Patrick Bronte - 'in the Scotch manner'

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who gave us a number of fine novels, were the daughters of Rev Patrick Brontë (1777-1861). He was minister in the village of Haworth in Yorkshire for more than forty years and exercised a thoroughly evangelical ministry.

However Patrick Brontë was not born in England. In fact he was the eldest of ten children of Hugh Brunty, a farm labourer from Drumballyroney in county Down.

Patrick Brontë wrote several volumes of poetry and the other day I came across this comment on his poetry by David J O’Donoghue, author of The Poets of Ireland. In another of his works, The Geographical Distribution of Irish Ability, published in Dublin and London in 1908, he said: Patrick Brontë was something of a poet, but wrote in the Scotch rather than in the Irish manner.