for it is nothing more--as to what is the truth of the matter. When 'Wuthering Heights,' after its slow progress through the press, was given to the world in the December of 1847, neither the critics nor the public were very well able to grasp its meaning. Reviewers, to quote Charlotte Brontë, 'too often remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before the "writing on the wall," and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.' In 'Wuthering Heights' they found the subject disagreeable, the characters brutal, the conception crude, and the object of the work wholly unintelligible. The most that could be made of it, was that some rude soul in the north of England, burning with spite against his species, had set himself, with intent little short of diabolical, to lay open the most vicious depths of selfishness and crime, which he had embodied in the actions of characters so lost and revolting, that the mind recoiled with a shudder from the perusal of the monstrosity he had created. One critic, who dwelt at some length on the want of 'tone' and polish in the book, surmised that the writer of it had suffered, 'not disappointment in love, but some great mortification of pride,' which had so embittered his spirit that he had prepared this stinging story in vengeance on his species, and had flung it, crying, 'There, take that!' with cynical pleasure, in the very teeth of humankind.