It is obvious that while Currer Bell, for "story" and other purposes, made use of a composite method in presenting a portrait, she drew from characters who possessed much in common: as with the composite character of the Rev. Mr. Helstone, meant for her father, a clergyman, but presenting also a phase of another clergyman, the Rev. Hammond Roberson; and as with Dr. John Bretton, a composite character drawn from the two Scotsmen, Mr. Smith her publisher, and the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, who subsequently became her husband. Doubtless, characteristics in the Taylors were similar to some of M. Héger's. Perhaps the fact that they spoke French and sojourned on the Continent, accentuated to her these characteristics. In a letter, Miss Brontë described all the Taylors as "Republicans." And so of Yorke Hunsden in _The Professor_, Chap. XXIV., we read, "republican, lord-hater, as he was, Hunsden was proud of his old ----shire blood ... and family standing." Thus, in _Shirley_, Chap. IV., in which work that character appears stripped of the Héger element, as Mr. Yorke, we read of the latter:-- Kings and nobles and priests ... were to him an abomination.... The want of ... benevolence made him very impatient of ... all faults which grated on his strong, shrewd nature: it left no check to his ... sarcasm. As he was not merciful, he would sometimes wound ... without ... caring how deep he thrust.... Mr. Yorke's family was the first and oldest in the district. _Viâ_ Yorke Hunsden of _The Professor_ and Mr. Yorke of _Shirley_ the reader has returned to a character who typified more than any other of Charlotte Brontë's Yorkshire-Héger portrayals the merciless, strong and shrewd-natured Taylor--Heathcliffe of _Wuthering Heights_. But the Yorkshire element in Heathcliffe was a caricature and an exaggeration for the purposes of the "cuckoo story," resulting from the tale Montagu tells of a foundling; and the emphasis laid upon his barbarity was largely a result, too, of the consideration I mention in the chapters entitled "The Recoil," which consideration had to do with the Héger phase of Heathcliffe. The fact that evidence shows Heathcliffe to have been, like Hunsden and Rochester, a composite character drawn from a dual model--the Taylor-Héger model--traceable in origin absolutely to Charlotte Brontë's idiosyncratic estimate of two male characters who are shown to have seriously interested her, in itself sufficiently demonstrates her authorship of _Wuthering Heights_, and is indeed of great interest. If reference be made to a letter written by Charlotte Brontë in 1846, the year when she offered _Wuthering Heights_ to a publisher, it will be found she mentioned that one of the Taylors had--like Heathcliffe--suffered in the teens of years from hypochondria, "a most dreadful doom," Charlotte called it, and related she herself had endured it for a year.[51]