in the Bastile, where he was detained a year. This punishment of her lover made the marchioness, apparently, more circumspect; but she nourished in her heart the most implacable hatred towards her father, sister, and two brothers, all of whom were poisoned by her in the year 1670. During the whole time, the marchioness was visiting the hospitals, outwardly as a devotee, but, as was afterwards strongly suspected, really in order to try on the prisoners the effect of the poisons produced by her paramour, who had learned the art of preparing them daring his imprisonment, of an Italian named Exili.
On the discovery of her crime, this wicked woman was condemned to be beheaded, and afterwards burned. She suffered with the greatest calmness, and evinced no feelings of repentance.
The marchioness of Brinvilliers seems to have been by nature inclined to wickedness. She acknowledged in her last confession, that at the age of seven she set fire to a house, urged by an inexplicable desire to commit crime. Yet she made pretension to religion, went regularly to confession, and when arrested at Leige, a sort of general form was found in her possession, which sufficiently alluded to her criminality to form a strong presumption against her. She probably had more respect for the ceremonies of her faith than for the law of God.
BRONTE, CHARLOTTE, EMILY, and ANN,
United as they are in death, as they were in life, and in the fame which followed the publication of their extraordinary works, these gifted sisters must appear in our pages as a triad of intellectual personifications; their names cannot be separated without injury to their individual characteristics, without rending apart sympathies and affections which united them more closely, and inextricably, than three of one family and household were perhaps ever knit before. They are the three strains, distinct, and yet ever blending intimately and harmoniously, of a wild sad melody, such as we might listen to amid the stillness of the solemn night, and scarcely know whether it came from earth or heaven. Those three voices, arising, as they did together, from the Yorkshire wolds; from that old quiet manse "on the very verge of the churchyard mould," and taking possession of the public ear, gradually enchaining attention, and causing a general inquiry of "who can it be?" Then as the strains grow louder and bolder, giving evidence of power and passionate energy, as well as a delicate perception of all the secret windings and workings of the human heart, while yet the singers were veiled under the mysterious cognomen of "Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell," how the wonder deepened, and the question sped through France and Germany, and across the wide Atlantic, and back again, "who can it be?"
But let us come down to more sober narrative, and answer this query, once so rife among readers, and still asked by some to whom the sad secrets of the Yorkshire manse have not yet been revealed. There, in his silent study, sits the aged clergyman, Mr. Bronte—a descendant of the Bronterres, of Ireland, an ancient and honourable family—sits lonely and desolate in his parsonage house at Haworth, near Keighley, in the West-Riding. Long years ago his wife laid her down to rest in the green churchyard near at hand, and several of his children were taken while the dew of
