The Project Gutenberg EBook of Records of a Girlhood, by Frances Ann Kemble

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: Records of a Girlhood

Author: Frances Ann Kemble

Release Date: August 8, 2005 [EBook #16478]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Louise Pryor and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net





[Transcriber's note: The spellings in this book are inconsistent in
the original, and have not been corrected except in the index as
explicitly noted below.]

[Illustration: Fanny Kemble]




RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD

BY

FRANCES ANN KEMBLE

_SECOND EDITION._

[Illustration]

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1880.




COPYRIGHT, 1879,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.


JOHN A. GRAY, Agent,
TYPE-SETTING MACHINERY,
16 & 18 JACOB STREET,
NEW YORK.




PREFATORY NOTE.


Considerable portions of this work originally appeared in the _Atlantic
Monthly_, but there is added to these a large amount of new matter not
hitherto published, and the whole work has been thoroughly revised.




RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD.

CHAPTER I.


A few years ago I received from a friend to whom they had been addressed
a collection of my own letters, written during a period of forty years,
and amounting to thousands--a history of my life.

The passion for universal history (_i.e._ any and every body's story)
nowadays seems to render any thing in the shape of personal
recollections good enough to be printed and read; and as the public
appetite for gossip appears to be insatiable, and is not unlikely some
time or other to be gratified at my expense, I have thought that my own
gossip about myself may be as acceptable to it as gossip about me
written by another.

I have come to the garrulous time of life--to the remembering days,
which only by a little precede the forgetting ones. I have much leisure,
and feel sure that it will amuse me to write my own reminiscences;
perhaps reading them may amuse others who have no more to do than I
have. To the idle, then, I offer these lightest of leaves gathered in
the idle end of autumn days, which have succeeded years of labor often
severe and sad enough, though its ostensible purpose was only that of
affording recreation to the public.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are two lives of my aunt Siddons: one by Boaden, and one by the
poet Campbell. In these biographies due mention is made of my paternal
grandfather and grandmother. To the latter, Mrs. Roger Kemble, I am
proud to see, by Lawrence's portrait of her, I bear a personal
resemblance; and I please myself with imagining that the likeness is
more than "skin deep." She was an energetic, brave woman, who, in the
humblest sphere of life and most difficult circumstances, together with
her husband fought manfully a hard battle with poverty, in maintaining
and, as well as they could, training a family of twelve children, of
whom four died in childhood. But I am persuaded that whatever qualities
of mind or character I inherit from my father's family, I am more
strongly stamped with those which I derive from my mother, a woman who,
possessing no specific gift in such perfection as the dramatic talent of
the Kembles, had in a higher degree than any of them the peculiar
organization of genius. To the fine senses of a savage rather than a
civilized nature, she joined an acute instinct of correct criticism in
all matters of art, and a general quickness and accuracy of perception,
and brilliant vividness of expression, that made her conversation
delightful. Had she possessed half the advantages of education which she
and my father labored to bestow upon us, she would, I think, have been
one of the most remarkable persons of her time.

My mother was the daughter of Captain Decamp, an officer in one of the
armies that revolutionary France sent to invade republican Switzerland.
He married the daughter of a farmer from the neighborhood of Berne. From
my grandmother's home you could see the great Jungfrau range of the
Alps, and I sometimes wonder whether it is her blood in my veins that so
loves and longs for those supremely beautiful mountains.

Not long after his marriage my grandfather went to Vienna, where, on the
anniversary of the birth of the great Empress-King, my mother was born,
and named, after her, Maria Theresa. In Vienna, Captain Decamp made the
acquaintance of a young English nobleman, Lord Monson (afterwards the
Earl of Essex), who, with an enthusiasm more friendly than wise, eagerly
urged the accomplished Frenchman to come and settle in London, where his
talents as a draughtsman and musician, which were much above those of a
mere amateur, combined with the protection of such friends as he could
not fail to find, would easily enable him to maintain himself and his
young wife and child.

In an evil hour my grandfather adopted this advice, and came to England.
It was the time when the emigration of the French nobility had filled
London with objects of sympathy, and society with sympathizers with
their misfortunes. Among the means resorted to for assisting the many
interesting victims of the Revolution, were representations, given under
the direction of Le Texier, of Berquin's and Madame de Genlis's juvenile
dramas, by young French children. These performances, combined with his
own extraordinary readings, became one of the fashionable frenzies of
the day. I quote from Walter Scott's review of Boaden's life of my uncle
the following notice of Le Texier: "On one of these incidental topics we
must pause for a moment, with delighted recollection. We mean the
readings of the celebrated Le Texier, who, seated at a desk, and dressed
in plain clothes, read French plays with such modulation of voice, and
such exquisite point of dialogue, as to form a pleasure different from
that of the theatre, but almost as great as we experience in listening
to a first-rate actor. We have only to add to a very good account given
by Mr. Boaden of this extraordinary entertainment, that when it
commenced Mr. Le Texier read over the _dramatis personæ_, with the
little analysis of character usually attached to each name, using the
voice and manner with which he afterward read the part; and so accurate
was the key-note given that he had no need to name afterward the person
who spoke; the stupidest of the audience could not fail to recognize
them."

Among the little actors of Le Texier's troupe, my mother attracted the
greatest share of public attention by her beauty and grace, and the
truth and spirit of her performances.

The little French fairy was eagerly seized upon by admiring fine ladies
and gentlemen, and snatched up into their society, where she was fondled
and petted and played with; passing whole days in Mrs. Fitzherbert's
drawing-room, and many a half hour on the knees of her royal and
disloyal husband, the Prince Regent, one of whose favorite jokes was to
place my mother under a huge glass bell, made to cover some large group
of precious Dresden china, where her tiny figure and flashing face
produced even a more beautiful effect than the costly work of art whose
crystal covering was made her momentary cage. I have often heard my
mother refer to this season of her childhood's favoritism with the fine
folk of that day, one of her most vivid impressions of which was the
extraordinary beauty of person and royal charm of manner and deportment
of the Prince of Wales, and his enormous appetite: enormous perhaps,
after all, only by comparison with her own, which he compassionately
used to pity, saying frequently, when she declined the delicacies that
he pressed upon her, "Why, you poor child! Heaven has not blessed you
with an appetite." Of the precocious feeling and imagination of the poor
little girl, thus taken out of her own sphere of life into one so
different and so dangerous, I remember a very curious instance, told me
by herself. One of the houses where she was a most frequent visitor, and
treated almost like a child of the family, was that of Lady Rivers,
whose brother, Mr. Rigby, while in the ministry, fought a duel with some
political opponent. Mr. Rigby had taken great notice of the little
French child treated with such affectionate familiarity by his sister,
and she had attached herself so strongly to him that, on hearing the
circumstance of his duel suddenly mentioned for the first time, she
fainted away: a story that always reminded me of the little Spanish girl
Florian mentions in his "Mémoires d'un jeune Espagnol," who, at six
years of age, having asked a young man of upward of five and twenty if
he loved her, so resented his repeating her question to her elder sister
that she never could be induced to speak to him again.

Meantime, while the homes of the great and gay were her constant resort,
the child's home was becoming sadder, and her existence and that of her
parents more precarious and penurious day by day. From my grandfather's
first arrival in London, his chest had suffered from the climate; the
instrument he taught was the flute, and it was not long before decided
disease of the lungs rendered that industry impossible. He endeavored to
supply its place by giving French and drawing lessons (I have several
small sketches of his, taken in the Netherlands, the firm, free delicacy
of which attest a good artist's handling); and so struggled on, under
the dark London sky, and in the damp, foggy, smoky atmosphere, while the
poor foreign wife bore and nursed four children.

It is impossible to imagine any thing sadder than the condition of such
a family, with its dark fortune closing round and over it, and its one
little human jewel, sent forth from its dingy case to sparkle and
glitter, and become of hard necessity the single source of light in the
growing gloom of its daily existence. And the contrast must have been
cruel enough between the scenes into which the child's genius
spasmodically lifted her, both in the assumed parts she performed and in
the great London world where her success in their performance carried
her, and the poor home, where sickness and sorrow were becoming abiding
inmates, and poverty and privation the customary conditions of
life--poverty and privation doubtless often increased by the very outlay
necessary to fit her for her public appearances, and not seldom by the
fear of offending, or the hope of conciliating, the fastidious taste of
the wealthy and refined patrons whose favor toward the poor little
child-actress might prove infinitely helpful to her and to those who
owned her.

The lives of artists of every description in England are not unapt to
have such opening chapters as this; but the calling of a player alone
has the grotesque element of fiction, with all the fantastic
accompaniments of sham splendor thrust into close companionship with the
sordid details of poverty; for the actor alone the livery of labor is a
harlequin's jerkin lined with tatters, and the jester's cap and bells
tied to the beggar's wallet. I have said artist life in England is apt
to have such chapters; artist life everywhere, probably. But it is only
in England, I think, that the full bitterness of such experience is
felt; for what knows the foreign artist of the inexorable element of
Respectability? In England alone is the pervading atmosphere of
respectability that which artists breathe in common with all other
men--respectability, that English moral climate, with its neutral tint
and temperate tone, so often sneered at in these days by its new German
title of Philistinism, so often deserving of the bitterest scorn in some
of its inexpressibly mean manifestations--respectability, the
pre-eminently unattractive characteristic of British existence, but
which, all deductions made for its vulgar alloys, is, in truth, only the
general result of the individual self-respect of individual Englishmen;
a wholesome, purifying, and preserving element in the homes and lives of
many, where, without it, the recklessness bred of insecure means and
obscure position would run miserable riot; a tremendous power of
omnipotent compression, repression, and oppression, no doubt, quite
consistent with the stern liberty whose severe beauty the people of
these islands love, but absolutely incompatible with license, or even
lightness of life, controlling a thousand disorders rampant in societies
where it does not exist; a power which, tyrannical as it is, and
ludicrously tragical as are the sacrifices sometimes exacted by it,
saves especially the artist class of England from those worst forms of
irregularity which characterize the Bohemianism of foreign literary,
artistic, and dramatic life.

Of course the pleasure-and-beauty-loving, artistic temperament, which is
the one most likely to be exposed to such an ordeal as that of my
mother's childhood, is also the one liable to be most injured by it, and
to communicate through its influence peculiar mischief to the moral
nature. It is the price of peril, paid for all that brilliant order of
gifts that have for their scope the exercise of the imagination through
the senses, no less than for that crown of gifts, the poet's passionate
inspiration, speaking to the senses through the imagination.

How far my mother was hurt by the combination of circumstances that
influenced her childhood I know not. As I remember her, she was a frank,
fearless, generous, and unworldly woman, and had probably found in the
subsequent independent exercise of her abilities the shield for these
virtues. How much the passionate, vehement, susceptible, and most
suffering nature was banefully fostered at the same time, I can better
judge from the sad vantage-ground of my own experience.

After six years spent in a bitter struggle with disease and difficulties
of every kind, my grandfather, still a young man, died of consumption,
leaving a widow and five little children, of whom the eldest, my mother,
not yet in her teens, became from that time the bread-winner and sole
support.

Nor was it many years before she established her claim to the
approbation of the general public, fulfilling the promise of her
childhood by performances of such singular originality as to deserve the
name of genuine artistic creations, and which have hardly ever been
successfully attempted since her time: such as "The Blind Boy" and "Deaf
and Dumb;" the latter, particularly, in its speechless power and pathos
of expression, resembling the celebrated exhibitions of Parisot and
Bigottini, in the great tragic ballets in which dancing was a
subordinate element to the highest dramatic effects of passion and
emotion expressed by pantomime. After her marriage, my mother remained
but a few years on the stage, to which she bequeathed, as specimens of
her ability as a dramatic writer, the charming English version of "La
jeune Femme colère," called "The Day after the Wedding;" the little
burlesque of "Personation," of which her own exquisitely humorous
performance, aided by her admirably pure French accent, has never been
equaled; and a play in five acts called "Smiles and Tears," taken from
Mrs. Opie's tale of "Father and Daughter."

She had a fine and powerful voice and a rarely accurate musical ear; she
moved so gracefully that I have known persons who went to certain
provincial promenades frequented by her, only to see her walk; she was a
capital horsewoman; her figure was beautiful, and her face very handsome
and strikingly expressive; and she talked better, with more originality
and vivacity, than any English woman I have ever known: to all which
good gifts she added that of being a first-rate _cook_. And oh, how
often and how bitterly, in my transatlantic household tribulations, have
I deplored that her apron had not fallen on my shoulders or round my
waist! Whether she derived this taste and talent from her French blood,
I know not, but it amounted to genius, and might have made her a
pre-eminent _cordon bleu_, if she had not been the wife, and _cheffe_,
of a poor professional gentleman, whose moderate means were so
skillfully turned to account, in her provision for his modest table,
that he was accused by ill-natured people of indulging in the expensive
luxury of a French cook. Well do I remember the endless supplies of
potted gravies, sauces, meat jellies, game jellies, fish jellies, the
white ranges of which filled the shelves of her store-room--which she
laughingly called her boudoir--almost to the exclusion of the usual
currant jellies and raspberry jams of such receptacles: for she had the
real _bon vivant's_ preference of the savory to the sweet, and left all
the latter branch of the art to her subordinates, confining the exercise
of her own talents, or immediate superintendence, to the production of
the above-named "elegant extracts." She never, I am sorry to say,
encouraged either my sister or myself in the same useful occupation,
alleging that we had what she called better ones; but I would joyfully,
many a time in America, have exchanged all my boarding-school
smatterings for her knowledge how to produce a wholesome and palatable
dinner. As it was, all I learned of her, to my sorrow, was a detestation
of bad cookery, and a firm conviction that that which was exquisite was
both wholesomer and more economical than any other. Dr. Kitchener, the
clever and amiable author of that amusing book, "The Cook's Oracle" (his
name was a _bonâ fide_ appellation, and not a drolly devised appropriate
_nom de plume_, and he was a doctor of physic), was a great friend and
admirer of hers; and she is the "accomplished lady" by whom several
pages of that entertaining kitchen companion were furnished to him.

The mode of opening one of her chapters, "I always bone my meat" (_bone_
being the slang word of the day for steal), occasioned much merriment
among her friends, and such a look of ludicrous surprise and reprobation
from Liston, when he read it, as I still remember.

My mother, moreover, devised a most admirable kind of _jujube_, made of
clarified gum-arabic, honey, and lemon, with which she kept my father
supplied during all the time of his remaining on the stage; he never
acted without having recourse to it, and found it more efficacious in
sustaining the voice and relieving the throat under constant exertion
than any other preparation that he ever tried; this she always made for
him herself.

The great actors of my family have received their due of recorded
admiration; my mother has always seemed to me to have been overshadowed
by their celebrity; my sister and myself, whose fate it has been to bear
in public the name they have made distinguished, owe in great measure to
her, I think, whatever ability has enabled us to do so not unworthily.

I was born on the 27th of November, 1809, in Newman Street, Oxford Road,
the third child of my parents, whose eldest, Philip, named after my
uncle, died in infancy. The second, John Mitchell, lived to distinguish
himself as a scholar, devoting his life to the study of his own language
and the history of his country in their earliest period, and to the
kindred subject of Northern Archæology.

Of Newman Street I have nothing to say, but regret to have heard that
before we left our residence there my father was convicted, during an
absence of my mother's from town, of having planted in my baby bosom the
seeds of personal vanity, while indulging his own, by having an
especially pretty and becoming lace cap at hand in the drawing-room, to
be immediately substituted for some more homely daily adornment, when I
was exhibited to his visitors. In consequence, perhaps, of which, I am a
disgracefully dress-loving old woman of near seventy, one of whose minor
miseries is that she can no longer find _any_ lace cap whatever that is
either pretty or becoming to her gray head. If my father had not been so
foolish then, I should not be so foolish now--perhaps.

The famous French actress, Mlle. Clairon, recalled, for the pleasure of
some foreign royal personage passing through Paris, for one night to the
stage, which she had left many years before, was extremely anxious to
recover the pattern of a certain cap which she had worn in her young
days in "La Coquette corrigée," the part she was about to repeat. The
cap, as she wore it, had been a Parisian rage; she declared that half
her success in the part had been the cap. The milliner who had made it,
and whose fortune it had made, had retired from business, grown old;
luckily, however, she was not dead: she was hunted up and adjured to
reproduce, if possible, this marvel of her art, and came to her former
patroness, bringing with her the identical head-gear. Clairon seized
upon it: "Ah oui, c'est bien cela! c'est bien là le bonnet!" It was on
her head in an instant, and she before the glass, in vain trying to
reproduce with it the well-remembered effect. She pished and pshawed,
frowned and shrugged, pulled the pretty _chiffon_ this way and that on
her forehead; and while so doing, coming nearer and nearer to the
terrible looking-glass, suddenly stopped, looked at herself for a moment
in silence, and then, covering her aged and faded face with her hands,
exclaimed, "Ah, c'est bien le bonnet! mais ce n'est plus la figure!"

Our next home, after Newman Street, was at a place called Westbourne
Green, now absorbed into endless avenues of "palatial" residences, which
scoff with regular-featured, lofty scorn at the rural simplicity implied
by such a name. The site of our dwelling was not far from the Paddington
Canal, and was then so far out of town that our nearest neighbors,
people of the name of Cockrell, were the owners of a charming residence,
in the middle of park-like grounds, of which I still have a faint,
pleasurable remembrance. The young ladies, daughters of Mr. Cockrell,
really made the first distinct mark I can detect on the _tabula rasa_ of
my memory, by giving me a charming pasteboard figure of a little girl,
to whose serene and sweetly smiling countenance, and pretty person, a
whole bookful of painted pasteboard petticoats, cloaks, and bonnets
could be adapted; it was a lovely being, and stood artlessly by a stile,
an image of rustic beauty and simplicity. I still bless the Miss
Cockrells, if they are alive, but if not, their memory for it!

Of the curious effect of dressing in producing the _sentiment_ of a
countenance, no better illustration can be had than a series of caps,
curls, wreaths, ribbons, etc., painted so as to be adaptable to one
face; the totally different _character_ imparted by a helmet, or a
garland of roses, to the same set of features, is a "caution" to
irregular beauties who console themselves with the fascinating variety
of their _expression_.

At this period of my life, I have been informed, I began, after the
manner of most clever children, to be exceedingly troublesome and
unmanageable, my principal crime being a general audacious contempt for
all authority, which, coupled with a sweet-tempered, cheerful
indifference to all punishment, made it extremely difficult to know how
to obtain of me the minimum quantity of obedience indispensable in the
relations of a tailless monkey of four years and its elders. I never
cried, I never sulked, I never resented, lamented, or repented either my
ill-doings or their consequences, but accepted them alike with a
philosophical buoyancy of spirit which was the despair of my poor
bewildered trainers.

Being hideously decorated once with a fool's cap of vast dimensions, and
advised to hide, not my "diminished head," but my horrible disgrace,
from all beholders, I took the earliest opportunity of dancing down the
carriage-drive to meet the postman, a great friend of mine, and attract
his observation and admiration to my "helmet," which I called aloud upon
all wayfarers also to contemplate, until removed from an elevated bank I
had selected for this public exhibition of myself and my penal costume,
which was beginning to attract a small group of passers-by.

My next malefactions were met with an infliction of bread and water,
which I joyfully accepted, observing, "Now I am like those poor dear
French prisoners that everybody pities so." Mrs. Siddons at that time
lived next door to us; she came in one day when I had committed some of
my daily offenses against manners or morals, and I was led, nothing
daunted, into her awful presence, to be admonished by her.

Melpomene took me upon her lap, and, bending upon me her "controlling
frown," discoursed to me of my evil ways in those accents which curdled
the blood of the poor shopman, of whom she demanded if the printed
calico she purchased of him "would wash." The tragic tones pausing, in
the midst of the impressed and impressive silence of the assembled
family, I tinkled forth, "What beautiful eyes you have!" all my small
faculties having been absorbed in the steadfast upward gaze I fixed upon
those magnificent orbs. Mrs. Siddons set me down with a smothered laugh,
and I trotted off, apparently uninjured by my great-aunt's solemn moral
suasion.

A dangerous appeal, of a higher order, being made to me by my aunt's
most intimate friend, Mrs. F----, a not very judicious person, to the
effect, "Fanny, why don't you pray to God to make you better?"
immediately received the conclusive reply, "So I do, and he makes me
worse and worse." Parents and guardians should be chary of handling the
deep chords upon whose truth and strength the highest harmonies of the
fully developed soul are to depend.

In short, I was as hopelessly philosophical a subject as Madame Roland,
when, at six years old, receiving her penal bread and water with the
comment, "Bon pour la digestion!" and the retributive stripes which this
drew upon her, with the further observation, "Bon pour la circulation!"
In spite of my "wickedness," as Topsy would say, I appear to have been
not a little spoiled by my parents, and an especial pet and favorite of
all their friends, among whom, though I do not remember him at this
early period of our acquaintance, I know was Charles Young, that most
kindly good man and pleasant gentleman, one of whose many amiable
qualities was a genuine love for little children. He was an intimate
friend of Mrs. Siddons and her brothers, and came frequently to our
house; if the elders were not at home, he invariably made his way to the
nursery, where, according to the amusing description he has often since
given me of our early intercourse, one of his great diversions was to
make me fold my little fat arms--not an easy performance for small
muscles--and with a portentous frown, which puckered up my mouth even
more than my eyebrows, receive from him certain awfully unintelligible
passages from "Macbeth;" replying to them, with a lisp that must have
greatly heightened the tragic effect of this terrible dialogue, "_My
handth are of oo tolor_" (My hands are of your color). Years--how
many!--after this first lesson in declamation, dear Charles Young was
acting Macbeth for the last time in London, and I was his "wicked wife;"
and while I stood at the side scenes, painting my hands and arms with
the vile red stuff that confirmed the bloody-minded woman's words, he
said to me with a smile, "Ah ha! _My handth are of oo tolor._"

Mr. Young's own theatrical career was a sort of curious contradiction
between his physical and mental endowments. His very handsome and
regular features of the Roman cast, and deep, melodious voice, were
undoubtedly fine natural requisites for a tragic actor, and he succeeded
my uncle in all his principal parts, if not with any thing like equal
genius, with a dignity and decorum that were always highly acceptable.
He had, however, no tragic mental element whatever with these very
decided external qualifications for tragedy; but a perception of and
passion for humor, which he indulged in private constantly, in the most
entertaining and surprising manner. Ludicrous stories; personal mimicry;
the most admirable imitation of national accent--Scotch, Irish, and
French (he spoke the latter language to perfection, and Italian very
well); a power of grimace that equaled Grimaldi, and the most
irresistibly comical way of resuming, in the midst of the broadest
buffoonery, the stately dignity of his own natural countenance, voice,
and manner.

He was a cultivated musician, and sang French and Italian with taste and
expression, and English ballads with a pathos and feeling only inferior
to that of Moore and Mrs. Arkwright, with both which great masters of
musical declamation he was on terms of friendly intimacy. Mr. Young was
a universal favorite in the best London society, and an eagerly sought
guest in pleasant country-houses, where his zeal for country sports, his
knowledge of and fondness for horses, his capital equestrianism, and
inexhaustible fund of humor, made him as popular with the men as his
sweet, genial temper, good breeding, musical accomplishments, and
infinite drollery did with the women.

Mr. Young once told Lord Dacre that he made about four thousand pounds
sterling per annum by his profession; and as he was prudent and moderate
in his mode of life, and, though elegant, not extravagant in his tastes,
he had realized a handsome fortune when he left the stage.

Mr. Young passed the last years of his life at Brighton, and I never
visited that place without going to see him, confined as he latterly was
to his sofa with a complication of painful diseases and the weight of
more than seventy years. The last time I saw him in his drawing-room he
made me sit on a little stool by his sofa--it was not long after my
father, his life-long friend and contemporary's death--and he kept
stroking my hair, and saying to me, "You look so like a child--a good
child." I saw him but once more after this; he was then confined to his
bed. It was on Sunday; he lay propped with pillows in an ample flannel
dressing-gown, with a dark-blue velvet skull-cap on his head, and I
thought I had never seen his face look more strikingly noble and
handsome; he was reading the church service and his Bible, and kept me
by him for some time. I never saw him again.

As a proof of the little poetical imagination which Mr. Young brought to
some of his tragic performances, I remember his saying of his dress in
Cardinal Wolsey, "Well, I never could associate any ideas of grandeur
with this old woman's red petticoat." It would be difficult to say what
his best performances were, for he had never either fire, passion, or
tenderness; but never wanted propriety, dignity, and a certain stately
grace. Sir Pertinax McSycophant and Iago were the best things I ever saw
him act, probably because the sardonic element in both of them gave
partial scope to his humorous vein.

Not long after this we moved to another residence, still in the same
neighborhood, but near the churchyard of Paddington church, which was a
thoroughfare of gravel walks, cutting in various directions the green
turf, where the flat tombstones formed frequent "play-tables" for us;
upon these our nursery-maid, apparently not given to melancholy
meditations among the tombs, used to allow us to manufacture whole
delightful dinner sets of clay plates and dishes (I think I could make
such now), out of which we used to have feasts, as we called them, of
morsels of cake and fruit.

At this time I was about five years old, and it was determined that I
should be sent to the care of my father's sister, Mrs. Twiss, who kept a
school at Bath, and who was my godmother. On the occasion of my setting
forth on my travels, my brother John presented me with a whole
collection of children's books, which he had read and carefully
preserved, and now commended to my use. There were at least a round
dozen, and, having finished reading them, it occurred to me that to make
a bonfire of them would be an additional pleasure to be derived from
them; and so I added to the intellectual recreation they afforded me the
more _sensational_ excitement of what I called "a blaze;" a proceeding
of which the dangerous sinfulness was severely demonstrated to me by my
new care-takers.

Camden Place, Bath, was one of the lofty terraces built on the charming
slopes that surround the site of the Aquæ Solis of the Romans, and here
my aunt Twiss kept a girls' school, which participated in the favor
which every thing belonging to, or even remotely associated with, Mrs.
Siddons received from the public. It was a decidedly "fashionable
establishment for the education of young ladies," managed by my aunt,
her husband, and her three daughters. Mrs. Twiss was, like every member
of my father's family, at one time on the stage, but left it very soon,
to marry the grim-visaged, gaunt-figured, kind-hearted gentleman and
profound scholar whose name she at this time bore, and who, I have heard
it said, once nourished a hopeless passion for Mrs. Siddons. Mrs. Twiss
bore a soft and mitigated likeness to her celebrated sister; she had
great sweetness of voice and countenance, and a graceful, refined,
feminine manner, that gave her great advantages in her intercourse with
and influence over the young women whose training she undertook. Mr.
Twiss was a very learned man, whose literary labors were, I believe,
various, but whose "Concordance of Shakespeare" is the only one with
which I am acquainted. He devoted himself, with extreme assiduity, to
the education of his daughters, giving them the unusual advantage of a
thorough classic training, and making of two of them learned women in
the more restricted, as well as the more general, sense of the term.
These ladies were what so few of their sex ever are, _really well
informed_; they knew much, and they knew it all thoroughly; they were
excellent Latin scholars and mathematicians, had read immensely and at
the same time systematically, had prodigious memories stored with
various and well-classed knowledge, and, above all, were mistresses of
the English language, and spoke and wrote it with perfect purity--an
accomplishment out of fashion now, it appears to me, but of the
advantage of which I retain a delightful impression in my memory of
subsequent intercourse with those excellent and capitally educated
women. My relations with them, all but totally interrupted for upward of
thirty years, were renewed late in the middle of my life and toward the
end of theirs, when I visited them repeatedly at their pretty rural
dwelling near Hereford, where they enjoyed in tranquil repose the easy
independence they had earned by honorable toil. There, the lovely
garden, every flower of which looked fit to take the first prize at a
horticultural show, the incomparable white strawberries, famous
throughout the neighborhood, and a magnificent Angola cat, were the
delights of my out-of-door life; and perfect kindness and various
conversation, fed by an inexhaustible fund of anecdote, an immense
knowledge of books, and a long and interesting acquaintance with
society, made the indoor hours passed with these quiet old lady
governesses some of the most delightful I have ever known. The two
younger sisters died first; the eldest, surviving them, felt the sad
solitude of their once pleasant home at "The Laurels" intolerable, and
removed her residence to Brighton, where, till the period of her death,
I used to go and stay with her, and found her to the last one of the
most agreeable companions I have ever known.

At the time of my first acquaintance with my cousins, however, neither
their own studies nor those of their pupils so far engrossed them as to
seclude them from society. Bath was then, at certain seasons, the gayest
place of fashionable resort in England; and, little consonant as such a
thing would appear at the present day with the prevailing ideas of the
life of a teacher, balls, routs, plays, assemblies, the Pump Room, and
all the fashionable dissipations of the place, were habitually resorted
to by these very "stylish" school-mistresses, whose position at one
time, oddly enough, was that of leaders of "the ton" in the pretty
provincial capital of Somersetshire. It was, moreover, understood, as
part of the system of the establishment, that such of the pupils as were
of an age to be introduced into society could enjoy the advantage of the
chaperonage of these ladies, and several did avail themselves of it.

What profit I made under these kind and affectionate kinsfolk I know
not; little, I rather think, ostensibly; perhaps some beneath the
surface, not very manifest either to them or myself at the time; but
painstaking love sows more harvests than it wots of, wherever or
whenever (or if never) it reaps them.

I did not become versed in any of my cousins' learned lore, or
accomplished in the lighter labors of their leisure hours--to wit, the
shoemaking, bread-seal manufacturing, and black and white Japan, table
and screen painting, which produced such an indescribable medley of
materials in their rooms, and were fashionable female idle industries of
that day.

Remote from the theatre, and all details of theatrical life, as my
existence in my aunt's school was, there still were occasional
infiltrations of that element which found their way into my small
sphere. My cousin John Twiss, who died not very long ago, an elderly
general in her Majesty's service, was at this time a young giant,
studying to become an engineer officer, whose visits to his home were
seasons of great delight to the family in general, not unmixed on my
part with dread; for a favorite diversion of his was enacting my uncle
John's famous rescue of Cora's child, in "Pizarro," with me clutched in
one hand, and exalted to perilous proximity with the chandelier, while
he rushed across the drawing-rooms, to my exquisite terror and triumph.

I remember, too, his sisters, all three remarkably tall women (the
eldest nearly six feet high, a portentous petticoat stature), amusing
themselves with putting on, and sweeping about the rooms in, certain
regal mantles and Grecian draperies of my aunt Mrs. Whitelock's, an
actress, like the rest of the Kembles, who sought and found across the
Atlantic a fortune and celebrity which it would have been difficult for
her to have achieved under the disadvantage of proximity to, and
comparison with, her sister, Mrs. Siddons. But I suppose the dramatic
impression which then affected me with the greatest and most vivid
pleasure was an experience which I have often remembered, when reading
Goethe's "Dichtung und Wahrheit," and the opening chapters of "Wilhelm
Meister." Within a pleasant summer afternoon's walk from Bath, through
green meadows and by the river's side, lay a place called Claverton
Park, the residence of a family of the name of A----. I remember nothing
of the house but the stately and spacious hall, in the middle of which
stood a portable theatre, or puppet-show, such as Punch inhabits, where
the small figures, animated with voice and movement by George A----, the
eldest son of the family, were tragic instead of grotesque, and where,
instead of the squeaking "Don Giovanni" of the London pavement,
"Macbeth" and similar solemnities appeared before my enchanted eyes. The
troupe might have been the very identical puppet performers of Harry
Rowe, the famous Yorkshire trumpeter. These, I suppose, were the first
plays I ever saw. Those were pleasant walks to Claverton, and pleasant
days at Claverton Hall! I wish Hans Breitmann and his "Avay in die
Ewigkeit" did not come in, like a ludicrous, lugubrious burden, to all
one's reminiscences of places and people one knew upward of fifty years
ago.

I have been accused of having acquired a bad habit of _punning from
Shakespeare!_--a delightful idea, that made me laugh till I cried the
first time it was suggested to me. If so, I certainly began early to
exhibit a result, of which the cause was, in some mysterious way, long
subsequent to the effect; unless the Puppet Plays of Claverton inspired
my wit. However that may be, I developed at this period a decided
faculty for punning, and that is an unusual thing at that age. Children
have considerable enjoyment of humor, as many of their favorite fairy
and other stories attest; they are often themselves extremely droll and
humorous in their assumed play characters and the stories they invent to
divert their companions; but punning is a not very noble species of wit;
it partakes of mental dexterity, requires neither fancy, humor, nor
imagination, and deals in words with double meanings, a subtlety very
little congenial to the simple and earnest intelligence of childhood.

_Les enfans terribles_ say such things daily, and make their
grandmothers' caps stand on end with their precocious astuteness; but
the clever sayings of most clever children, repeated and reported by
admiring friends and relations, are, for the most part, simply the
result of unused faculties, exercising themselves in, to them, an unused
world; only therefore surprising to worn-out faculties, which have
almost ceased to exercise themselves in, to them, an almost worn-out
world.

To Miss B---- I was indebted for the first doll I remember possessing--a
gorgeous wax personage, in white muslin and cherry-colored ribbons, who,
by desire of the donor, was to be called Philippa, in honor of my uncle.
I never loved or liked dolls, though I remember taking some pride in the
splendor of this, my first-born. They always affected me with a grim
sense of being a mockery of the humanity they were supposed to
represent; there was something uncanny, not to say ghastly, in the doll
existence and its mimicry of babyhood to me, and I had a nervous
dislike, not unmixed with fear, of the smiling simulacra that girls are
all supposed to love with a species of prophetic maternal instinct.

The only member of my aunt Twiss's family of whom I remember at this
time little or nothing was the eldest son, Horace, who in subsequent
years was one of the most intimate and familiar friends of my father and
mother, and who became well known as a clever and successful public man,
and a brilliant and agreeable member of the London society of his day.

My stay of a little more than a year at Bath had but one memorable
event, in its course, to me. I was looking one evening, at bedtime, over
the banisters, from the upper story into the hall below, with tiptoe
eagerness that caused me to overbalance myself and turn over the rail,
to which I clung on the wrong side, suspended, like Victor Hugo's
miserable priest to the gutter of Notre Dame, and then fell four stories
down on the stone pavement of the hall. I was not killed, or apparently
injured, but whether I was not really irreparably damaged no human being
can possibly tell.

My next memories refer to a residence which my parents were occupying
when I returned to London, called Covent Garden Chambers, now, I
believe, celebrated as "Evans's," and where, I am told, it is
confidently affirmed that I was born, which I was not; and where, I am
told, a picture is shown that is confidently affirmed to be mine, which
it is not. My sister Adelaide was born in Covent Garden Chambers, and
the picture in question is an oil sketch, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, of my
cousin Maria Siddons; quite near the truth enough for history, private
or public. It was while we were living here that Mrs. Siddons returned
to the stage for one night, and acted Lady Randolph for my father's
benefit. Of course I heard much discourse about this, to us, important
and exciting event, and used all my small powers of persuasion to be
taken to see her.

My father, who loved me very much, and spoiled me not a little, carried
me early in the afternoon into the market-place, and showed me the dense
mass of people which filled the whole Piazza, in patient expectation of
admission to the still unopened doors. This was by way of proving to me
how impossible it was to grant my request. However that might then
appear, it was granted, for I was in the theatre at the beginning of the
performance; but I can now remember nothing of it but the appearance of
a solemn female figure in black, and the tremendous _roar_ of public
greeting which welcomed her, and must, I suppose, have terrified my
childish senses, by the impression I still retain of it; and this is the
only occasion on which I saw my aunt in public.

Another circumstance, connected in my mind with Covent Garden Chambers,
was a terrible anguish about my youngest brother, Henry, who was for
some hours lost. He was a most beautiful child, of little more than
three years old, and had been allowed to go out on the door-steps, by an
exceedingly foolish little nursery-maid, to look at the traffic of the
great market-place. Returning without him, she declared that he had
refused to come in with her, and had run to the corner of Henrietta
Street, as she averred, where she had left him, to come and fetch
authoritative assistance.

The child did not come home, and all search for him proved vain
throughout the crowded market and the adjoining thoroughfares, thronged
with people and choked with carts and wagons, and swarming with the
blocked-up traffic, which had to make its way to and from the great mart
through avenues far narrower and more difficult of access than they are
now. There were not then, either, those invaluable beings, policemen,
standing at every corner to enforce order and assist the helpless. These
then were not; and no inquiry brought back any tidings of the poor
little lost boy. My mother was ill, and I do not think she was told of
the child's disappearance, but my father went to and fro with the face
and voice of a distracted man; and I well remember the look with which
he climbed a narrow outside stair leading only to a rain-water cistern,
with the miserable apprehension that his child might have clambered up
and fallen into it. The neighborhood was stirred with sympathy for the
agony of the poor father, and pitying gossip spreading the news through
the thronged market-place, where my father's name and appearance were
familiar enough to give a strong personal feeling to the compassion
expressed. A baker's boy, lounging about, caught up the story of the
lost child, and described having seen a "pretty little chap with curly
hair, in a brown holland pinafore," in St. James's Square. Thither the
searchers flew, and the child was found, tired out with his
self-directed wandering, but apparently quite contented, fast asleep on
the door-step of one of the lordly houses of that aristocratic square.
He was so remarkably beautiful that he must have attracted attention
before long, and _might_ perhaps have been restored to his home; but God
knows what an age of horror and anguish was lived through by my father
and my poor aunt Dall in that short, miserable space of time till he was
found.

My aunt Dall, of whom I now speak for the first time, was my mother's
sister, and had lived with us, I believe, ever since I was born. Her
name was Adelaide, but the little fellow whose adventure I have just
related, stumbling over this fine Norman appellation, turned it into
Idallidy, and then conveniently shortened it of its two extremities and
made it Dall, by which title she was called by us, and known to all our
friends, and beloved by all who ever spoke or heard it. Her story was as
sad a one as could well be; yet to my thinking she was one of the
happiest persons I have ever known, as well as one of the best. She was
my mother's second sister, and as her picture, taken when she was
twenty, shows (and it was corroborated by her appearance till upward of
fifty), she was extremely pretty. Obliged, as all the rest of her family
were, to earn her own bread, and naturally adopting the means of doing
so that they did, she went upon the stage; but I can not conceive that
her nature can ever have had any affinity with her occupation. She had a
robust and rather prosaic common-sense, opposed to any thing exaggerated
or sentimental, which gave her an excellent judgment of character and
conduct, a strong genial vein of humor which very often made her
repartees witty as well as wise, and a sunny sweetness of temper and
soundness of moral nature that made her as good as she was easy and
delightful to live with. Whenever any thing went wrong, and she was
"vexed past her patience," she used to sing; it was the only indication
by which we ever knew that she was what is termed "out of sorts." She
had found employment in her profession under the kindly protection of
Mr. Stephen Kemble, my father's brother, who lived for many years at
Durham, and was the manager of the theatre there, and, according to the
fashion of that time, traveled with his company, at stated seasons, to
Newcastle, Sunderland, and other places, which formed a sort of
theatrical circuit in the northern counties, throughout which he was
well known and generally respected.

In his company my aunt Dall found employment, and in his daughter, Fanny
Kemble, since well known as Mrs. Robert Arkwright, an inseparable friend
and companion. My aunt lived with Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Kemble, who were
excellent, worthy people. They took good care of the two young girls
under their charge, this linsey-woolsey Rosalind and Celia--their own
beautiful and most rarely endowed daughter, and her light-hearted,
lively companion; and I suppose that a merrier life than that of these
lasses, in the midst of their quaint theatrical tasks and homely
household duties, was seldom led by two girls in any sphere of life.
They learned and acted their parts, devised and executed, with small
means and great industry, their dresses; made pies and puddings, and
patched and darned, in the morning, and by dint of paste and rouge
became heroines in the evening; and withal were well-conducted, good
young things, full of the irrepressible spirits of their age, and
turning alike their hard home work and light stage labor into fun. Fanny
had inherited the beauty of her father's family, which in her most
lovely countenance had a character of childlike simplicity and serene
sweetness that made it almost angelic.

Far on in middle age she retained this singularly tender beauty, which
added immensely to the exquisite effect of her pathetic voice in her
incomparable rendering of the ballads she composed (the poetry as well
as the music being often her own), and to which her singing of them gave
so great a fashion at one time in the great London world. It was in vain
that far better musicians, with far finer voices, attempted to copy her
inimitable musical recitation; nobody ever sang like her, and still less
did anybody ever look like her while she sang. Practical jokes of very
doubtful taste were the fashion of that day, and remembering what
wonderfully coarse and silly proceedings were then thought highly
diverting by "vastly genteel" people, it is not, perhaps, much to be
wondered at that so poor a piece of wit as this should have furnished
diversion to a couple of light-hearted girls, with no special
pretensions to elegance or education. Once they were driving together in
a post-chaise on the road to Newcastle, and my aunt, having at hand in a
box part of a military equipment intended for some farce, accoutred her
upper woman in a soldier's cap, stock, and jacket, and, with heavily
corked mustaches, persisted in embracing her companion, whose frantic
resistance, screams of laughter, and besmirched cheeks, elicited
comments of boundless amazement, in broad north-country dialect, from
the market folk they passed on the road, to whom they must have appeared
the most violent runaway couple that ever traveled.

Liston, the famous comedian, was at this time a member of the Durham
company, and though he began his career there by reciting Collins's "Ode
to the Passions," attired in a pea-green coat, buckskins, top-boots, and
powder, with a scroll in his hand, and followed up this essay of his
powers with the tragic actor's battle-horse, the part of Hamlet, he soon
found his peculiar gift to lie in the diametrically opposite direction
of broad farce. Of this he was perpetually interpolating original
specimens in the gravest performances of his fellow-actors; on one
occasion suddenly presenting to Mrs. Stephen Kemble, as she stood
disheveled at the side scene, ready to go on the stage as Ophelia in her
madness, a basket with carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, and pot-herbs,
instead of the conventional flowers and straws of the stage maniac,
which sent the representative of the fair Ophelia on in a broad grin,
with ill-suppressed fury and laughter, which must have given quite an
original character of verisimilitude to the insanity she counterfeited.

On another occasion he sent all the little chorister boys on, in the
lugubrious funeral procession in "Romeo and Juliet," with pieces of
brown paper in their hands to wipe their tears with.

The suppression of that very dreadful piece of stage pageantry has at
last, I believe, been conceded to the better taste of modern audiences;
but even in my time it was still performed, and an exact representation
of a funeral procession, such as one meets every day in Rome, with
torch-bearing priests, and bier covered with its black-velvet pall,
embroidered with skull and cross-bones, with a corpse-like figure
stretched upon it, marched round the stage, chanting some portion of the
fine Roman Catholic requiem music. I have twice been in the theatre when
persons have been seized with epilepsy during that ghastly exhibition,
and think the good judgment that has discarded such a mimicry of a
solemn religious ceremony highly commendable.

Another evening, Liston, having painted Fanny Kemble's face like a
clown's, posted her at one of the stage side doors to confront her
mother, poor Mrs. Stephen Kemble, entering at the opposite one to
perform some dismally serious scene of dramatic pathos, who, on suddenly
beholding this grotesque apparition of her daughter, fell into
convulsions of laughter and coughing, and half audible exclamations of
"Go away, Fanny! I'll tell your father, miss!" which must have had the
effect of a sudden seizure of madness to the audience, accustomed to the
rigid decorum of the worthy woman in the discharge of her theatrical
duties.

Long after these provincial exploits, and when he had become the
comedian _par excellence_ of the English stage, for which eminence
nature and art had alike qualified him by the imperturbable gravity of
his extraordinarily ugly face, which was such an irresistibly comical
element in his broadest and most grotesque performances, Mr. Liston used
to exert his ludicrous powers of tormenting his fellow-actors in the
most cruel manner upon that sweet singer, Miss Stephens (afterward
Countess of Essex). She had a curious nervous trick of twitching her
dress before she began to sing; this peculiarity was well known to all
her friends, and Liston, who certainly was one of them, used to agonize
the poor woman by standing at the side scene, while the symphony of her
pathetic ballads was being played, and indicating by his eyes and
gestures that something was amiss with the trimming or bottom of her
dress; when, as invariably as he chose to play the trick, poor Miss
Stephens used to begin to twitch and catch at her petticoat, and half
hysterical, between laughing and crying, would enchant and entrance her
listeners with her exquisite voice and pathetic rendering of "Savourneen
Deelish" or "The Banks of Allan Water."




CHAPTER II.


Two young men, officers of a militia regiment, became admirers of the
two young country actresses: how long an acquaintance existed before the
fact became evident that they were seriously paying their addresses to
the girls, I do not know; nor how long the struggle lasted between pride
and conventional respectability on the part of the young men's families
and the pertinacity of their attachment.

Fanny Kemble's suitor, Robert Arkwright, had certainly no pretensions to
dignity of descent, and the old Derbyshire barber, Sir Richard, or his
son could hardly have stood out long upon that ground, though the
immense wealth realized by their ingenuity and industry was abundant
worldly reason for objections to such a match, no doubt.

However that may be, the opposition was eventually overcome by the
determination of the lovers, and they were married; while to the others
a far different fate was allotted. The young man who addressed my aunt,
whose name I do not know, was sent for by his father, a wealthy
Yorkshire squire, who, upon his refusing to give up his mistress,
instantly assembled all the servants and tenants, and declared before
them all that the young gentleman, his son (and supposed heir), was
illegitimate, and thenceforth disinherited and disowned. He enlisted and
went to India, and never saw my aunt again. Mrs. Arkwright went home to
Stoke, to the lovely house and gardens in the Peak of Derbyshire, to
prosperity and wealth, to ease and luxury, and to the love of husband
and children. Later in life she enjoyed, in her fine mansion of Sutton,
the cordial intimacy of the two great county magnates, her neighbors,
the Dukes of Rutland and Devonshire, the latter of whom was her admiring
and devoted friend till her death. In the society of the high-born and
gay and gifted with whom she now mixed, and among whom her singular
gifts made her remarkable, the enthusiasm she excited never impaired the
transparent and childlike simplicity and sincerity of her nature. There
was something very peculiar about the single-minded, simple-hearted
genuineness of Mrs. Arkwright which gave an unusual charm of
unconventionality and fervid earnestness to her manner and conversation.
I remember her telling me, with the most absolute conviction, that she
thought wives were bound implicitly to obey their husbands, for she
believed that at the day of judgment husbands would be answerable for
their wives' souls.

It was in the midst of a life full of all the most coveted elements of
worldly enjoyment, and when she was still beautiful and charming, though
no longer young, that I first knew her. Her face and voice were heavenly
sweet, and very sad; I do not know why she made so profoundly melancholy
an impression upon me, but she was so unlike all that surrounded her,
that she constantly suggested to me the one live drop of water in the
middle of a globe of ice. The loss of her favorite son affected her with
irrecoverable sorrow, and she passed a great portion of the last years
of her life at a place called Cullercoats, a little fishing village on
the north coast, to which when a young girl she used to accompany her
father and mother for rest and refreshment, when the hard life from
which her marriage released her allowed them a few days' respite by the
rocks and sands and breakers of the Northumberland shore. The Duke of
Devonshire, whose infirmity of deafness did not interfere with his
enjoyment of music, was an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs. Arkwright, and
her constant and affectionate friend. Their proximity of residence in
Derbyshire made their opportunities of meeting very frequent, and when
the Arkwrights visited London, Devonshire House was, if they chose it,
their hotel. His attachment to her induced him, towards the end of his
life, to take a residence in the poor little village of Cullercoats,
whither she loved to resort, and where she died. I possess a copy of a
beautiful drawing of a head of Mrs. Arkwright, given to me by the duke,
for whom the original was executed. It is only a head, with the eyes
raised to heaven, and the lips parted, as in the act of singing; and the
angelic sweetness of the countenance may perhaps suggest, to those who
never heard her, the voice that seemed like that face turned to sound.

So Fanny Kemble married, and Adelaide Decamp came and lived with us, and
was the good angel of our home. All intercourse between the two (till
then inseparable companions) ceased for many years, and my aunt began
her new life with a bitter bankruptcy of love and friendship, happiness
and hope, that would have dried the sap of every sweet affection, and
made even goodness barren, in many a woman's heart for ever.

Without any home but my father's house, without means of subsistence but
the small pittance which he was able to give her, in most grateful
acknowledgment of her unremitting care of us, without any joys or hopes
but those of others, without pleasure in the present or expectation in
the future, apparently without memory of the past, she spent her whole
life in the service of my parents and their children, and lived and
moved and had her being in a serene, unclouded, unvarying atmosphere of
cheerful, self-forgetful content that was heroic in its absolute
unconsciousness. She is the only person I can think of who appeared to
me to have fulfilled Wordsworth's conception of

    "Those blessed ones who do God's will and know it not."

I have never seen either man or woman like her, in her humble
excellence, and I am thankful that, knowing what the circumstances of
her whole life were, she yet seems to me the happiest human being I have
known. She died, as she had lived, in the service of others. When I went
with my father to America, my mother remained in England, and my aunt
came with us, to take care of me. She died in consequence of the
overturning of a carriage (in which we were travelling), from which she
received a concussion of the spine; and her last words to me, after a
night of angelic endurance of restless fever and suffering, were, "Open
the window; let in the blessed light"--almost the same as Goethe's, with
a characteristic difference. It was with the hope of giving her the
proceeds of its publication, as a token of my affectionate gratitude,
that I printed my American journal; that hope being defeated by her
death, I gave them, for her sake, to her younger sister, my aunt
Victoire Decamp. This sister of my mother's was, when we were living in
Covent Garden Chambers, a governess in a school at Lea, near Blackheath.

The school was kept by ladies of the name of Guinani, sisters to the
wife of Charles Young--the Julia so early lost, so long loved and
lamented by him. I was a frequent and much-petted visitor to their
house, which never fulfilled the austere purpose implied in its name to
me, for all my days there were holidays; and I remember hours of special
delight passed in a large drawing-room where two fine cedars of Lebanon
threw grateful gloom into the windows, and great tall china jars of
pot-pourri filled the air with a mixed fragrance of roses and (as it
seemed to me) plum-pudding, and where hung a picture, the contemplation
of which more than once moved me to tears, after I had been given to
understand that the princely personage and fair-headed baby in a boat in
the midst of a hideous black sea, overhung by a hideous black sky, were
Prospero, the good Duke of Milan, and his poor little princess daughter,
Miranda, cast forth by wicked relations to be drowned.

It was while we were still living in Covent Garden Chambers that Talma,
the great French actor, came to London. He knew both my uncle and my
father, and was highly esteemed and greatly admired by both of them. He
called one day upon my father, when nobody was at home, and the servant
who opened the door holding me by the hand, the famous French actor, who
spoke very good English, though not without the "pure Parisian accent,"
took some kind of notice of me, desiring me to be sure and remember his
name, and tell my father that Mr. Talma, the great French tragedian, had
called. I replied that I would do so, and then added, with noble
emulation, that my father was also a great tragedian, and my uncle was
also a great tragedian, and that we had a baby in the nursery who I
thought must be a great tragedian too, for she did nothing but cry, and
what was that if not tragedy?--which edifying discourse found its way
back to my mother, to whom Talma laughingly repeated it. I have heard my
father say that on the occasion of this visit of Talma's to London, he
consulted my uncle on the subject of acting in English. Hamlet was one
of his great parts, and he made as fine a thing of Ducis' cold, and
stiff, and formal adaptation of Shakespeare's noble work as his meagre
material allowed; but, as I have said before, he spoke English well, and
thought it not impossible to undertake the part in the original
language. My uncle, however, strongly dissuaded him from it, thinking
the decided French accent an insuperable obstacle to his success, and
being very unwilling that he should risk by a failure in the attempt his
deservedly high reputation. A friend of mine, at a dinner party, being
asked if she had seen Mr. Fechter in Hamlet, replied in the negative,
adding that she did not think she should relish Shakespeare declaimed
with a foreign accent. The gentleman who had questioned her said, "Ah,
very true indeed--perhaps not;" then, looking attentively at his plate,
from which I suppose he drew the inspiration of what followed, he added,
"And yet--after all, you know, Hamlet was a foreigner." This view of the
case had probably not suggested itself to John Kemble, and so he
dissuaded Talma from the experiment. While referring to Mr. Fechter's
personification of Hamlet, and the great success which it obtained in
the fashionable world, I wish to preserve a charming instance of naïve
ignorance in a young guardsman, seduced by the enthusiasm of the gay
society of London into going, for once, to see a play of Shakespeare's.
After sitting dutifully through some scenes in silence, he turned to a
fellow-guardsman, who was painfully looking and listening by his side,
with the grave remark, "I say, George, _dooced_ odd play this; its all
full of quotations." The young military gentleman had occasionally, it
seems, heard Shakespeare quoted, and remembered it.

To return to my story. About this time it was determined that I should
be sent to school in France. My father was extremely anxious to give me
every advantage that he could, and Boulogne, which was not then the
British Alsatia it afterwards became, and where there was a girl's
school of some reputation, was chosen as not too far from home to send a
mite seven years old, to acquire the French language and begin her
education. And so to Boulogne I went, to a school in the oddly named
"Rue tant perd tant paie," in the old town, kept by a rather sallow and
grim, but still vivacious old Madame Faudier, with the assistance of her
daughter, Mademoiselle Flore, a bouncing, blooming beauty of a discreet
age, whose florid complexion, prominent black eyes, plaited and
profusely pomatumed black hair, and full, commanding figure, attired for
fête days, in salmon-colored merino, have remained vividly impressed
upon my memory. What I learned here except French (which I could not
help learning), I know not. I was taught music, dancing, and Italian,
the latter by a Signor Mazzochetti, an object of special detestation to
me, whose union with Mademoiselle Flore caused a temporary fit of
rejoicing in the school. The small seven-year-old beginnings of such
particular humanities I mastered with tolerable success, but if I may
judge from the frequency of my _penitences_, humanity in general was not
instilled into me without considerable trouble. I was a sore torment, no
doubt, to poor Madame Faudier, who, on being once informed by some
alarmed passers in the street that one of her "demoiselles" was
perambulating the house roof, is reported to have exclaimed, in a
paroxysm of rage and terror, "Ah, ce ne peut etre que cette _diable_ de
Kemble!" and sure enough it was I. Having committed I know not what
crime, I had been thrust for chastisement into a lonely garret, where,
having nothing earthly to do but look about me, I discovered (like a
prince in the Arabian Nights) a ladder leading to a trap-door, and
presently was out on a sort of stone coping, which ran round the steep
roof of the high, old-fashioned house, surveying with serene
satisfaction the extensive prospect landward and seaward, unconscious
that I was at the same time an object of terror to the beholders in the
street below. Snatched from the perilous delight of this bad eminence, I
was (again, I think, rather like the Arabian prince) forthwith plunged
into the cellar; where I curled myself up on the upper step, close to
the heavy door that had been locked upon me, partly for the comfort of
the crack of light that squeezed itself through it, and partly, I
suppose, from some vague idea that there was no bottom to the steps,
derived from my own terror rather than from any precise historical
knowledge of oubliettes and donjons, with the execrable treachery of
stairs suddenly ending in mid-darkness over an abyss. I suppose I
suffered a martyrdom of fear, for I remember upwards of thirty years
afterwards having this very cellar, and my misery in it, brought before
my mind suddenly, with intense vividness, while reading, in Victor
Hugo's Notre Dame, poor Esmeralda's piteous entreaties for deliverance
from her underground prison: "Oh laissez moi sortir! j'ai froid! j'ai
peur! et des bêtes me montent le long du corps." The latter hideous
detail certainly completes the exquisite misery of the picture. Less
justifiable than banishment to lonely garrets, whence egress was to be
found only by the roof, or dark incarceration in cellars whence was no
egress at all, was another device, adopted to impress me with the evil
of my ways, and one which seems to me so foolish in its cruelty, that
the only amazement is, how anybody entrusted with the care of children
could dream of any good result from such a method of impressing a little
girl not eight years old. There was to be an execution in the town of
some wretched malefactor, who was condemned to be guillotined, and I was
told that I should be taken to see this supreme act of legal
retribution, in order that I might know to what end evil courses
conducted people. We all remember the impressive fable of "Don't Care,"
who came to be hanged, but I much doubt if any of the thousands of young
Britons whose bosoms have been made to thrill with salutary terror at
his untimely end were ever taken by their parents and guardians to see a
hanging, by way of enforcing the lesson. Whether it was ever intended
that I should witness the ghastly spectacle of this execution, or
whether it was expressly contrived that I should come too late, I know
not; it is to be hoped that my doing so was not accidental, but
mercifully intentional. Certain it is, that when I was taken to the
Grande Place the slaughter was over; but I saw the guillotine, and
certain gutters running red with what I was told (whether truly or not)
was blood, and a sad-looking man, busied about the terrible machine,
who, it was said, was the executioner's son; all which lugubrious
objects, no doubt, had their due effect upon my poor childish
imagination and nervous system, with a benefit to my moral nature which
I should think highly problematical.

The experiments tried upon the minds and souls of children by those who
undertake to train them, are certainly among the most mysterious of
Heaven-permitted evils. The coarse and cruel handling of these
wonderfully complex and delicate machines by ignorant servants, ignorant
teachers, and ignorant parents, fills one with pity and with amazement
that the results of such processes should not be even more disastrous
than they are.

In the nature of many children exists a capacity of terror equalled in
its intensity only by the reticence which conceals it. The fear of
ridicule is strong in these sensitive small souls, but even that is
inadequate to account for the silent agony with which they hug the
secret of their fear. Nursery and schoolroom authorities, fonder of
power than of principle, find their account in both these tendencies,
and it is marvellous to what a point tyranny may be exercised by means
of their double influence over children, the sufferers never having
recourse to the higher parental authority by which they would be
delivered from the nightmare of silent terror imposed upon them.

The objects that excite the fears of children are often as curious and
unaccountable as their secret intensity. A child four years of age, who
was accustomed to be put to bed in a dressing-room opening into her
mother's room, and near her nursery, and was left to go to sleep alone,
from a desire that she should not be watched and lighted to sleep (or in
fact kept awake, after a very common nursery practice), endured this
discipline without remonstrance, and only years afterwards informed her
mother that she never was so left in her little bed, alone in the
darkness, without a full conviction that a large black dog was lying
under it, which terrible imagination she never so much as hinted at, or
besought for light or companionship to dispel. Miss Martineau told me
once, that a special object of horror to her, when she was a child, were
the colors of the prism, a thing in itself so beautiful, that it is
difficult to conceive how any imagination could be painfully impressed
by it; but her terror of these magical colors was such, that she used to
rush past the room, even when the door was closed, where she had seen
them reflected from the chandelier, by the sunlight, on the wall.

The most singular instance I ever knew, however, of unaccountable terror
produced in a child's mind by the pure action of its imagination, was
that of a little boy who overheard a conversation between his mother and
a friend upon the subject of the purchase of some stuff, which she had
not bought, "because," said she, "it was ell wide." The words "ell
wide," perfectly incomprehensible to the child, seized upon his fancy,
and produced some image of terror by which for a long time his poor
little mind was haunted. Certainly this is a powerful instance, among
innumerable and striking ones, of the fact that the fears of children
are by no means the result of the objects of alarm suggested to them by
the ghost-stories, bogeys, etc., of foolish servants and companions;
they quite as often select or create their terrors for themselves, from
sources so inconceivably strange, that all precaution proves ineffectual
to protect them from this innate tendency of the imaginative faculty.
This "ell wide" horror is like something in a German story. The strange
aversion, coupled with a sort of mysterious terror, for beautiful and
agreeable or even quite commonplace objects, is one of the secrets of
the profound impression which the German writers of fiction produce. It
belongs peculiarly to their national genius, some of whose most striking
and thrilling conceptions are pervaded with this peculiar form of the
sentiment of fear. Hoffman and Tieck are especially powerful in their
use of it, and contrive to give a character of vague mystery to simple
details of prosaic events and objects, to be found in no other works of
fiction. The terrible conception of the _Doppelgänger_, which exists in
a modified form as the wraith of Scottish legendary superstition, is
rendered infinitely more appalling by being taken out of its misty
highland half-light of visionary indefiniteness, and produced in
frock-coat and trousers, in all the shocking distinctness of
commonplace, everyday, contemporary life. The Germans are the only
people whose imaginative faculty can cope with the homeliest forms of
reality, and infuse into them _vagueness_, that element of terror most
alien from familiar things. That they may be tragic enough we know, but
that they have in them a mysterious element of terror of quite
indefinite depth, German writers alone know how to make us feel.

I do not think that in my own instance the natural cowardice with which
I was femininely endowed was unusually or unduly cultivated in
childhood; but with a highly susceptible and excitable nervous
temperament and ill-regulated imagination, I have suffered from every
conceivable form of terror; and though, for some inexplicable reason, I
have always had the reputation of being fearless, have really, all my
life, been extremely deficient in courage.

Very impetuous, and liable to be carried away by any strong emotion, my
entire want of self-control and prudence, I suppose, conveyed the
impression that I was equally without fear; but the truth is that, as a
wise friend once said to me, I have always been "as rash and as cowardly
as a child;" and none of my sex ever had a better right to apply to
herself Shakespeare's line--

    "A woman, naturally born to fears."

The only agreeable impression I retain of my school-days at Boulogne is
that of the long half-holiday walks we were allowed to indulge in. Not
the two-and-two, dull, dreary, daily procession round the ramparts, but
the disbanded freedom of the sunny afternoon, spent in gathering
wild-flowers along the pretty, secluded valley of the Liane, through
which no iron road then bore its thundering freight. Or, better still,
clambering, straying, playing hide-and-seek, or sitting telling and
hearing fairy tales among the great carved blocks of stone, which lay,
in ignominious purposelessness, around the site on the high, grassy
cliff where Napoleon the First--the Only--had decreed that his triumphal
pillar should point its finger of scorn at our conquered, "pale-faced
shores." Best of all, however, was the distant wandering, far out along
the sandy dunes, to what used to be called "La Gárenne;" I suppose
because of the wild rabbits that haunted it, who--hunted and rummaged
from their burrows in the hillocks of coarse grass by a pitiless pack of
school-girls--must surely have wondered after our departure, when they
came together stealthily, with twitching noses, ears, and tails, what
manner of fiendish visitation had suddenly come and gone, scaring their
peaceful settlement on the silent, solitary sea-shore.

Before I left Boulogne, the yearly solemnity of the distribution of
prizes took place. This was, at Madame Faudier's, as at all French
schools of that day, a most exciting event. Special examinations
preceded it, for which the pupils prepared themselves with diligent
emulation. The prefect, the sub-prefect, the mayor, the bishop, all the
principal civil and religious authorities of the place, were invited to
honor the ceremony with their presence. The courtyard of the house was
partly inclosed, and covered over with scaffoldings, awnings, and
draperies, under which a stage was erected, and this, together with the
steps that led to it, was carpeted with crimson, and adorned with a
profusion of flowers. One of the dignified personages, seated around a
table on which the books designed for prizes were exhibited, pronounced
a discourse commendatory of past efforts and hortatory to future ones,
and the pupils, all _en grande toilette_, and seated on benches facing
the stage, were summoned through the rows of admiring parents, friends,
acquaintances, and other invited guests, to receive the prizes awarded
for excellence in the various branches of our small curriculum. I was
the youngest girl in the school, but I was a quick, clever child, and a
lady, a friend of my family, who was present, told me many years after,
how well she remembered the frequent summons to the dais received by a
small, black-eyed damsel, the _cadette_ of the establishment. I have
considerable doubt that any good purpose could be answered by this
public appeal to the emulation of a parcel of school-girls; but I have
no doubt at all that abundant seeds of vanity, self-love, and love of
display, were sown by it, which bore their bad harvest many a long year
after.

I left Boulogne when I was almost nine years old, and returned home,
where I remained upwards of two years before being again sent to school.
During this time we lived chiefly at a place called Craven Hill,
Bayswater, where we occupied at different periods three different
houses.

My mother always had a detestation of London, which I have cordially
inherited. The dense, heavy atmosphere, compounded of smoke and fog,
painfully affected her breathing and oppressed her spirits; and the
deafening clangor of its ceaseless uproar irritated her nerves and
distressed her in a manner which I invariably experience whenever I am
compelled to pass any time in that huge Hubbub. She perpetually yearned
for the fresh air and the quiet of the country. Occupied as my father
was, however, this was an impossible luxury; and my poor mother escaped
as far as her circumstances would allow from London, and towards the
country, by fixing her home at the place I have mentioned. In those days
Tyburnia did not exist; nor all the vast region of Paddingtonian London.
Tyburn turnpike, of nefarious memory, still stood at the junction of
Oxford Road and the Edgeware Road, and between the latter and Bayswater
open fields traversed by the canal, with here and there an isolated
cottage dotted about them, stretched on one side of the high-road; and
on the other, the untidy, shaggy, ravelled-looking selvage of Hyde Park;
not trimmed with shady walks and flower borders and smooth grass and
bright iron railing as now, but as forbidding in its neglected aspect as
the desolate stretch of uninclosed waste on the opposite side.

About a mile from Tyburn Gate a lane turned off on the right, following
which one came to a meadow, with a path across its gentle rise which led
to the row of houses called Craven Hill. I do not think there were
twenty in all, and some of them, such as Lord Ferrar's and the Harley
House, were dwellings of some pretension. Even the most modest of them
had pretty gardens in front and behind, and verandas and balconies with
flowering creepers and shrubberies, and a general air of semi-rurality
that cheated my poor mother with a make-believe effect of being, if not
in the country, at any rate out of town. And infinite were the devices
of her love of elegance and comfort produced from the most unpromising
materials, but making these dwellings of ours pretty and pleasant beyond
what could have been thought possible. She had a peculiar taste and
talent for furnishing and fitting up; and her means being always very
limited, her zeal was great for frequenting sales, where she picked up
at reasonable prices quaint pieces of old furniture, which she brought
with great triumph to the assistance of the commonplace upholstery of
our ready-furnished dwellings. Nobody ever had such an eye for the
disposal of every article in a room, at once for greatest convenience
and best appearance; and I never yet saw the apartment into which by her
excellent arrangement she did not introduce an element of comfort and
elegance--a liveable look, which the rooms of people unendowed with that
special faculty never acquire, and never retain, however handsome or
finely fitted up they may be. I am sorry to be obliged to add, however,
that she had a rage for moving her furniture from one place to another,
which never allowed her to let well alone; and not unfrequently her mere
desire for change destroyed the very best results of her own good taste.
We never knew when we might find the rooms a perfect chaos of disorder,
with every chair, table, and sofa "dancing the hayes" in horrid
confusion; while my mother, crimson and dishevelled with pulling and
pushing them hither and thither, was breathlessly organizing new
combinations. Nor could anything be more ludicrous than my father's
piteous aspect, on arriving in the midst of this _remue-ménage_, or the
poor woman's profound mortification when, finding everything moved from
its last position (for the twentieth time), he would look around, and,
instead of all the commendation she expected, exclaim in dismay, "Why,
bless my soul! what has happened to the room, _again_!" Our furniture
played an everlasting game of puss in the corner; and I am thankful that
I have inherited some of my mother's faculty of arranging, without any
of her curious passion for changing the aspect of her rooms.

A pretty, clever, and rather silly and affected woman, Mrs. Charles
M----, who had a great passion for dress, was saying one day to my
mother, with a lackadaisical drawl she habitually made use of, "What do
you do when you have a headache, or are bilious, or cross, or nervous,
or out of spirits? I always change my dress; it does me so much good!"
"Oh," said my mother, briskly, "I change the furniture." I think she
must have regarded it as a panacea for all the ills of life. Mrs.
Charles M---- was the half-sister of that amiable woman and admirable
actress, Miss Kelly.

To return to Craven Hill. A row of very fine elm trees was separated
only by the carriage-road from the houses, whose front windows looked
through their branches upon a large, quiet, green meadow, and beyond
that to an extensive nursery garden of enchanting memory, where our
weekly allowances were expended in pots of violets and flower-seeds and
roots of future fragrance, for our small gardens: this pleasant
foreground divided us from the Bayswater Road and Kensington Gardens. At
the back of the houses and their grounds stretched a complete open of
meadow land, with hedgerows and elm trees, and hardly any building in
sight in any direction. Certainly this was better than the smoke and din
of London. To my father, however, the distance was a heavy increase of
his almost nightly labor at the theatre. Omnibuses were no part of
London existence then; a hackney coach (there were no cabs, either
four-wheelers or hansoms) was a luxury to be thought of only
occasionally, and for part of the way; and so he generally wound up his
hard evening's work with a five miles' walk from Covent Garden to Craven
Hill.

It was perhaps the inconvenience of this process that led to our taking,
in addition to our "rural" residence, a lodging in Gerard Street, Soho.
The house immediately fronts Anne Street, and is now a large
establishment for the sale of lamps. It was a handsome old house, and at
one time belonged to the "wicked" Lord Lyttleton. At the time I speak
of, we occupied only a part of it, the rest remaining in the possession
of the proprietor, who was a picture-dealer, and his collection of dusky
_chefs-d'oeuvre_ covered the walls of the passages and staircases with
dark canvas, over whose varnished surface ill-defined figures and
ill-discerned faces seemed to flit, as with some trepidation I ran past
them. The house must have been a curious as well as a very large one;
but I never saw more of it than our own apartments, which had some
peculiarities that I remember. Our dining-room was a very large, lofty,
ground-floor room, fitted up partially as a library with my father's
books, and having at the farther end, opposite the windows, two heavy,
fluted pillars, which gave it rather a dignified appearance. My mother's
drawing-room, which was on the first floor and at the back of the house,
was oval in shape and lighted only by a skylight; and one entrance to it
was through a small anteroom or boudoir, with looking-glass doors and
ceiling all incrusted with scrolls and foliage and _rococo_ Louis Quinze
style of ornamentation, either in plaster or carved in wood and painted
white. There were back staircases and back doors without number, leading
in all directions to unknown regions; and the whole house, with its
remains of magnificence and curious lumber of objects of art and
_vertu_, was a very appropriate frame for the traditional ill-repute of
its former noble owner.

A ludicrous circumstance enough, I remember, occurred, which produced no
little uproar and amusement in one of its dreariest chambers. My brother
John was at this time eagerly pursuing the study of chemistry for his
own amusement, and had had an out-of-the-way sort of spare bedroom
abandoned to him for his various ill savored materials and scientific
processes, from which my mother suffered a chronic terror of sudden
death by blowing up. There was a monkey in the house, belonging to our
landlord, and generally kept confined in his part of it, whence the
knowledge of his existence only reached us through anecdotes brought by
the servants. One day, however, an alarm was spread that the monkey had
escaped from his own legitimate quarters and was running wild over the
house. Chase was given, and every hole and corner searched in vain for
the mischievous ape, who was at length discovered in what my brother
dignified by the title of his laboratory, where, in a frenzy of gleeful
activity, he was examining first one bottle and then another; finally he
betook himself, with indescribably grotesque grinnings and chatterings,
to uncorking and sniffing at them, and then pouring their contents
deliberately out on the (luckily carpetless) floor,--a joke which might
have had serious results for himself, as well as the house, if he had
not in the midst of it suffered ignoble capture and been led away to his
own quarters; my mother that time, certainly, escaping imminent "blowing
up."

While we were living in Gerard Street, my uncle Kemble came for a short
time to London from Lausanne, where he had fixed his residence--compelled
to live abroad, under penalty of seeing the private fortune he had
realized by a long life of hard professional labor swept into the ruin
which had fallen upon Covent Garden Theatre, of which he was part
proprietor. And I always associate this my only recollection of his
venerable white hair and beautiful face, full of an expression of most
benign dignity, with the earliest mention I remember of that luckless
property, which weighed like an incubus upon my father all his life, and
the ruinous burden of which both I and my sister successively endeavored
in vain to prop.

My mother at this time gave lessons in acting to a few young women who
were preparing themselves for the stage; and I recollect very well the
admiration my uncle expressed for the beauty of one of them, an
extremely handsome Miss Dance, who, I think, came out successfully, but
soon married, and relinquished her profession.

This young lady was the daughter of a violinist and musical composer,
whose name has a place in my memory from seeing it on a pretty musical
setting for the voice of some remarkably beautiful verses, the author of
which I have never been able to discover. I heard they had been taken
out of that old-fashioned receptacle for stray poetical gems, the poet's
corner of a country newspaper. I write them here as accurately as I can
from memory; it is more than fifty years since I learnt them, and I have
never met with any copy of them but that contained in the old music
sheet of Mr. Dance's duet.

    SONG OF THE SPIRIT OF MORN.

    Now on their couch of rest
      Mortals are sleeping,
    While in dark, dewy vest,
      Flowerets are weeping.
    Ere the last star of night
      Fades in the fountain,
    My finger of rosy light
      Touches the mountain.

    Far on his filmy wing
      Twilight is wending,
    Shadows encompassing,
      Terrors attending:
    While my foot's fiery print,
      Up my path showing,
    Gleams with celestial tint.
      Brilliantly glowing,

    Now from my pinions fair
      Freshness is streaming,
    And from my yellow hair
      Glories are gleaming.
    Nature with pure delight
      Hails my returning,
    And Sol, from his chamber bright,
      Crowns the young morning.

My uncle John returned to Switzerland, and I never saw him again; he had
made over his share of Covent Garden to my father, and went back to live
and die in peace at his Beau Site on the Lake of Geneva.

The first time that I visited Lausanne I went to his grave, and found it
in the old burial-ground above the town, where I wonder the dead have
patience to lie still, for the glorious beauty of the view their
resting-place commands. It was one among a row of graves with broad,
flat tombstones bearing English names, and surrounded with iron
railings, and flowers more or less running wild.

My father received the property my uncle transferred to him with
cheerful courage, and not without sanguine hopes of retrieving its
fortunes: instead of which, it destroyed his and those of his family;
who, had he and they been untrammelled by the fatal obligation of
working for a hopelessly ruined concern, might have turned their labors
to far better personal account. Of the eighty thousand pounds which my
uncle sank in building Covent Garden, and all the years of toil my
father and myself and my sister sank in endeavoring to sustain it,
nothing remained to us at my father's death; not even the ownership of
the only thing I ever valued the property for,--the private box which
belonged to us, the yearly rent of which was valued at three hundred
pounds, and the possession of which procured us for several years many
evenings of much enjoyment.

The only other recollection I have connected with Gerard Street is that
of certain passages from "Paradise Lost," read to me by my father, the
sonorous melody of which so enchanted me, that for many years of my life
Milton was to me incomparably the first of English poets; though at this
time of my earliest acquaintance with him, Walter Scott had precedence
over him, and was undoubtedly in my opinion greatest of mortal and
immortal bards. His "Marmion" and "Lay of the Last Minstrel" were
already familiar to me. Of Shakespeare at this time, and for many
subsequent years, I knew not a single line.

While our lodging in town was principally inhabited by my father and
resorted to by my mother as a convenience, my aunt Dall, and we
children, had our home at my mother's _rus in urbe_, Craven Hill, where
we remained until I went again to school in France.

Our next door neighbors were, on one side, a handsome, dashing Mrs.
Blackshaw, sister of George the Fourth's favorite, Beau Brummel, whose
daughters were good friends of ours; and on the other Belzoni, the
Egyptian traveller, and his wife, with whom we were well acquainted. The
wall that separated our gardens was upwards of six feet high,--it
reached above my father's head, who was full six feet tall,--but our
colossal friend, the Italian, looked down upon us over it quite easily,
his large handsome face showing well above it, down to his magnificent
auburn beard, which in those less hirsute days than these he seldom
exhibited, except in the privacy of his own back garden, where he used
occasionally to display it, to our immense delight and astonishment.
Great, too, was our satisfaction in visiting Madame Belzoni, who used to
receive us in rooms full of strange spoils, brought back by herself and
her husband from the East; she sometimes smoked a long Turkish pipe, and
generally wore a dark blue sort of caftan, with a white turban on her
head. Another of our neighbors here was Latour, the musical composer, to
whom, though he was personally good-natured and kind to me, I owe a
grudge, for the sake of his "Music for Young Persons," and only regret
that he was not our next-door neighbor, when he would have execrated his
own "O Dolce Concerto," and "Sul Margine d'un Rio," and all his
innumerable progeny of variations for two hands and four hands, as
heartily as I did. I do not know whether it was instigated by his advice
or not that my mother at this time made me take lessons of a certain Mr.
Laugier, who received pupils at his own house, near Russell Square, and
taught them thorough-bass and counterpoint, and the science of musical
composition. I attended his classes for some time, and still possess
books full of the grammar of music, as profound and difficult a study,
almost, as the grammar of language. But I think I was too young to
derive much benefit from so severe a science, and in spite of my books
full of musical "parsing," so to speak, declensions of chords, and
conjugations of scales, I do not think I learned much from Mr. Laugier,
and, never having followed up this beginning of the real study of music,
my knowledge of it has been only of that empirical and contemptible sort
which goes no further than the end of boarding-school young ladies'
fingers, and sometimes, at any rate, amounts to tolerably skilful and
accurate execution; a result I never attained, in spite of Mr. Laugier's
thorough-bass and a wicked invention called a chiroplast, for which, I
think, he took out a patent, and for which I suppose all luckless girls
compelled to practice with it thought he ought to have taken out a
halter. It was a brass rod made to screw across the keys, on which were
_strung_, like beads, two brass frames for the hands, with separate
little cells for the fingers, these being secured to the brass rod
precisely at the part of the instrument on which certain exercises were
to be executed. Another brass rod was made to pass under the wrist in
order to maintain it also in its proper position, and thus incarcerated,
the miserable little hands performed their daily, dreary monotony of
musical exercise, with, I imagine, really no benefit at all from the
irksome constraint of this horrid machine, that could not have been
imparted quite as well, if not better, by a careful teacher. I had,
however, no teacher at this time but my aunt Dall, and I suppose the
chiroplast may have saved her some trouble, by insuring that my
practising, which she could not always superintend, should not be merely
a process of acquiring innumerable bad habits for the exercise of the
patience of future teachers.

My aunt at this time directed all my lessons, as well as the small
beginnings of my sister's education. My brother John was at Clapham with
Mr. Richardson, who was then compiling his excellent dictionary, in
which labor he employed the assistance of such of his pupils as showed
themselves intelligent enough for the occupation; and I have no doubt
that to this beginning of philological study my brother owed his
subsequent predilection for and addiction to the science of language. My
youngest brother, Henry, went to a day-school in the neighborhood.

All children's amusements are more or less dramatic, and a theatre is a
favorite resource in most playrooms, and, naturally enough, held an
important place in ours. The printed sheets of small figures,
representing all the characters of certain popular pieces, which we
colored, and pasted on card-board and cut out, and then, by dint of long
slips of wood with a slit at one end, into which their feet were
inserted, moved on and off our small stage; the coloring of the scenery;
and all the arrangement and conduct of the pieces we represented, gave
us endless employment and amusement. My brother John was always manager
and spokesman in these performances, and when we had fitted up our
theatre with a _real_ blue silk curtain that would roll up, and a _real_
set of foot-lights that would burn, and when he contrived, with some
resin and brimstone and salt put in a cup and set on fire, to produce a
diabolical sputter and flare and bad smell, significant of the blowing
up of the mill in "The Miller and his Men," great was our exultation.
This piece and "Blue Beard" were our "battle horses," to which we
afterwards added a lugubrious melodrama called "The Gypsy's Curse" (it
had nothing whatever to do with "Guy Mannering"), of which I remember
nothing but some awful doggerel, beginning with--

    "May thy path be still in sorrow,
     May thy dark night know no morrow,"

which used to make my blood curdle with fright.

About this time I was taken for the first time to a real play, and it
was to that paradise of juvenile spectators, Astley's, where we saw a
Highland horror called "Meg Murdoch, or the Mountain Hag," and a
mythological after-piece called "Hyppolita, Queen of the Amazons," in
which young ladies in very short and shining tunics, with burnished
breastplates, helmets, spears, and shields, performed sundry warlike
evolutions round her Majesty Hyppolita, who was mounted on a snow-white
_live_ charger: in the heat of action some of these fair warriors went
so far as to die, which martial heroism left an impression on my
imagination so deep and delightful as to have proved hitherto indelible.

At length we determined ourselves to enact something worthy of notice
and approbation, and "Amoroso, King of Little Britain," was selected by
my brother John, our guide and leader in all matters of taste, for the
purpose. "Chrononhotonthologos" had been spoken of, but our youngest
performer, my sister, was barely seven years old, and I doubt if any of
us (but our manager) could have mastered the mere names of that famous
burlesque. Moreover, I think, in the piece we chose there were only four
principal characters, and we contrived to speak the words, and even sing
the songs, so much to our own satisfaction, that we thought we might
aspire to the honor of a hearing from our elders and betters. So we
produced our play before my father and mother and some of their friends,
who had good right (whatever their inclination might have been) to be
critical, for among them were Mr. and Mrs. Liston (the Amoroso and
Coquetinda of the real stage), Mr. and Mrs. Mathews, and Charles Young,
all intimate friends of my parents, whose children were our playmates,
and coadjutors in our performance.

For Charles Matthews I have always retained a kindly regard for auld
lang syne's sake, though I hardly ever met him after he went on the
stage. He was well educated, and extremely clever and accomplished, and
I could not help regretting that his various acquirements and many
advantages for the career of an architect, for which his father destined
him, should be thrown away; though it was quite evident that he followed
not only the strong bent of his inclination, but the instinct of the
dramatic genius which he inherited from his eccentric and most original
father, when he adopted the profession of the stage, where, in his own
day, he has been unrivaled in the sparkling vivacity of his performance
of a whole range of parts in which nobody has approached the finish,
refinement, and spirit of his acting. Moreover, his whole demeanor,
carriage, and manner were so essentially those of a gentleman, that the
broadest farce never betrayed him into either coarseness or vulgarity;
and the comedy he acted, though often the lightest of the light, was
never anything in its graceful propriety but high comedy. No member of
the French theatre was ever at once a more finished and a more
delightfully amusing and _natural_ actor.

Liston's son went into the army when he grew up, and I lost sight of
him.

With the Rev. Julian Young, son of my dear old friend Charles Young, I
always remained upon the most friendly terms, meeting him with cordial
pleasure whenever my repeated returns to England brought us together,
and allowed us to renew the amicable relations that always subsisted
between us.

I remember another family friend of ours at this time, a worthy old
merchant of the name of Mitchell, who was my brother John's godfather,
and to whose sombre, handsome city house I was taken once or twice to
dinner. He was at one time very rich, but lost all his fortune in some
untoward speculation, and he used to come and pay us long, sad, silent
visits, the friendly taciturnity of which I always compassionately
attributed to that circumstance, and wished that he had not lost the use
of his tongue as well as his money.

While we were living at Craven Hill, my father's sister, Mrs. Whitelock,
came to live with us for some time. She was a very worthy but
exceedingly ridiculous woman, in whom the strong peculiarities of her
family were so exaggerated, that she really seemed like a living parody
or caricature of all the Kembles.

She was a larger and taller woman than Mrs. Siddons, and had a fine,
commanding figure at the time I am speaking of, when she was quite an
elderly person. She was like her brother Stephen in face, with handsome
features, too large and strongly marked for a woman, light gray eyes,
and a light auburn wig, which, I presume, represented the color of her
previous hair, and which, together with the tall cap that surmounted it,
was always more or less on one side. She had the deep, sonorous voice
and extremely distinct utterance of her family, and an extraordinary
vehemence of gesture and expression quite unlike their quiet dignity and
reserve of manner, and which made her conversation like that of people
in old plays and novels; for she would slap her thigh in emphatic
enforcement of her statements (which were apt to be upon an incredibly
large scale), not unfrequently prefacing them with the exclamation, "I
declare to God!" or "I wish I may die!" all which seemed to us very
extraordinary, and combined with her large size and loud voice used
occasionally to cause us some dismay. My father used to call her Queen
Bess (her name was Elizabeth), declaring that her manners were like
those of that royal _un_-gentlewoman. But she was a simple-hearted,
sweet-tempered woman, whose harmless peculiarities did not prevent us
all being fond of her.

She had a great taste and some talent for drawing, which she cultivated
with a devotion and industry unusual in so old a person. I still possess
a miniature copy she made of Clarke's life-size picture of my father as
Cromwell, which is not without merit.

She was extremely fond of cards, and taught us to play the (even then)
old-fashioned game of quadrille, which my mother, who also liked cards,
and was a very good whist player, said had more variety in it than any
modern game.

Mrs. Whitelock had been for a number of years in the United States, of
which (then comparatively little known) part of the world she used to
tell us stories that, from her characteristic exaggeration, we always
received with extreme incredulity; but my own experience, subsequent by
many years to hers, has corroborated her marvelous histories of flights
of birds that almost darkened the sun (_i.e._ threw a passing shadow as
of a cloud upon the ground), and roads with ruts and mud-holes into
which one's carriage sank up to the axle-tree.

She used to tell us anecdotes of General Washington, to whom she had
been presented and had often seen (his favorite bespeak was always "The
School for Scandal"); and of Talleyrand, whom she also had often met,
and invariably called Prince _Tallierande_. She was once terrified by
being followed at evening, in the streets of Philadelphia, by a red
Indian savage, an adventure which has many times recurred to my mind
while traversing at all hours and in all directions the streets of that
most peaceful Quaker city, distant now by more than a thousand miles
from the nearest red Indian savage. Congress was sitting in Philadelphia
at that time; it was virtually the capital of the newly made United
States, and Mrs. Whitelock held an agreeable and respectable position
both in private and in public. I have been assured by persons as well
qualified to be critics as Judge Story, Chief-Justice Kent, and Judge
Hopkinson (Moore's friend), that she was an actress of considerable
ability. Perhaps she was; her Kemble name, face, figure, and voice no
doubt helped her to produce a certain effect on the stage; but she must
have been a very imperfectly educated woman. Nothing could be droller
than to see her with Mrs. Siddons, of whom she looked like a clumsy,
badly finished, fair imitation. Her vehement gestures and violent
objurgations contrasted comically with her sister's majestic stillness
of manner; and when occasionally Mrs. Siddons would interrupt her with,
"Elizabeth, your wig is on one side," and the other replied, "Oh, is
it?" and giving the offending head-gear a shove put it quite as crooked
in the other direction, and proceeded with her discourse, Melpomene
herself used to have recourse to her snuff-box to hide the dawning smile
on her face.

I imagine that my education must have been making but little progress
during the last year of my residence at Craven Hill. I had no masters,
and my aunt Dall could ill supply the want of other teachers; moreover,
I was extremely troublesome and unmanageable, and had become a
tragically desperate young person, as my determination to poison my
sister, in revenge for some punishment which I conceived had been
unjustly inflicted upon me, will sufficiently prove. I had been warned
not to eat privet berries, as they were poisonous, and under the above
provocation it occurred to me that if I strewed some on the ground my
sister might find and eat them, which would insure her going straight to
heaven, and no doubt seriously annoy my father and mother. How much of
all this was a lingering desire for the distinction of a public
execution of guillotine (the awful glory of which still survived in my
memory), how much dregs of "Gypsy Curses" and "Mountain Hags," and how
much the passionate love of exciting a sensation and producing an
effect, common to children, servants, and most uneducated people, I know
not. I never did poison my sister, and satisfied my desire of vengeance
by myself informing my aunt of my contemplated crime, the fulfillment of
which was not, I suppose, much apprehended by my family, as no measures
were taken to remove myself, my sister, or the privet bush from each
other's neighborhood.




CHAPTER III.


A quite unpremeditated inspiration which occurred to me upon being again
offended--to run away--probably alarmed my parents more than my
sororicidal projects, and I think determined them upon carrying out a
plan which had been talked of for some time, of my being sent again to
school; which plan ran a narrow risk of being defeated by my own
attempted escape from home. One day, when my father and mother were both
in London, I had started for a walk with my aunt and sister; when only a
few yards from home, I made an impertinent reply to some reproof I
received, and my aunt bade me turn back and go home, declining my
company for the rest of the walk. She proceeded at a brisk pace on her
way with my sister, nothing doubting that, when left alone, I would
retrace my steps to our house; but I stood still and watched her out of
sight, and then revolved in my own mind the proper course to pursue.

At first it appeared to me that it would be judicious, under such
smarting injuries as mine, to throw myself into a certain pond which was
in the meadow where I stood (my remedies had always rather an extreme
tendency); but it was thickly coated with green slime studded with
frogs' heads, and looked uninviting. After contemplating it for a
moment, I changed my opinion as to the expediency of getting under that
surface, and walked resolutely off towards London; not with any idea of
seeking my father and mother, but simply with that goal in view, as the
end of my walk.

Half-way thither, however, I became tired, and hot, and hungry, and
perhaps a little daunted by my own undertaking. I have said that between
Craven Hill and Tyburn turnpike there then was only a stretch of open
fields, with a few cottages scattered over them. In one of these lived a
poor woman who was sometimes employed to do needlework for us, and who,
I was sure, would give me a bit of bread and butter, and let me rest; so
I applied to her for this assistance. Great was the worthy woman's
amazement when I told her that I was alone, on my way to London; greater
still, probably, when I informed her that my intention was to apply for
an engagement at one of the theatres, assuring her that nobody with
talent need ever want for bread. She very wisely refrained from
discussing my projects, but, seeing that I was tired, persuaded me to
lie down in her little bedroom and rest before pursuing my way to town.
The weather was oppressively hot, and having lain down on her bed, I
fell fast asleep. I know not for how long, but I was awakened by the
sudden raising of the latch of the house door, and the voice of my aunt
Dall inquiring of my friendly hostess if she had seen or heard anything
of me.

I sat up breathless on the bed, listening, and looking round the room
perceived another door than the one by which I had entered it, which
would probably have given me egress to the open fields again, and
secured my escape; but before I could slip down from the bed and resume
my shoes, and take advantage of this exit, my aunt and poor Mrs. Taylor
entered the room, and I was ignominiously captured and taken home; I
expiated my offence by a week of bread and water, and daily solitary
confinement in a sort of tool-house in the garden, where my only
occupation was meditation, the "clear-obscure" that reigned in my prison
admitting of no other.

This was not cheerful, but I endeavored to make it appear as little the
reverse as possible, by invariably singing at the top of my voice
whenever I heard footsteps on the gravel walk near my place of
confinement.

Finally I was released, and was guilty of no further outrage before my
departure for Paris, whither I went with my mother and Mrs. Charles
Matthews at the end of the summer.

We travelled in the _malle poste_, and I remember but one incident
connected with our journey. Some great nobleman in Paris was about to
give a grand banquet, and the _conducteur_ of our vehicle had been
prevailed upon to bring up the fish for the occasion in large hampers on
our carriage, which was then the most rapid public conveyance on the
road between the coast and the capital. The heat was intense, and the
smell of our "luggage" intolerable. My mother complained and
remonstrated in vain; the name of the important personage who was to
entertain his guests with this delectable fish was considered an
all-sufficient reply. At length the contents of the baskets began
literally to ooze out of them and stream down the sides of the carriage;
my mother threatening an appeal to the authorities at the _bureau de
poste_, and finally we got rid of our pestiferous load.

I was now placed in a school in the Rue d'Angoulême, Champs Élysées; a
handsome house, formerly somebody's private hotel, with _porte cochère_,
_cour d'honneur_, a small garden beyond, and large, lofty ground-floor
apartments opening with glass doors upon them. The name of the lady at
the head of this establishment was Rowden; she had kept a school for
several years in Hans Place, London, and among her former pupils had had
the charge of Miss Mary Russell Mitford, and that clever but most
eccentric personage, Lady Caroline Lamb. The former I knew slightly,
years after, when she came to London and was often in friendly
communication with my father, then manager of Covent Garden, upon the
subject of the introduction on the stage of her tragedy of the
"Foscari."

The play of "Rienzi," in which Miss Mitford achieved the manly triumph
of a really successful historical tragedy, is, of course, her principal
and most important claim to fame, though the pretty collection of rural
sketches, redolent of country freshness and fragrance, called "Our
Village," precursor, in some sort, of Mrs. Gaskell's incomparable
"Cranford," is, I think, the most popular of Miss Mitford's works.

She herself has always a peculiar honor in my mind, from the exemplary
devotion of her whole life to her father, for whom her dutiful and
tender affection always seemed to me to fulfil the almost religious idea
conveyed by the old-fashioned, half-heathen phrase of "filial piety."

Lady Caroline Lamb I never saw, but from friends of mine who were well
acquainted with her I have heard manifold instances of her extraordinary
character and conduct. I remember my friend Mr. Harness telling me that,
dancing with him one night at a great ball, she had suddenly amazed him
by the challenge: "Gueth how many pairth of thtockingth I have on." (Her
ladyship lisped, and her particular graciousness to Mr. Harness was the
result of Lord Byron's school intimacy with and regard for him.) Finding
her partner quite unequal to the piece of divination proposed to him,
she put forth a very pretty little foot, from which she lifted the
petticoat ankle high, lisping out, "Thixth."

I remember my mother telling me of my father and herself meeting Mr. and
Lady Caroline Lamb at a dinner at Lord Holland's, in Paris, when
accidentally the expected arrival of Lord Byron was mentioned. Mr. Lamb
had just named the next day as the one fixed for their departure; but
Lady Caroline immediately announced her intention of prolonging her
stay, which created what would be called in the French chambers
"sensation."

When the party broke up, my father and mother, who occupied apartments
in the same hotel as the Lambs,--Meurice's,--were driven into the
court-yard just as Lady Caroline's carriage had drawn up before the
staircase leading to her rooms, which were immediately opposite those of
my father and mother. A _ruisseau_ or gutter ran round the court-yard,
and intervened between the carriage step and the door of the vestibule,
and Mr. Lamb, taking Lady Caroline, as she alighted, in his arms (she
had a very pretty, slight, graceful figure), gallantly lifted her over
the wet stones; which act of conjugal courtesy elicited admiring
approval from my mother, and from my father a growl to the effect, "If
you were _my_ wife I'd put your ladyship _in_ the gutter," justified
perhaps by their observation of what followed. My mother's sitting-room
faced that of Lady Caroline, and before lights were brought into it she
and my father had the full benefit of a curious scene in the room of
their opposite neighbors, who seemed quite unmindful that their
apartment being lighted and the curtains not drawn, they were, as
regarded the opposite wing of the building, a spectacle for gods and
men.

Mr. Lamb on entering the room sat down on the sofa, and his wife perched
herself on the elbow of it with her arm round his neck, which engaging
attitude she presently exchanged for a still more persuasive one, by
kneeling at his feet; but upon his getting up, the lively lady did so
also, and in a moment began flying round the room, seizing and flinging
on the floor cups, saucers, plates,--the whole _cabaret_,--vases,
candlesticks, her poor husband pursuing and attempting to restrain his
mad moiety, in the midst of which extraordinary scene the curtains were
abruptly closed, and the domestic drama finished behind them, leaving no
doubt, however, in my father's and mother's minds that the question of
Lady Caroline's prolonged stay till Lord Byron's arrival in Paris had
caused the disturbance they had witnessed.

I never read "Glenarvon," in which, I believe, Lady Caroline is supposed
to have intended to represent her idol, Lord Byron, and the only
composition of hers with which I am acquainted is the pretty song of
"Waters of Elle," of which I think she also wrote the air. She was
undoubtedly very clever, in spite of her silliness, and possessed that
sort of attraction, often as powerful as unaccountable, which belongs
sometimes to women so little distinguished by great personal beauty,
that they have suggested the French observation that "ce sont les femmes
laides qui font les grandes passions." The European women fascinating
_par excellence_ are the Poles; and a celebrated enchantress of that
charming and fantastic race of sirens, the Countess Delphine Potocka,
always reminded me of Lady Caroline Lamb, in the descriptions given of
her by her adorers.

With Mr. Lamb I never was acquainted till long after Lady Caroline's
death--after I came out on the stage, when he was Lord Melbourne, and
Prime Minister of England. I was a very young person, and though I often
met him in society, and he took amiable and kindly notice of me, our
intercourse was, of course, a mere occasional condescension on his part.

He was exceedingly handsome, with a fine person, verging towards the
portly, and a sweet countenance, more expressive of refined, easy,
careless good-humor, than almost any face I ever saw. His beauty was of
too well born and well bred a type to be unpleasantly sensual; but his
whole face, person, expression, and manner conveyed the idea of a
pleasure-loving nature, habitually self-indulgent, and indulgent to
others. He was my _beau ideal_ of an Epicurean philosopher (supposing it
possible that an Epicurean philosopher could have consented to be Prime
Minister of England), and I confess to having read with unbounded
astonishment the statement in the "Greville Memoirs," that this apparent
prince of _poco curanti_ had taken the pains to make himself a profound
Hebrew scholar.

I retain one very vivid impression of that most charming of debonair
noblemen, Lord Melbourne. I had the honor of dining at his house once,
with the beautiful, highly gifted, and unfortunate woman with whom his
relations afterwards became subject of such cruel public scandal; and
after dinner I sat for some time opposite a large, crimson-covered
ottoman, on which Lord Melbourne reclined, surrounded by those three
enchanting Sheridan sisters, Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (afterwards
Lady Dufferin), and Lady St. Maur (afterwards Duchess of Somerset, and
always Queen of Beauty). A more remarkable collection of comely
creatures, I think, could hardly be seen, and taking into consideration
the high rank, eminent position, and intellectual distinction of the
four persons who formed that beautiful group, it certainly was a picture
to remain impressed upon one's memory.

To return to my school-mistress, Mrs. Rowden; she was herself an
authoress, and had published a poem dedicated to Lady Bessborough (Lady
Caroline Lamb's mother), the title of which was "The pleasures of
friendship" (hope, memory, and imagination were all bespoken), of which
I remember only the two opening lines--

    "Visions of early youth, ere yet ye fade,
     Let my light pen arrest your fleeting shade."

Mrs. Rowden, during the period of her school-keeping in London, was an
ardent admirer of the stage in general and of my uncle John in
particular, of whom the mezzotint engraving as Coriolanus, from
Lawrence's picture, adorned her drawing-room in the Rue d'Angoulême,
where, however, the nature and objects of her enthusiasm had undergone a
considerable change: for when I was placed under her charge, theatres
and things theatrical had given place in her esteem to churches and
things clerical; her excitements and entertainments were Bible-meetings,
prayer-meetings, and private preachings and teachings of religion. She
was what was then termed Methodistical, what would now be designated as
very Low Church. We were taken every Sunday either to the chapel of the
embassy or to the Église de l'Oratoire (French Protestant worship), to
two and sometimes to three services; and certainly Sunday was no day of
rest to us, as we were required to write down from memory the sermons we
had heard in the course of the day, and read them aloud at our evening
devotional gathering. Some of us had a robust power of attention and
retention, and managed these reproductions with tolerable fidelity.
Others contrived to bring forth such a version of what they had heard as
closely resembled the last edition of the subject-matter of a prolonged
game of Russian scandal. Sometimes, upon an appeal to mercy and a solemn
protest that we had paid the utmost attention and _couldn't_ remember a
single sentence of the Christian exhortation we had heard, we were
allowed to choose a text and compose an original sermon of our own; and
I think a good-sized volume might have been made of homilies of my
composition, indited under these circumstances for myself and my
companions. I have always had rather an inclination for preaching, of
which these exercises were perhaps the origin, and it is but a few years
ago that I received at Saint Leonard's a visit from a tottering, feeble
old lady of near seventy, whose name, unheard since, carried me back to
my Paris school-days, and who, among other memories evoked to recall
herself to my recollection, said, "Oh, don't you remember how
good-natured you were in writing such nice sermons for me when I never
could write down what I had heard at church?" Her particular share in
these intellectual benefits conferred by me I did not remember, but I
remembered well and gratefully the sweet, silver-toned voice of her
sister, refreshing the arid atmosphere of our dreary Sunday evenings
with Handel's holy music. "I know that my Redeemer liveth," and "He
shall feed his Flock," which I heard for the first time from that gentle
schoolmate of mine, recall her meek, tranquil face and, liquid thread of
delicate soprano voice, even through the glorious associations of Jenny
Lind's inspired utterance of those divine songs. These ladies were
daughters of a high dignitary of the English Church, which made my
sermon-writing for their succor rather comical. Besides these Sunday
exercises, we were frequently taken to week-day services at the Oratoire
to hear some special preacher of celebrity, on which occasions of devout
dissipation Mrs. Rowden always appeared in the highest state of elation,
and generally received distinguished notice from the clerical hero of
the evening.

I remember accompanying her to hear Mr. Lewis Wade, a celebrated
missionary preacher, who had been to Syria and the Holy Land, and
brought thence observations on subjects sacred and profane that made his
discourses peculiarly interesting and edifying.

I was also taken to hear a much more impressive preacher, Mr. César
Malan, of Geneva, who addressed a small and select audience of very
distinguished persons, in a magnificent _salon_ in some great private
house, where every body sat on satin and gilded _fauteuils_ to receive
his admonitions, all which produced a great effect on my mind--not,
however, I think, altogether religious; but the sermon I heard, and the
striking aspect of the eloquent person who delivered it, left a strong
and long impression on my memory. It was the first fine preaching I ever
heard, and though I was undoubtedly too young to appreciate it duly, I
was, nevertheless, deeply affected by it, and it gave me my earliest
experience of that dangerous thing, emotional religion, or, to speak
more properly, religious excitement.

The Unitarians of the United States have in my time possessed a number
of preachers of most remarkable excellence; Dr. Channing, Dr. Dewey, Dr.
Bellows, my own venerable and dear pastor, Dr. Furness, Dr. Follen,
William and Henry Ware, being all men of extraordinary powers of
eloquence. At home I have heard Frederick Maurice and Dean Stanley, but
the most impressive preaching I ever heard in England was still from a
Unitarian pulpit; James Martineau, I think, surpassed all the very
remarkable men I have named in the wonderful beauty and power,
spirituality and solemnity, of his sacred teaching. Frederick Robertson,
to my infinite loss and sorrow, I never heard, having been deterred from
going to hear him by his reputation of a "fashionable preacher;" he,
better than any one, would have understood my repugnance to that species
of religious instructor.

Better, in my judgment, than these occasional appeals to our feelings
and imaginations under Mrs. Rowden's influence, was the constant _use_
of the Bible among us. I cannot call the reading and committing to
memory of the Scriptures, as we performed those duties, by the serious
name of study. But the Bible was learnt by heart in certain portions and
recited before breakfast every morning, and read aloud before bedtime
every evening by us; and though the practice may be open to some
objections, I think they hardly outweigh the benefit bestowed upon young
minds by early familiar acquaintance with the highest themes, the
holiest thoughts, and the noblest words the world possesses or ever will
possess. To me my intimate knowledge of the Bible has always seemed the
greatest benefit I derived from my school training.

Of the secular portion of the education we received, the French lady who
was Mrs. Rowden's partner directed the principal part. Our lessons of
geography, grammar, history, arithmetic, and mythology (of which latter
subject I suspect we had a much more thorough knowledge than is at all
usual with young English girls) were conducted by her.

These studies were all pursued in French, already familiar to me as the
vehicle of my elementary acquirements at Boulogne; and this soon became
the language in which I habitually wrote, spoke, and thought, to the
almost entire neglect of my native tongue, of which I never thoroughly
studied the grammar till I was between fifteen and sixteen, when, on my
presenting, in a glow of vanity, some verses of mine to my father, he
said, with his blandest smile, after reading them, "Very well, very
pretty indeed! My dear, don't you think, before you write poetry, you
had better learn grammar?" a suggestion which sent me crestfallen to a
diligent study of Lindley Murray. But grammar is perfectly uncongenial
matter to me, which my mind absolutely refuses to assimilate. I have
learned Latin, English, French, Italian, and German grammar, and do not
know a single rule of the construction of any language whatever. More
over, to the present day, my early familiar use of French produces
uncertainty in my mind as to the spelling of all words that take a
double consonant in French and only one in English, as apartment, enemy,
etc.

The men of my family--that is, my uncle John, my father, and my eldest
brother--were all philologists, and extremely fond of the study of
language. Grammar was favorite light reading, and the philosophy which
lies at the root of human speech a frequent subject of discussion and
research with them; but they none of them spoke foreign languages with
ease or fluency. My uncle was a good Latin scholar, and read French,
Italian, and Spanish, but spoke none of them; not even the first, in
spite of his long residence in French Switzerland. The same was the case
with my father, whose delight in the dry bones of language was such that
at near seventy he took the greatest pleasure in assiduously studying
the Greek grammar. My brother John, who was a learned linguist, and
familiar with the modern European languages, spoke none of them well,
not even German, though he resided for many years at Hanover, where he
was curator of the royal museum and had married a German wife, and had
among his most intimate friends and correspondents both the Grimms,
Gervinus, and many of the principal literary men of Germany. My sister
and myself, on the contrary, had remarkable facility in speaking foreign
languages with the accent and tune (if I may use the expression)
peculiar to each; a faculty which seems to me less the result of early
training and habit, than of some particular construction of ear and
throat favorable for receiving and repeating mere sounds; a musical
organization and mimetic faculty; a sort of mocking-bird specialty,
which I have known possessed in great perfection by persons with whom it
was in no way connected with the study, but only with the use of the
languages they spoke with such idiomatic ease and grace. Moreover, in my
own case, both in Italian and German, though I understand for the most
part what I read and what is said in these languages, I have had but
little exercise in speaking them, and have been amused to find myself,
while travelling, taken for an Italian as well as for a German, simply
by dint of the facility with which I imitated the accent of the people I
was among, while intrepidly confounding my moods, tenses, genders, and
cases in the determination to speak and make myself understood in the
language of whatever country I was passing through.

Mademoiselle Descuillès, Mrs. Rowden's partner, was a handsome woman of
about thirty, with a full, graceful figure, a pleasant countenance, a
great deal of playful vivacity of manner, and very determined and strict
notions of discipline. Active, energetic, intelligent, and
good-tempered, she was of a capital composition for a governess, the
sort of person to manage successfully all her pupils, and become an
object of enthusiastic devotion to the elder ones whom she admitted to
her companionship.

She almost always accompanied us when we walked, invariably presided in
the schoolroom, and very generally her eager figure and pleasant, bright
eyes were to be discovered in some corner of the playground, where, from
a semi-retirement, seated in her fauteuil with book or needlework in
hand, she exercised a quiet but effectual surveillance over her young
subjects.

She was the active and efficient partner in the concern, Mrs. Rowden the
dignified and representative one. The whole of our course of study and
mode of life, with the exception of our religious training, of which I
have spoken before, was followed under her direction, and according to
the routine of most French schools.

The monastic rule of loud-reading during meals was observed, and l'Abbé
Millot's "Universal History," of blessed boring memory, was the dry
daily sauce to our diet. On Saturday we always had a half-holiday in the
afternoon, and the morning occupations were feminine rather than
academic.

Every girl brought into the schoolroom whatever useful needlework,
mending or making, her clothes required; and while one read aloud, the
others repaired or replenished their wardrobes.

Great was our satisfaction if we could prevail upon Mademoiselle
Descuillès herself to take the book in hand and become the "lectrice" of
the morning; greater still when we could persuade her, while intent upon
her own stitching, to sing to us, which she sometimes did, old-fashioned
French songs and ballads, of which I learnt from her and still remember
some that I have never since heard, that must have long ago died out of
the musical world and left no echo but in my memory. Of two of these I
think the words pretty enough to be worth preserving, the one for its
naïve simplicity, and the other for the covert irony of its reflection
upon female constancy, to which Mademoiselle Descuillès' delivery, with
her final melancholy shrug of the shoulders, gave great effect.

    LE TROUBADOUR

    Un gentil Troubadour
    Qui chante et fait la guerre,
    Revenait chez son père,
    Rêvant à son amour.

    Gages de sa valeur,
    Suspendus à son écharpe,
    Son épée, et sa harpe,
    Se croisaient sur son coeur.

    Il rencontre en chemin
    Pelerine jolie,
    Qui voyage, et qui prie,
    Un rosaire à la main.

    Colerette, à long plis,
    Cachait sa fine taille,
    Un grand chapeau de paille,
    Ombrait son teint de lys.

    "O gentil Troubadour,
    Si tu reviens fidèle,
    Chante un couplet pour celle
    Qui bénit ton retour."

    "Pardonne à mon refus
    Pelerine jolie!
    Sans avoir vu ma mie,
    Je ne chanterai plus."

    "Et ne la vois-tu pas?
    O Troubadour fidèle!
    Regarde moi--c'est elle!
    Ouvre lui donc tes bras!

    "Craignant pour notre amour,
    J'allais en pelerine,
    A la Vierge divine
    Prier pour ton retour!"

    Près des tendres amans
    S'élève une chapelle,
    L'Ermite qu'on appelle,
    Bénit leurs doux sermens

    Venez en ce saint lieu,
    Amans du voisinage,
    Faire un pelerinage
    A la Mère de Dieu!

The other ballad, though equally an illustration of the days of
chivalry, was written in a spirit of caustic contempt for the fair sex,
which suggests the bitterness of the bard's personal experience:--

    LE CHEVALIER ERRANT.

    Dans un vieux château de l'Andalousie,
    Au temps où l'amour se montrait constant,
    Où Beauté, Valeur, et Galanterie
    Guidait aux combats un fidèle amant,
    Un beau chevalier un soir se présente,
    Visière baissée, et la lance en main;
    Il vient demander si sa douce amante
    N'est pas (par hasard) chez le châtelain.

    "Noble chevalier! quelle est votre amie?"
    Demande à son tour le vieux châtelain.
    "Ah! de fleurs d'amour c'est la plus jolie
    Elle a teint de rose, et peau de satin,
    Elle a de beaux yeux, dont le doux langage
    Porte en votre coeur vif enchantment,
    Elle a tout enfin--elle est belle,--et sage!"
    "Pauvre chevalier! chercherez longtemps!

    "Guidez de mes pas l'ardeur incertain,
    Où dois-je chercher ce que j'ai perdu?"
    "Mon fils, votre soit, hélas! s'en fait peine,
    Ce que vous cherchez ne se trouve plus."
    "Poursuivez, pourtant, votre long voyage,
    Et si vouz trouvez un pareil trésor--
    Ne le perdez plus! Adieu, bon voyage!"
    L'amant repartit--mais, il cherche encore.

The air of the first of these songs was a very simple and charming
little melody, which my sister, having learnt it from me, adapted to
some English words. The other was an extremely favorite _vaudeville_
air, repeated constantly in the half-singing dialogue of some of those
popular pieces.

Our Saturday sewing class was a capital institution, which made most of
us expert needle-women, developed in some the peculiarly lady-like
accomplishment of working exquisitely, and gave to all the useful
knowledge of how to make and mend our own clothes. When I left school I
could make my own dresses, and was a proficient in marking and darning.

My school-fellows were almost all English, and, I suppose, with one
exception, were young girls of average character and capacity. Elizabeth
P----, a young person from the west of England, was the only remarkable
one among them. She was strikingly handsome, both in face and figure,
and endowed with very uncommon abilities. She was several years older
than myself, and an object of my unbounded school-girl heroine worship.
A daughter of Kiallmark, the musical composer, was also eminent among us
for her great beauty, and always seemed to my girlish fancy what Mary
Queen of Scots must have looked like in her youth.

Besides pupils, Mrs. Rowden received a small number of parlor boarders,
who joined only in some of the lessons; indeed, some of them appeared to
fulfil no purpose of education whatever by their residence with her.
There were a Madame and Mademoiselle de ----, the latter of whom was
supposed, I believe, to imbibe English in our atmosphere. She bore a
well-known noble French name, and was once visited, to the immense
excitement of all "ces demoiselles," by a brother, in the uniform of the
Royal Gardes du Corps, whose looks were reported (I think rather
mythologically) to be as superb as his attire. In which case he must
have been strikingly unlike his sister, who was one of the ugliest women
I ever saw; with a disproportionately large and ill-shaped nose and
mouth, and a terrible eruption all over her face. She had, however, an
extremely beautiful figure, exquisite hands and feet, skin as white as
snow, and magnificent hair and eyes; in spite of which numerous
advantages, she was almost repulsively plain: it really seemed as if she
had been the victim of a spell, to have so beautiful a body, and so all
but hideous a face. Besides these French ladies, there was a Miss
McC----, a very delicate, elegant-looking Irishwoman, and a Miss ----,
who, in spite of her noble name, was a coarse and inelegant, but very
handsome Englishwoman. In general, these ladies had nothing to do with
us; they had privileged places at table, formed Mrs. Rowden's evening
circle in the drawing-room, and led (except at meals) a life of
dignified separation from the scholars.

I remember but two French girls in our whole company: the one was a
Mademoiselle Adèle de ----, whose father, a fanatical Anglomane, wrote a
ridiculous book about England.

The other French pupil I ought not to have called a companion, or said
that I remembered, for in truth I remember nothing but her funeral. She
died soon after I joined the school, and was buried in the cemetery of
Père la Chaise, near the tomb of Abelard and Eloïse, with rather a
theatrical sort of ceremony. She was followed to her grave by the whole
school, dressed in white, and wearing long white veils fastened round
our heads with white fillets. On each side of the bier walked three
young girls, pall-bearers, in the same maiden mourning, holding in one
hand long streamers of broad white ribbon attached to the bier, and in
the other several white narcissus blossoms.

The ghostly train and the picturesque mediæval monument, close to which
we paused and clustered to deposit the dead girl in her early
resting-place, formed a striking picture that haunted me for a long
time, and which the smell and sight of the chalk-white narcissus blossom
invariably recalls to me.

Meantime, the poetical studies, or rather indulgencies of home, had
ceased. No sonorous sounds of Milton's mighty music ever delighted my
ears, and for my almost daily bread of Scott's romantic epics I hungered
and thirsted in vain, with such intense desire, that I at length
undertook to write out "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion" from
memory, so as not absolutely to lose my possession of them. This task I
achieved to a very considerable extent, and found the stirring,
chivalrous stories, and spirited, picturesque verse, a treasure of
refreshment, when all my poetical diet consisted of "L'Anthologie
française à l'Usage des Demoiselles," and Voltaire's "Henriade," which I
was compelled to learn by heart, and with the opening lines of which I
more than once startled the whole dormitory at midnight, sitting
suddenly up in my bed, and from the midst of perpetual slumbers loudly
proclaiming--

    "Je chante ce héros qui regna sur la France,
     Et par droit de conquête, et par droit de naissance."

More exciting reading was Madame Cottin's "Mathilde," of which I now got
hold for the first time, and devoured with delight, finishing it one
evening just before we were called to prayers, so that I wept bitterly
during my devotions, partly for the Norman princess and her Saracen
lover, and partly from remorse at my own sinfulness in not being able to
banish them from my thoughts while on my knees and saying my prayers.

But, to be sure, that baptism in the desert, with the only drop of water
they had to drink, seemed to me the very acme of religious fervor and
sacred self-sacrifice. I wonder what I should think of the book were I
to read it now, which Heaven forefend! The really powerful impression
made upon my imagination and feelings at this period, however, was by my
first reading of Lord Byron's poetry. The day on which I received that
revelation of the power of thought and language remained memorable to me
for many a day after.

I had occasionally received invitations from Mrs. Rowden to take tea in
the drawing-room with the lady parlor boarders, when my week's report
for "bonne conduite" had been tolerably satisfactory. One evening when I
had received this honorable distinction, and was sitting in sleepy
solemnity on the sofa, opposite my uncle John's black figure in
"Coriolanus," which seemed to grow alternately smaller and larger as my
eyelids slowly drew themselves together and suddenly opened wide, with a
startled consciousness of unworthy drowsiness, Miss H----, who was
sitting beside me, reading, leaned back and put her book before my face,
pointing with her finger to the lines--

    "It is the hour when from the boughs
     The nightingale's high note is heard."

It would be impossible to describe the emotion I experienced. I was
instantly wide awake, and, quivering with excitement, fastened a grip
like steel upon the book, imploring to be allowed to read on. The fear,
probably, of some altercation loud enough to excite attention to the
subject of her studies (which I rather think would not have been
approved of, even for a "parlor boarder") prevented Miss H---- from
making the resistance she should have made to my entreaties, and I was
allowed to leave the room, carrying with me the dangerous prize, which,
however, I did not profit by.

It was bedtime, and the dormitory light burned but while we performed
our night toilet, under supervision. The under teacher and the lamp
departed together, and I confided to the companion whose bed was next to
mine that I had a volume of Lord Byron under my pillow. The emphatic
whispered warnings of terror and dismay with which she received this
information, her horror at the wickedness of the book (of which of
course she knew nothing), her dread of the result of detection for me,
and her entreaties, enforced with tears, that I would not keep the
terrible volume where it was, at length, combined with my own nervous
excitement about it, affected me with such a sympathy of fear that I
jumped out of bed and thrust the fatal poems into the bowels of a straw
_paillasse_ on an empty bed, and returned to my own to remain awake
nearly all night. My study of Byron went no further then: the next
morning I found it impossible to rescue the book unobserved from its
hiding-place, and Miss H----, to whom I confided the secret of it, I
suppose took her own time for withdrawing it, and so I then read no more
of that wonderful poetry, which, in my after days of familiar
acquaintance with it, always affected me like an evil potion taken into
my blood. The small, sweet draught which I sipped in that sleepy
school-salon atmosphere remained indelibly impressed upon my memory,
insomuch that when, during the last year of my stay in Paris, the news
of my uncle John's death at Lausanne, and that of Lord Byron at
Missolonghi, was communicated to me, my passionate regret was for the
great poet, of whose writings I knew but twenty lines, and not for my
own celebrated relation, of whom, indeed, I knew but little.

It was undoubtedly well that this dangerous source of excitement should
be sealed to me as long as possible; but I do not think that the works
of imagination to which I was allowed free access were of a specially
wholesome or even harmless tendency. The false morality and
attitudinizing sentiment of such books as "Les Contes à ma Fille," and
Madame de Genlis' "Veillées du Château," and "Adèle et Théodore," were
rubbish, if not poison. The novels of Florian were genuine and simple
romances, less mischievous, I incline to think, upon the whole, than the
educational Countess's mock moral sentimentality; but Chateaubriand's
"Atala et Chactas," with its picturesque pathos, and his powerful
classical novel of "Les Martyrs," were certainly unfit reading for young
girls of excitable feelings and wild imaginations, in spite of the
religious element which I supposed was considered their recommendation.

One great intellectual good fortune befell me at this time, and that was
reading "Guy Mannering;" the first of Walter Scott's novels that I ever
read--the _dearest_, therefore. I use the word advisedly, for I know no
other than one of affection to apply to those enchanting and admirable
works, that deserve nothing less than love in return for the healthful
delight they have bestowed. To all who ever read them, the first must
surely be the best; the beginning of what a series of pure enjoyments,
what a prolonged, various, exquisite succession of intellectual
surprises and pleasures, amounting for the time almost to happiness.

Scott, like Shakespeare, has given us, for intimate acquaintance,
companions, and friends, men and women of such peculiar individual
nobleness, grace, wit, wisdom, and humor, that they people our minds and
recur to our thoughts with a vividness which makes them seem rather to
belong to the past realities of the memory, than to the shadowy visions
of the imagination.

It was not long before all this imaginative stimulus bore its legitimate
fruit in a premature harvest of crude compositions which I dignified
with the name of poetry. Rhymes I wrote without stint or stopping--a
perfect deluge of doggerel; what became of it all I know not, but I have
an idea that a manuscript volume was sent to my poor parents, as a
sample of the poetical promise supposed to be contained in these unripe
productions.

Besides the studies pursued by the whole school under the tuition of
Mademoiselle Descuillès, we had special masters from whom we took
lessons in special branches of knowledge. Of these, by far the most
interesting to me, both in himself and in the subject of his teachings,
was my Italian master, Biagioli.

He was a political exile, of about the same date as his remarkable
contemporary, Ugo Foscolo; his high forehead, from which his hair fell
back in a long grizzled curtain, his wild, melancholy eyes, and the
severe and sad expression of his face, impressed me with some awe and
much pity. He was at that time one of the latest of the long tribe of
commentators on Dante's "Divina Commedia." I do not believe his
commentary ranks high among the innumerable similar works on the great
Italian poem; but in violence of abuse, and scornful contempt of all but
his own glosses, he yields to none of his fellow-laborers in that vast
and tangled poetical, historical, biographical, philosophical,
theological, and metaphysical jungle.

Dante was his spiritual consolation, his intellectual delight, and
indeed his daily bread; for out of that tremendous horn-book he taught
me to stammer the divine Italian language, and illustrated every lesson,
from the simplest rule of its syntax to its exceedingly complex and
artificially constructed prosody, out of the pages of that sublime,
grotesque, and altogether wonderful poem. My mother has told me that she
attributed her incapacity for relishing Milton to the fact of "Paradise
Lost" having been used as a lesson-book out of which she was made to
learn English--a circumstance which had made it for ever "Paradise
_Lost_" to her. I do not know why or how I escaped a similar misfortune
in my school-girl study of Dante, but luckily I did so, probably being
carried over the steep and stony way with comparative ease by the help
of my teacher's vivid enthusiasm. I have forgotten my Italian grammar,
rules of syntax and rules of prosody alike, but I read and re-read the
"Divina Commedia" with ever-increasing amazement and admiration. Setting
aside all its weightier claims to the high place it holds among the
finest achievements of human genius, I know of no poem in any language
in which so many single lines and detached passages can be found of
equally descriptive force, picturesque beauty, and delightful melody of
sound; the latter virtue may lie, perhaps, as much in the instrument
itself as in the master hand that touched it--the Italian tongue, the
resonance and vibrating power of which is quite as peculiar as its
liquid softness.

While the stern face and forlorn figure of poor Biagioli seemed an
appropriate accompaniment to my Dantesque studies, nothing could exceed
the contrast he presented to another Italian who visited us on alternate
days and gave us singing lessons. Blangini, whose extreme popularity as
a composer and teacher led him to the dignity of _maestro di capella_ to
some royal personage, survives only in the recollection of certain
elderly drawing-room nightingales who warbled fifty summers ago, and who
will still hum bits of his pretty Canzoni and Notturni, "Care pupille,"
"Per valli per boschi," etc.

Blangini was a _petit maître_ as well as a singing master; always
attired in the height of the fashion, and in manner and appearance much
more of a Frenchman than an Italian. He was mercilessly satirical on the
failures of his pupils, to whom (having reduced them, by the most
ridiculous imitation of their unfortunate vocal attempts, to an almost
inaudible utterance of _pianissimo_ pipings) he would exclaim, "Ma per
carità! aprite la bocca! che cantate come uccelli che dormano!"

My music master, as distinguished from my singing master, was a worthy
old Englishman of the name of Shaw, who played on the violin, and had
been at one time leader of the orchestra at Covent Garden Theatre.
Indeed, it was to him that John Kemble addressed the joke (famous,
because in his mouth unique) upon the subject of a song in the piece of
"Richard Coeur de Lion"--I presume an English version of Gietry's
popular romance, "O Richard, O mon Roi!" This Mr. Shaw was painfully
endeavoring to teach my uncle, who was entirely without musical ear, and
whose all but insuperable difficulty consisted in repeating a few bars
of the melody supposed to be sung under his prison window by his
faithful minstrel, Blondel. "Mr. Kemble, Mr. Kemble, you are murdering
the time, sir!" cried the exasperated musician; to which my uncle
replied, "Very well, sir, and you are forever beating it!" I do not know
whether Mrs. Rowden knew this anecdote, and engaged Mr. Shaw because he
had elicited this solitary sally from her quondam idol, John Kemble. The
choice, whatever its motive, was not a happy one. The old leader of the
theatrical orchestra was himself no piano-forte player, could no longer
see very well nor hear very well, and his principal attention was
directed to his own share of the double performance, which he led much
after the careless, slap-bang style in which overtures that nobody
listened to were performed in his day. It is a very great mistake to let
learners play with violin accompaniment until they have thoroughly
mastered the piano-forte without it. Fingering, the first of fundamental
acquirements, is almost sure to be overlooked by the master, whose
attention is not on the hands of his pupil but on his own bow; and the
pupil, anxious to keep up with the violin, slurs over rapid passages,
scrambles through difficult ones, and acquires a general habit of merely
following the violin in time and tune, to the utter disregard of steady,
accurate execution. As for me, I derived but one benefit from my old
violin accompanier, that of becoming a good timist; in every other
respect I received nothing but injury from our joint performances,
getting into incorrigible habits of bad fingering, and of making up my
bass with unscrupulous simplifications of the harmony, quite content if
I came in with my final chords well thumped in time and tune with the
emphatic scrape of the violin that ended our lesson. The music my master
gave me, too, was more in accordance with his previous practice as
leader of a theatrical orchestra, than calculated to make me a steady
and scrupulous executant.

We had another master for French and Latin--a clever, ugly, impudent,
snuffy, dirty little man, who wrote vaudevilles for the minor theaters,
and made love to his pupils. Both these gentlemen were superseded in
their offices by other professors before I left school: poor old Pshaw
Pshaw, as we used to call him, by the French composer, Adam, unluckily
too near the time of my departure for me to profit by his strict and
excellent method of instruction; and our vaudevillist was replaced by a
gentleman of irreproachable manners, and I should think morals, who
always came to our lessons _en toilette_--black frock-coat and
immaculate white waistcoat, unexceptionable boots and gloves--by dint of
all which he ended by marrying our dear Mademoiselle Descuillès (who,
poor thing, was but a woman after all, liable to charming by such
methods), and turning her into Madame Champy, under which name she
continued to preside over the school after I left it; and Mrs. Rowden
relinquished her share in the concern--herself marrying, and becoming
Mrs. St. Quintin.

I have spoken of my learning Latin: Elizabeth P----, the object in all
things of my emulous admiration, studied it, and I forthwith begged
permission to do so likewise; and while this dead-language ambition
possessed me, I went so far as to acquire the Greek alphabet; which,
however, I used only as a cipher for "my secrets," and abandoned my
Latin lore, just as I had exchanged my Phædrus for Cornelius Nepos, not
even attaining to the "Arma virumque cano."

Nobody but Miss P---- and myself dabbled in these classical depths, but
nearly the whole school took dancing lessons, which were given us by two
masters, an old and young Mr. Guillet, father and son: the former, a
little dapper, dried-up, wizen-faced, beak-nosed old man, with a brown
wig that fitted his head and face like a Welsh night-cap; who played the
violin and stamped in time, and scolded and made faces at us when we
were clumsy and awkward; the latter, a highly colored, beak-nosed young
gentleman who squinted fearfully with magnificent black eyes, and had
one shining, oily wave of blue-black hair, which, departing from above
one ear, traversed his forehead in a smooth sweep, and ended in a
frizzly breaker above the other. This gentleman showed us our steps, and
gave us the examples of graceful ability of which his father was no
longer capable. I remember a very comical scene at one of our dancing
lessons, occasioned by the first appearance of a certain Miss ----, who
entered the room, to the general amazement, in full evening costume--a
practice common, I believe, in some English schools where "dressing for
dancing" prevails. We only put on light prunella slippers instead of our
heavier morning shoes or boots, and a pair of gloves, as adequate
preparation. Moreover, the French fashion for full dress, of that day,
did not sanction the uncovering of the person usual in English evening
attire.




CHAPTER IV.


Great was the general surprise of the dancing class when this large,
tall, handsome English girl, of about eighteen, entered the room in a
rose-colored silk dress, with very low neck and very short sleeves,
white satin shoes, and white kid gloves; her long auburn ringlets and
ivory shoulders glancing in the ten o'clock morning sunlight with a sort
of incongruous splendor, and her whole demeanor that of the most
innocent and modest tranquillity.

Mademoiselle Descuillès shut her book to with a snap, and sat bolt
upright and immovable, with eyes and mouth wide open. Young Mr. Guillet
blushed purple, and old Mr. Guillet scraped a few interjections on his
fiddle, and then, putting it down, took a resonant pinch of snuff, by
way of restoring his scattered senses.

No observation was made, however, and the lesson proceeded, young Mr.
Guillet turning scarlet each time either of his divergent orbs of vision
encountered his serenely unconscious, full-dressed pupil; which
certainly, considering that he was a member of the Grand Opera _corps de
ballet_, was a curious instance of the purely conventional ideas of
decency which custom makes one accept.

Whatever want of assiduity I may have betrayed in my other studies,
there was no lack of zeal for my dancing lessons. I had a perfect
passion for dancing, which long survived my school-days, and I am
persuaded that my natural vocation was that of an opera dancer. Far into
middle life I never saw beautiful dancing without a rapture of
enthusiasm, and used to repeat from memory whole dances after seeing
Duvernay or Ellsler, as persons with a good musical ear can repeat the
airs of the opera first heard the night before. And I remember, during
Ellsler's visit to America, when I had long left off dancing in society,
being so transported with her execution of a Spanish dance called "El
Jaleo de Xerxes," that I was detected by my cook, who came suddenly upon
me in my store-room, in the midst of sugar, rice, tea, coffee, flour,
etc., standing on the tips of my toes, with my arms above my head, in
one of the attitudes I had most admired in that striking and picturesque
performance. The woman withdrew in speechless amazement, and I alighted
on my heels, feeling wonderfully foolish. How I thought I never should
be able to leave off dancing! And so I thought of riding! and so I
thought of singing! and could not imagine what life would be like when I
could no more do these things. I was not wrong, perhaps, in thinking it
would be difficult to leave them off: I had no conception how easily
they would leave me off.

Varying our processions in the Champs Élysées were less formal
excursions in the Jardin de Luxembourg; and as the picture-gallery in
the palace was opened gratuitously on certain days of the week, we were
allowed to wander through it, and form our taste for art among the
samples of the modern French school of painting there collected: the
pictures of David, Gérard, Girodet, etc., the Dido and Æneas, the
Romulus and Tatius with the Sabine women interposing between them,
Hippolytus before Theseus and Phædra, Atala being laid in her grave by
her lover--compositions with which innumerable engravings have made
England familiar--the theatrical conception and hard coloring and
execution of which (compensated by masterly grouping and incomparable
drawing) did not prevent their striking our uncritical eyes with
delighted admiration, and making this expedition to the Luxembourg one
of my favorite afternoon recreations. These pictures are now all in the
gallery of the Louvre, illustrating the school of art of the consulate
and early empire of Bonaparte.

Another favorite promenade of ours, and the one that I preferred even to
the hero-worship of the Luxembourg, was the Parc Monceaux. This estate,
the private property of the Orleans family, confiscated by Louis
Napoleon, and converted into a whole new _quartier_ of his new Paris,
with splendid streets and houses, and an exquisite public flower-garden
in the midst of them, was then a solitary and rather neglected Jardin
Anglais (so called) or park, surrounded by high walls and entered by a
small wicket, the porter of which required a permit of admission before
allowing ingress to the domain. I never remember seeing a single
creature but ourselves in the complete seclusion of this deserted
pleasaunce. It had grass and fine trees and winding walks, and little
brooks fed by springs that glimmered in cradles of moss-grown,
antiquated rock-work; no flowers or semblance of cultivation, but a
general air of solitude and wildness that recommended it especially to
me, and recalled as little as possible the great, gay city which
surrounded it.

My real holidays, however (for I did not go home during the three years
I spent in Paris), were the rare and short visits my father paid me
while I was at school. At all other seasons Paris might have been
Patagonia for any thing I saw or heard or knew of its brilliant gayety
and splendid variety. But during those holidays of his and mine, my
enjoyment and his were equal, I verily believe, though probably not (as
I then imagined) perfect. Pleasant days of joyous _camaraderie_ and
_flanerie_!--in which every thing, from being new to me, was almost as
good as new to my indulgent companion: the Rue de Rivoli, the Tuileries,
the Boulevard, the Palais Royal, the _déjeuner à la fourchette_ at the
Café Riche, the dinner in the small _cabinet_ at the Trois Frères, or
the Cadran Bleu, and the evening climax of the theater on the Boulevard,
where Philippe, or Léontine Fay, or Poitier and Brunet, made a school of
dramatic art of the small stages of the Porte St. Martin, the Variétés,
and the Vaudeville.

My father's days in Paris, in which he escaped from the hard labor and
heavy anxiety of his theatrical life of actor, manager, and proprietor,
and I from the dull routine of school-room studies and school-ground
recreations, were pleasant days to him, and golden ones in my girlish
calendar. I remember seeing, with him, a piece called "Les deux
Sergens," a sort of modern Damon and Pythias, in which the heroic
friends are two French soldiers, and in which a celebrated actor of the
name of Philippe performed the principal part. He was the predecessor
and model of Frédéric Lemaître, who (himself infinitely superior to his
pupil and copyist, Mr. Fechter, who, by a very feeble imitation of
Lemaître's most remarkable parts, has achieved so much reputation) was
not to be compared with Philippe in the sort of sentimental melodrama of
which "Les deux Sergens" was a specimen.

This M. Philippe was a remarkable man, not only immensely popular for
his great professional merit, but so much respected for an order of
merit not apt to be enthusiastically admired by Parisians--that of a
moral character and decent life--that at his funeral a very serious riot
occurred, in consequence of the Archbishop of Paris, according to the
received opinion and custom of the day, refusing to allow him to be
buried in consecrated ground; the profane player's calling, in the year
of grace 1823, or thereabouts, being still one which disqualified its
followers for receiving the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, and
therefore, of course, for claiming Christian burial. The general feeling
of the Parisian public, however, was in this case too strong for the
ancient anathema of the Church. The Archbishop of Paris was obliged to
give way, and the dead body of the worthy actor was laid in the sacred
soil of Père la Chaise. I believe that since that time the question has
never again been debated, nor am I aware that there is any one more
peculiarly theatrical cemetery than another in Paris.

In a letter of Talma's to Charles Young upon my uncle John's death, he
begs to be numbered among the subscribers to the monument about to be
erected to Mr. Kemble in Westminster Abbey; adding the touching remark:
"Pour moi, je serai heureux si les prêtres me laissent enterrer dans un
coin de mon jardin."

The excellent moral effect of this species of class prejudice is
admirably illustrated by an anecdote I have heard my mother tell. One
evening, when she had gone to the Grand Opera with M. Jouy, the wise and
witty Hermite de la Chaussée d'Antin, talking with him of the career and
circumstances of the young ballet women (she had herself, when very
young, been a dancer on the English stage), she wound up her various
questions with this: "Et y en a-t-il qui sont filles de bonne conduite?
qui sont sages?" "Ma foi!" replied the Hermite, shrugging his shoulders,
"elles auraient grand tort; personne n'y croirait."

A charming vaudeville called "Michel et Christine," with that charming
actress, Madame Alan Dorval, for its heroine, was another extremely
popular piece at that time, which I went to see with my father. The time
of year at which he was able to come to Paris was unluckily the season
at which all the large theaters were closed. Nevertheless, by some happy
chance, I saw one performance at the Grand Opera of that great dancer
and actress, Bigottini, in the ballet of the "Folle par Amour;" and I
shall never forget the wonderful pathos of her acting and the grace and
dignity of her dancing. Several years after, I saw Madame Pasta in
Paesiello's pretty opera of the "Nina Pazza," on the same subject, and
hardly know to which of the two great artists to assign the palm in
their different expression of the love-crazed girl's despair.

I also saw several times, at this period of his celebrity, the
inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaïdes" that
was making a furor--a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet,
produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Académie
Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds;
and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old
King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it is impossible to imagine.

The piece was the broadest and most grotesque quiz of the "grand genre
classique et héroïque," and was almost the first of an order of
entertainments which have gone on increasing in favor up to the present
day of universally triumphant parody and burlesque, by no means as
laughable and by no means as unobjectionable. Indeed, farcical to the
broadest point as was that mythological travesty of "The Danaïdes," it
was the essence of decency and propriety compared with "La grande
Duchesse," "La belle Hélène," "Orphée aux Enfers," "La Biche au Bois,"
"Le petit Faust," and all the vile succession of indecencies and
immoralities that the female good society of England in these latter
years has delighted in witnessing, without the help of the mask which
enabled their great-grandmothers to sit out the plays of Wycherley,
Congreve, and Farquhar, chaste and decorous in their crude coarseness
compared with the French operatic burlesques of the present day.

But by far the most amusing piece in which I recollect seeing Poitier,
was one in which he acted with the equally celebrated Brunet, and in
which they both represented English _women_--"Les Anglaises pour Rire."

The Continent was then just beginning to make acquaintance with the
traveling English, to whom the downfall of Bonaparte had opened the
gates of Europe, and who then began, as they have since continued, in
ever-increasing numbers, to carry amazement and amusement from the
shores of the Channel to those of the Mediterranean, by their wealth,
insolence, ignorance, and cleanliness.

"Les Anglaises pour Rire" was a caricature (if such a thing were
possible) of the English female traveler of that period. Coal-scuttle
poke bonnets, short and scanty skirts, huge splay feet arrayed in
indescribable shoes and boots, short-waisted tight-fitting spencers,
colors which not only swore at each other, but caused all beholders to
swear at them--these were the outward and visible signs of the British
fair of that day. To these were added, in this representation of them by
these French appreciators of their attractions, a mode of speech in
which the most ludicrous French, in the most barbarous accent, was
uttered in alternate bursts of loud abruptness and languishing drawl.
Sudden, grotesque playfulness was succeeded by equally sudden and
grotesque bashfulness; now an eager intrepidity of wild enthusiasm,
defying all decorum, and then a sour, severe reserve, full of angry and
terrified suspicion of imaginary improprieties. Tittering shyness, all
giggle-goggle and blush; stony and stolid stupidity, impenetrable to a
ray of perception; awkward, angular postures and gestures, and jerking
saltatory motions; Brobdingnag strides and straddles, and kittenish
frolics and friskings; sharp, shrill little whinnying squeals and
squeaks, followed by lengthened, sepulchral "O-h's"--all formed together
such an irresistibly ludicrous picture as made "Les Anglaises pour Rire"
of Poitier and Brunet one of the most comical pieces of acting I have
seen in all my life.

Mrs. Rowden's establishment in Hans Place had been famous for occasional
dramatic representations by the pupils; and though she had become in her
Paris days what in the religious jargon of that day was called serious,
or even methodistical, she winked at, if she did not absolutely
encourage, sundry attempts of a similar sort which her Paris pupils got
up.

Once it was a vaudeville composed expressly in honor of her birthday by
the French master, in which I had to sing, with reference to her, the
following touching tribute, to a well-known vaudeville tune:

    "C'est une mère!
     Qui a les premiers droits sur nos coeurs?
     Qui partage, d'une ardeur sincère,
     Et nos plaisirs et nos douleurs?
     C'est une mère!"

I suppose this trumpery was stamped upon my brain by the infinite
difficulty I had in delivering it gracefully, with all the point and all
the pathos the author assured me it contained, at Mrs. Rowden,
surrounded by her friends and guests, and not suggesting to me the
remotest idea of _my_ mother or any body else's mother.

After this we got up Madame de Genlis' little piece of "L' Isle
Heureuse," in which I acted the accomplished and conceited princess who
is so judiciously rejected by the wise and ancient men of the island, in
spite of the several foreign tongues she speaks fluently, in favor of
the tender-hearted young lady who, in defiance of all sound systems of
political and social economy, always walks about attended by the poor of
the island in a body, to whom she distributes food and clothes in a
perpetual stream of charity, and whose prayers and blessings lift her
very properly to the throne, while the other young woman is left talking
to all the ambassadors in all their different languages at once.

Our next dramatic attempt came to a disastrous and premature end. I do
not know who suggested to us the witty and clever little play of
"Roxelane;" the versification of the piece is extremely easy and
graceful, and the preponderance of female characters and convenient
Turkish costume, of turbans and caftans, and loose voluminous trousers,
had appeared to us to combine various advantages for our purpose.
Mademoiselle Descuillès had consented to fill the part of Solyman, the
magnificent and charming Sultan, and I was to be the saucy French
heroine, "dont le nez en l'air semble narguer l'amour," the _sémillante_
Roxelane. We had already made good progress in the only difficulty our
simple appreciation of matters dramatic presented to our imagination,
the committing the words of our parts to memory, when Mrs. Rowden, from
whom all our preparations on such occasions were kept sacredly secret,
lighted upon the copy of the play, with all the MS. marks and directions
for our better guidance in the performance; and great were our
consternation, dismay, and disappointment when, with the offending
pamphlet in her hand, she appeared in our midst and indignantly forbade
the representation of any such piece, after the following ejaculatory
fashion, and with an accent difficult to express by written signs: "May,
commang! may_de_mosels, je suis atonnay! May! commang! May_de_mosel
Descuillès, je suis surprise! Kesse ke say! vous per_ma_ttay
may_de_mosels être lay filles d'ung seraglio! je ne vou pau! je vous
defang! je suis biang atonnay!" And so she departed, with our prompter's
copy, leaving us rather surprised, ourselves, at the unsuspected horror
we had been about to perpetrate, and Mademoiselle Descuillès shrugging
her shoulders and smiling, and not probably quite convinced of the
criminality of a piece of which the heroine, a pretty Frenchwoman,
revolutionizes the Ottoman Empire by inducing her Mohammedan lover to
dismiss his harem and confine his affections to her, whom he is supposed
to marry after the most orthodox fashion possible in those parts.

Our dramatic ardor was considerably damped by this event, and when next
it revived our choice could not be accused of levity. Our aim was
infinitely more ambitious, and our task more arduous. Racine's
"Andromaque" was selected for our next essay in acting, and was, I
suppose, pronounced unobjectionable by the higher authorities. Here,
however, our mainstay and support, Mademoiselle Descuillès, interposed a
very peculiar difficulty. She had very good-naturedly learned the part
of Solyman, in the other piece, for us, and whether she resented the
useless trouble she had had on that occasion, or disliked that of
committing several hundred of Racine's majestic verses to memory, I know
not; but she declared that she would only act the part of Pyrrhus, which
we wished her to fill, if we would read it aloud to her till she knew
it, while she worked at her needle. Of course we had to accept any
condition she chose to impose upon us, and so we all took it by turns,
whenever we saw her industrious fingers flying through their
never-ending task, to seize up Racine and begin pouring her part into
her ears. She actually learned it so, and our principal difficulty after
so teaching her was to avoid mixing up the part of Pyrrhus, which we had
acquired by the same process, with every other part in the play.

The dressing of this classical play was even more convenient than our
contemplated Turkish costume could have been. A long white skirt drawn
round the waist, a shorter one, with slits in it for armholes, drawn
round the neck by way of tunic, with dark blue or scarlet Greek pattern
border, and ribbon of the same color for girdle, and sandals, formed a
costume that might have made Rachel or Ristori smile, but which
satisfied all our conceptions of antique simplicity and grace; and so we
played our play.

Mademoiselle Descuillès was Pyrrhus; a tall blonde, with an insipid face
and good figure, Andromaque; Elizabeth P----, my admired and emulated
superior in all things, Oreste (not superior, however, in acting; she
had not the questionable advantage of dramatic blood in her veins); and
myself, Hermione (in the performance of which I very presently gave
token of mine). We had an imposing audience, and were all duly
terrified, became hoarse with nervousness, swallowed raw eggs to clear
our throats, and only made ourselves sick with them as well as with
fright. But at length it was all over; the tragedy was ended, and I had
electrified the audience, my companions, and, still more, myself; and
so, to avert any ill effects from this general electrification, Mrs.
Rowden thought it wise and well to say to me, as she bade me good-night,
"Ah, my dear, I don't think your parents need ever anticipate your going
on the stage; you would make but a poor actress." And she was right
enough. I did make but a poor actress, certainly, though that was not
for want of natural talent for the purpose, but for want of cultivating
it with due care and industry. At the time she made that comment upon my
acting I felt very well convinced, and have since had good reason to
know, that my school-mistress thought my performance a threat, or
promise (I know not which to call it) of decided dramatic power, as I
believe it was.

With this performance of "Andromaque," however, all such taste, if it
ever existed, evaporated, and though a few years afterward the stage
became my profession, it was the very reverse of my inclination. I
adopted the career of an actress with as strong a dislike to it as was
compatible with my exercising it at all.

I now became acquainted with all Racine's and Corneille's plays, from
which we were made to commit to memory the most remarkable passages; and
I have always congratulated myself upon having become familiar with all
these fine compositions before I had any knowledge whatever of
Shakespeare. Acquaintance with his works might, and I suppose certainly
would, have impaired my relish for the great French dramatists, whose
tragedies, noble and pathetic in spite of the stiff formality of their
construction, the bald rigidity of their adherence to the classic
unities, and the artificial monotony of the French heroic rhymed verse,
would have failed to receive their due appreciation from a taste and
imagination already familiar with the glorious freedom of Shakespeare's
genius. As it was, I learned to delight extremely in the dignified
pathos and stately tragic power of Racine and Corneille, in the
tenderness, refinement, and majestic vigorous simplicity of their fine
creations, and possessed a treasure of intellectual enjoyment in their
plays before opening the first page of that wonderful volume which
contains at once the history of human nature and human existence.

After I had been about a year and a half at school, Mrs. Rowden left her
house in the Rue d'Angoulême, and moved to a much finer one, at the very
top of the Champs Élysées, a large, substantial stone mansion, within
lofty iron gates and high walls of inclosure. It was the last house on
the left-hand side within the Barrière de l'Étoile, and stood on a
slight eminence and back from the Avenue des Champs Élysées by some
hundred yards. For many years after I had left school, on my repeated
visits to Paris, the old stone house bore on its gray front the large
"Institution de jeunes Demoiselles," which betokened the unchanged tenor
of its existence. But the rising tide of improvement has at length swept
it away, and modern Paris has rolled over it, and its place remembers it
no more. It was a fine old house, roomy, airy, bright, sunny, cheerful,
with large apartments and a capital play-ground, formed by that
old-fashioned device, a quincunx of linden trees, under whose shade we
carried on very Amazonian exercises, fighting having become one of our
favorite recreations.

This house was said to have belonged to Robespierre at one time, and a
very large and deep well in one corner of the play-ground was invested
with a horrid interest in our imaginations by tales of _noyades_ on a
small scale supposed to have been perpetrated in its depths by his
orders. This charm of terror was, I think, rather a gratuitous addition
to the attractions of this uncommonly fine well; but undoubtedly it
added much to the fascination of one of our favorite amusements, which
was throwing into it the heaviest stones we could lift, and rushing to
the farthest end of the play-ground, which we sometimes reached before
the resounding _bumps_ from side to side ended in a sullen splash into
the water at the bottom. With our removal to the Barrière de l'Étoile,
the direction of our walks altered, and our visits to the Luxembourg
Gardens and the Parc Monceaux were exchanged for expeditions to the Bois
de Boulogne, then how different from the charming pleasure-ground of
Paris which it became under the reforming taste and judgment of Louis
Napoleon!

Between the back of our play-ground and the village suburb of Chaillot
scarcely a decent street or even house then existed; there was no
splendid Avenue de l'Impératrice, with bright villas standing on vivid
carpets of flowers and turf. Our way to the "wood" was along the
dreariest of dusty high-roads, bordered with mean houses and
disreputable-looking _estaminets_; and the Bois de Boulogne itself, then
undivided from Paris by the fortifications which subsequently encircled
the city, was a dismal network of sandy avenues and _carrefours_,
traversed in every direction by straight, narrow, gloomy paths, a dreary
wilderness of low thickets and tangled copsewood.

I have said that I never returned home during my three years' school
life in Paris; but portions of my holidays were spent with a French
family, kind friends of my parents, who received me as an _enfant de la
maison_ among them. They belonged to the _petite bourgeoisie_ of Paris.
Mr. A---- had been in some business, I believe, but when I visited him
he was living as a small _rentier_, in a pretty little house on the main
road from Paris to Versailles.

It was just such a residence as Balzac describes with such minute finish
in his scenes of Parisian and provincial life: a sunny little
_maisonnette_, with green _jalousies_, a row of fine linden trees
clipped into arches in front of it, and behind, the trim garden with its
wonderfully productive dwarf _espaliers_, full of delicious pears and
Reine Claudes (that queen of amber-tinted, crimson-freckled greengages),
its apricots, as fragrant as flowers, and its glorious, spice-breathing
carnations.

The mode of life and manners of these worthy people were not refined or
elegant, but essentially hospitable and kind; and I enjoyed the sunny
freedom of my holiday visits to them extremely. The marriage of their
daughter opened to me a second Parisian home of the same class, but with
greater pretensions to social advantages, derived from the great city in
the center of which it stood.

I was present at the celebration of Caroline A----'s marriage to one of
the head-masters of a first-class boarding-school for boys, of which he
subsequently became the principal director. It was in the Rue de Clichy,
and thither the bride departed, after a jolly, rollicking, noisy
wedding, beginning with the religious solemnization at church and
procession to the _mairie_ for due sanction of the civil authorities,
and ending with a bountiful, merry, early afternoon dinner, and the not
over-refined ancient custom of the distribution of the _jarretière de la
mariée_. The jarretière was a white satin ribbon, tied at a discreet
height above the bride's ankle, and removed thence by the best man and
cut into pieces, for which an animated scramble took place among the
male guests, each one who obtained a piece of the white favor
immediately fastening it in his button-hole. Doubtless, in earlier and
coarser times, it was the bride's real garter that was thus distributed,
and our elegant white and silver rosettes are the modern representatives
of this primitive wedding "favor," which is a relic of ages when both in
England and in France usages obtained at the noblest marriages which
would be tolerated by no class in either country now;

    "When bluff King Hal the stocking threw,
     And Katharine's hand the curtain drew."

I have a distinct recollection of the merry uproar caused by this
ceremony, and of the sad silence that fell upon the little sunny
dwelling when the new-married pair and all the guests had returned to
Paris, and I helped poor Madame A---- and her old _cuisinière_ and
_femme de charge_, both with tearful eyes, to replace the yellow
_velours d'Utrecht_ furniture in its accustomed position on the shiny
_parquet_ of the best _salon_, with the slippery little bits of
foot-rugs before the empty _bergères_ and _canapés_.

My holidays after this time were spent with M. and Madame R----, in
whose society I remember frequently seeing a literary man of the name of
Pélissier, a clever writer, a most amusing talker, and an admirable
singer of Béranger's songs.

Another visitor of their house was M. Rio, the eminent member of the
French ultramontane party, the friend of Lammenais, Lacordaire,
Montalembert, the La Ferronays, the hero of the Jeune Vendée, the
learned and devout historian of Christian art. I think my friend M.
R---- was a Breton by birth, and that was probably the tie between
himself and his remarkable Vendéan friend, whose tall, commanding
figure, dark complexion, and powerful black eyes gave him more the
appearance of a Neapolitan or Spaniard than of a native of the coast of
ancient Armorica. M. Rio was then a young man, and probably in Paris for
the first time, at the beginning of the literary career of which he has
furnished so interesting a sketch in the autobiographical volumes which
form the conclusion of his "Histoire de l'Art Chrétien." Five and twenty
years later, while passing my second winter in Rome, I heard of M. Rio's
arrival there, and of the unbounded satisfaction he expressed at finding
himself in the one place where no restless wheels beat time to, and no
panting chimneys breathed forth the smoke of the vast, multiform
industry of the nineteenth century; where the sacred stillness of
unprogressive conservatism yet prevailed undisturbed. Gas had, indeed,
been introduced in the English quarter; but M. Rio could shut his eyes
when he drove through that, and there still remained darkness enough
elsewhere for those who loved it better than light.

During one of my holiday visits to M. R----, a ball was given at his
young gentlemen's school, to which I was taken by him and his wife. It
was my very first ball, and I have a vivid recollection of my white
muslin frock and magnificent _ponceau_ sash. At this festival I was
introduced to a lad, with whom I was destined to be much more intimately
acquainted in after years as one of the best amateur actors I ever saw,
and who married one of the most charming and distinguished women of
European society, Pauline de la Ferronays, whose married name has
obtained wide celebrity as that of the authoress of "Le Récit d'une
Soeur."

I remained in Paris till I was between fifteen and sixteen years old,
and then it was determined that I should return home. The departure of
Elizabeth P---- had left me without competitor in my studies among my
companions, and I was at an age to be better at home than at any school.

My father came to fetch me, and the only adventure I met with on the way
back was losing my bonnet, blown from my head into the sea, on board the
packet, which obliged me to purchase one as soon as I reached London;
and having no discreeter guide of my proceedings, I so far imposed upon
my father's masculine ignorance in such matters as to make him buy for
me a full-sized Leghorn flat, under the circumference of which enormous
_sombrero_ I seated myself by him on the outside of the Weybridge coach,
and amazed the gaping population of each successive village we passed
through with the vast dimensions of the thatch I had put on my head.

Weybridge was not then reached by train in half an hour from London; it
was two or three hours' coach distance: a rural, rather
deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain
of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on
the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former
residence of the Duke of York.

The straggling little village lay on the edge of a wild heath and common
country that stretches to Guildford and Godalming and all through that
part of Surrey to Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, and the Sussex coast--a
region of light, sandy soil, hiding its agricultural poverty under a
royal mantle of golden gorse and purple heather, and with large tracts
of blue aromatic pine wood and one or two points of really fine scenery,
where the wild moorland rolls itself up into ridges and rises to crests
of considerable height, which command extensive and beautiful views:
such as the one from the summit of Saint George's Hill, near Weybridge,
and the top of Blackdown, the noble site of Tennyson's fine house,
whence, over miles of wild wood and common, the eye sweeps to the downs
above the Sussex cliffs and the glint of the narrow seas.

We had left London in the afternoon, and did not reach Weybridge until
after dark. I had been tormented the whole way down by a nervous fear
that I should not know my mother's face again; an absence of three
years, of course, could not justify such an apprehension, but it had
completely taken possession of my imagination and was causing me much
distress, when, as the coach stopped in the dark at the village inn, I
heard the words, "Is there any one here for Mrs. Kemble?" uttered in a
voice which I knew so well, that I sprang, hat and all, into my mother's
arms, and effectually got rid of my fear that I should not know her.

Her rural yearnings had now carried her beyond her suburban refuge at
Craven Hill, and she was infinitely happy, in her small cottage
habitation, on the outskirts of Weybridge and the edge of its
picturesque common. Tiny, indeed, it was, and but for her admirable
power of contrivance could hardly have held us with any comfort; but she
delighted in it, and so did we all except my father, who, like most men,
had no real taste for the country; the men who appear to themselves and
others to like it confounding their love for hunting and shooting with
that of the necessary field of their sports. Anglers seem to me to be
the only sportsmen who really have a taste for and love of nature as
well as for fishy water. At any rate, the silent, solitary, and
comparatively still character of their pursuit enables them to study and
appreciate beauty of scenery more than the violent exercise and
excitement of fox-hunting, whatever may be said in favor of the
picturesque influences of beating preserves and wading through
turnip-fields with keepers and companions more or less congenial.

Of deer-stalking and grouse-shooting I do not speak; a man who does not
become enthusiastic in his admiration of wild scenery while following
these sports must have but half the use of his eyes.

Perhaps it was hardly fair to expect my father to relish extremely a
residence where he was as nearly as possible too high and too wide, too
long and too large, for every room in the house. He used to come down on
Saturday and stay till Monday morning, but the rest of the week he spent
at what was then our home in London, No. 5 Soho Square; it was a
handsome, comfortable, roomy house, and has now, I think, been converted
into a hospital.

The little cottage at Weybridge was covered at the back with a vine,
which bore with the utmost luxuriance a small, black, sweet-water grape,
from which, I remember, one year my mother determined to make wine; a
direful experiment, which absorbed our whole harvest of good little
fruit, filled every room in the house with unutterable messes, produced
much fermentation of temper as well as wine, and ended in a liquid
product of such superlative nastiness, that to drink it defied our
utmost efforts of obedience and my mother's own resolute courage; so it
was with acclamations of execration made libations of--to the infernal
gods, I should think--and no future vintage was ever tried, to our great
joy.

The little plot of lawn on which our cottage stood was backed by the
wild purple swell of the common, and that was crested by a fine fir
wood, a beautiful rambling and scrambling ground, full of picturesque
and romantic associations with all the wild and fanciful mental
existences which I was then beginning to enjoy. And even as I glide
through it now, on the railroad that has laid its still depths open to
the sun's glare and scared its silence with the eldritch snort and
shriek of the iron team, I have visions of Undine and Sintram, the
Elves, the little dog Stromian, the Wood-Witch, and all the world of
supernatural beauty and terror which then peopled its recesses for me,
under the influence of the German literature that I was becoming
acquainted with through the medium of French and English translations,
and that was carrying me on its tide of powerful enchantment far away
from the stately French classics of my school studies.

Besides our unusual privilege of grape-growing in the open air, our
little estate boasted a magnificent beurré pear tree, a small arbor of
intertwined and peculiarly fine filbert and cobnut trees, and some
capital greengage and apple trees; among the latter, a remarkably large
and productive Ribstone pippin. So that in the spring the little plot of
land was flowerful, and in the autumn fruitful, and we cordially
indorsed my mother's preference for it to the London house in Soho
Square.

The sort of orchard which contained all these objects of our regard was
at the back of the house; in front of it, however, the chief peculiarity
(which was by no means a beauty) of the place was displayed.

This was an extraordinary mound or hillock of sand, about half an acre
in circumference, which stood at a distance of some hundred yards
immediately in front of the cottage, and in the middle of what ought to
have been a flower garden, if this uncouth protuberance had not
effectually prevented the formation of any such ornamental setting to
our house. My mother's repeated applications to our landlord (the
village baker) to remove or allow her to remove this unsightly
encumbrance were unavailing. He thought he might have future use for the
sand, and he knew he had no other present place of deposit for it; and
there it remained, defying all my mother's ingenuity and love of beauty
to convert it into any thing useful or ornamental, or other than a cruel
eye-sore and disfigurement to our small domain.

At length she hit upon a device for abating her nuisance, and set about
executing it as follows. She had the sand dug out of the interior of the
mound and added to its exterior, which she had graded and smoothed and
leveled and turfed so as to resemble the glacis of a square bastion or
casemate, or other steep, smooth-sided earth-work in a fortification. It
was, I suppose, about twenty feet high, and sloped at too steep an angle
for us to scale or descend it; a good footpath ran round the top,
accessible from the entrance of the sand-heap, the interior walls of
which she turfed (to speak Irish) with heather, and the ground or floor
of this curious inclosure she planted with small clumps of evergreen
shrubs, leaving a broad walk through the middle of it to the house door.
A more curious piece of domestic fortification never adorned a cottage
garden. It looked like a bit of Robinson Crusoe's castle--perhaps even
more like a portion of some deserted fortress. It challenged the
astonishment of all our visitors, whose invariable demand was, "What is
that curious place in the garden?" "The mound," was the reply; and the
mound was a delightful play-ground for us, and did infinite credit to my
mother's powers of contrivance. Forty years and more elapsed between my
first acquaintance with Weybridge and my last visit there. The Duke of
York's house at Oatlands, afterwards inhabited by my friends Lord and
Lady Ellesmere, had become a country hotel, pleasant to all its visitors
but those who, like myself, saw ghosts in its rooms and on its gravel
walks; its lovely park, a nest of "villas," made into a suburb of London
by the railroads that intersect in all directions the wild moorland
twenty miles from the city, which looked, when I first knew it, as if it
might be a hundred.

I read and spent a night at the Oatlands Hotel, and walked, before I did
so, to my mother's old cottage. The tiny house had had some small
additions, and looked new and neat and well cared for. The mound,
however, still stood its ground, and had relapsed into something of its
old savage condition; it would have warranted a theory of Mr. Oldbuck's
as to its possible former purposes and origin. I looked at its crumbled
and irregular wall, from which the turf had peeled or been washed away;
at the tangled growth of grasses and weeds round the top, crenellated
with many a breach and gap; and the hollow, now choked up with luxuriant
evergreens that overtopped the inclosure and forbade entrance to it, and
thought of my mother's work and my girlish play there, and was glad to
see her old sand-heap was still standing, though her planting had, with
the blessing of time, made it impenetrable to me.

Our cottage was the last decent dwelling on that side of the village;
between ourselves and the heath and pine wood there was one miserable
shanty, worthy of the poorest potato patch in Ireland. It was inhabited
by a ragged ruffian of the name of E----, whose small domain we
sometimes saw undergoing arable processes by the joint labor of his son
and heir, a ragged ruffian some sizes smaller than himself, and of a
half-starved jackass, harnessed together to the plow he was holding;
occasionally the team was composed of the quadruped and a tattered and
fierce-looking female biped, a more terrible object than even the man
and boy and beast whose labors she shared.

On the other side our nearest neighbors, separated from us by the common
and its boundary road, were a family of the name of ----, between whose
charming garden and pretty residence and our house a path was worn by a
constant interchange of friendly intercourse.

I followed no regular studies whatever during our summer at Weybridge.
We lived chiefly in the open air, on the heath, in the beautiful wood
above the meadows of Brooklands, and in the neglected, picturesque
inclosure of Portmore Park, whose tenantless, half-ruined mansion, and
noble cedars, with the lovely windings of the river Wey in front, made
it a place an artist would have delighted to spend his hours in.

We haunted it constantly for another purpose. My mother had a perfect
passion for fishing, and would spend whole days by the river, pursuing
her favorite sport. We generally all accompanied her, carrying baskets
and tackle and bait, kettles and camp stools, and looking very much like
a family of gypsies on the tramp. We were each of us armed with a rod,
and were more or less interested in the sport. We often started after an
early breakfast, and, taking our luncheon with us, remained the whole
day long absorbed in our quiet occupation.

My mother was perfectly unobservant of all rules of angling, in her
indiscriminate enthusiasm, and "took to the water" whether the wind
blew, the sun shone, or the rain fell; fishing--under the most
propitious or unpropitious circumstances--was not, indeed, necessarily,
catching fish, but still, fishing; and she was almost equally happy
whether she did or did not catch any thing. I have known her remain all
day in patient expectation of the "glorious nibble," stand through
successive showers, with her clothes between whiles drying on her back,
and only reluctantly leave the water's edge when it was literally too
dark to see her float.

Although we all fished, I was the only member of the family who
inherited my mother's passion for it, and it only developed much later
in me, for at this time I often preferred taking a book under the trees
by the river-side, to throwing a line; but towards the middle of my life
I became a fanatical fisherwoman, and was obliged to limit my waste of
time to one day in the week, spent on the Lenox lakes, or I should
infallibly have wandered thither and dreamed away my hours on their
charming shores or smooth expanse daily.

I have often wondered that both my mother and myself (persons of
exceptional impatience of disposition and irritable excitability of
temperament) should have taken such delight in so still and monotonous
an occupation, especially to the point of spending whole days in an
unsuccessful pursuit of it. The fact is that the excitement of hope,
keeping the attention constantly alive, is the secret of the charm of
this strong fascination, infinitely more than even the exercise of
successful skill. And this element of prolonged and at the same time
intense expectation, combined with the peculiarly soothing nature of the
external objects which surround the angler, forms at once a powerful
stimulus and a sedative especially grateful in their double action upon
excitable organizations.




CHAPTER V.


I have said that we all more or less joined in my mother's fishing mania
at Weybridge; but my sister, then a girl of about eleven years, never
had any liking for it, which she attributed to the fact that my mother
often employed her to bait the hook for her. My sister's "tender-hefted"
nature was horribly disgusted and pained by this process, but my own
belief is that had she inherited the propensity to catch fish, even that
would not have destroyed it in her. I am not myself a cruel or
hardhearted woman (though I have the hunter's passion very strongly),
and invariably baited my own hook, in spite of the disgust and horror I
experienced at the wretched twining of the miserable worms round my
fingers, and springing of the poor little live bait with its back
pierced with a hook. But I have never allowed any one to do this office
for me, because it seemed to me that to inflict such a task on any one,
because it was revolting to me, was not fair or sportsmanlike; and so I
went on torturing my own bait and myself, too eagerly devoted to the
sport to refrain from it, in spite of the price I condemned myself to
pay for it. Moreover, if I have ever had female companions on my fishing
excursions, I have invariably done this service for them, thinking the
process too horrid for them to endure; and have often thought that if I
were a man, nothing could induce me to marry a woman whom I had seen
bait her own hook with any thing more sensitive than paste.

I have said that I followed no systematic studies after I left school;
but from that time began for me an epoch of indiscriminate, omnivorous
reading, which lasted until I went upon the stage, when all my own
occupations were necessarily given up for the exercise of my profession.

At this time my chief delight was in such German literature as
translations enabled me to become acquainted with. La Motte Fouqué,
Tieck, Wieland's "Oberon," Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," were my principal
studies; soon to be followed by the sort of foretaste of Jean Paul
Richter that Mr. Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" gave his readers; both
matter and manner in that remarkable work bearing far more resemblance
to the great German Incomprehensible than to any thing in the English
language, certainly not excepting Mr. Carlyle's own masterly articles in
the _Edinburgh Review_ on Burns, Elliot the Corn-Law Rhymer, etc.
Besides reading every book that came within my reach, I now commenced
the still more objectionable practice of scribbling verses without stint
or stay; some, I suppose, in very bad Italian, and some, I am sure, in
most indifferent English; but the necessity was on me, and perhaps an
eruption of such rubbish was a safer process than keeping it in the
mental system might have proved; and in the meantime this intellectual
effervescence added immensely to the pleasure of my country life, and my
long, rambling walks in that wild, beautiful neighborhood.

I remember at this moment, by the by, a curious companionship we had in
those walks. A fine, big Newfoundland dog and small terrier were
generally of the party; and, nothing daunted by their presence, an
extremely tame and affectionate cat, who was a member of the family,
invariably joined the procession, and would accompany us in our longest
walks, trotting demurely along by herself, a little apart from the rest,
though evidently considering herself a member of the party.

The dogs, fully occupied with each other, and with discursive raids
right and left of the road, and parenthetical rushes in various
directions for their own special delectation, would sometimes, returning
to us at full gallop, tumble over poor puss and roll her unceremoniously
down in their headlong career. She never, however, turned back for this,
but, recovering her feet, with her back arched all but in two, and every
hair of her tail standing on end with insulted dignity, vented in a
series of spittings and swearings her opinion of dogs in general and
those dogs in particular, and then resumed her own decently demure gait
and deportment; thanking Heaven, I have no doubt, in her cat's soul,
that she was not that disgustingly violent and ill-mannered beast--a
dog.

My brothers shared with us our fishing excursions and these walks, when
at home from school; besides, I was promoted to their nobler
companionship by occasionally acting as long-stop or short-stop (stop of
some sort was undoubtedly my title) in insufficiently manned or boyed
games of cricket: once, while nervously discharging this onerous duty, I
received a blow on my instep from a cricket ball which I did not stop,
that seemed to me a severe price for the honor of sharing my brothers'
manly pastimes. A sport of theirs in which I joined with more
satisfaction was pistol-shooting at a mark: I had not a quick eye, but a
very steady hand, so that with a deliberate aim I contrived to hit the
mark pretty frequently. I liked this quiet exercise of skill better than
that dreadful watching and catching of cannon-balls at cricket; though
the noise of the discharge of fire-arms was always rather trying to me,
and I especially resented my pistol missing fire when I had braced my
courage for the report. My brother John at this time possessed a rifle
and a fowling-piece, with the use of both of which he endeavored to
familiarize me; but the rifle I found insupportably heavy, and as for
the other gun, it kicked so unmercifully, in consequence, I suppose, of
my not holding it hard enough against my shoulder the first time I fired
it, that I declined all further experiments with it, and reverted to the
pretty little lady-like pocket pistols, which were the only fire-arms I
ever used until one fine day, some years later, when I was promoted to
the honor of firing an American cannon on the practicing ground of the
young gentlemen cadets of West Point.

While we retained our little cottage at Weybridge, the house of
Oatlands, the former residence of the Duke of York, and burial-place of
the duchess's favorite dogs, whose cemetery was one of the "lions" of
the garden, was purchased by a Mr. ----, a young gentleman of very large
fortune, who came down there and enlivened the neighborhood occasionally
with his sporting prowesses, which consisted in walking out, attired in
the very height of Bond Street dandyism, with two attendant gamekeepers,
one of whom carried and handed him his gun when he wished to fire it,
the other receiving it from him after it had been discharged. This very
luxurious mode of following his sport caused some sarcastic comment in
the village.

This gentleman did not long retain possession of Oatlands, and it was
let to the Earl of Ellesmere, then Lord Francis Egerton, with whom and
Lady Francis we became acquainted soon after their taking it; an
acquaintance which on my part grew into a strong and affectionate regard
for both of them. They were excellent and highly accomplished, and, when
first I knew them, two of the handsomest and most distinguished-looking
persons I have ever seen.

Our happy Weybridge summers, which succeeded each other for three years,
had but one incident of any importance for me--my catching the
small-pox, which I had very severely. A slight eruption from which my
sister suffered was at first pronounced by our village Æsculapius to be
chicken-pox, but presently assumed the more serious aspect of varioloid.
My sister, like the rest of us, had been carefully vaccinated; but the
fact was then by no means so generally understood as it now is, that the
power of the vaccine dies out of the system by degrees, and requires
renewing to insure safety. My mother, having lost her faith in
vaccination, thought that a natural attack of varioloid was the best
preservative from small-pox, and my sister having had her seasoning so
mildly and without any bad result but a small scar on her long nose, I
was sent for from London, where I was, with the hope that I should take
the same light form of the malady from her; but the difference of our
age and constitution was not taken into consideration, and I caught the
disease, indeed, but as nearly as possible died of it, and have remained
disfigured by it all my life.

I was but little over sixteen, and had returned from school a very
pretty-looking girl, with fine eyes, teeth, and hair, a clear, vivid
complexion, and rather good features. The small-pox did not affect my
three advantages first named, but, besides marking my face very
perceptibly, it rendered my complexion thick and muddy and my features
heavy and coarse, leaving me so moderate a share of good looks as quite
to warrant my mother's satisfaction in saying, when I went on the stage,
"Well, my dear, they can't say we have brought you out to exhibit your
beauty." Plain I certainly was, but I by no means always looked so; and
so great was the variation in my appearance at different times, that my
comical old friend, Mrs. Fitzhugh, once exclaimed, "Fanny Kemble, you
are the ugliest and the handsomest woman in London!" And I am sure, if a
collection were made of the numerous portraits that have been taken of
me, nobody would ever guess any two of them to be likenesses of the same
person.

The effect of natural small-pox on the skin and features varies
extremely in different individuals, I suppose according to their
constitution. My mother and her brother had the disease at the same
time, and with extreme violence; he retained his beautiful bright
complexion and smooth skin and handsome features; my mother was deeply
pitted all over her face, though the fine outline of her nose and mouth
was not injured in the slightest degree; while with me, the process
appeared to be one of general thickening or blurring, both of form and
color. Terrified by this result of her unfortunate experiment, my poor
mother had my brothers immediately vaccinated, and thus saved them from
the infection which they could hardly have escaped, and preserved the
beauty of my youngest brother, which then and for several years after
was very remarkable.

Mrs. F---- is among the most vivid memories of my girlish days. She and
her husband were kind and intimate friends of my father and mother. He
was a most amiable and genial Irish gentleman, with considerable
property in Ireland and Suffolk, and a fine house in Portland Place, and
had married his cousin, a very handsome, clever, and eccentric woman. I
remember she always wore a bracelet of his hair, on the massive clasp of
which were engraved the words, "Stesso sangue, stessa sorte." I also
remember, as a feature of sundry dinners at their house, the first gold
dessert service and table ornaments that I ever saw, the magnificence of
which made a great impression upon me; though I also remember their
being replaced, upon Mrs. F---- wearying of them, by a set of ground
glass and dead and burnished silver, so exquisite, that the splendid
gold service was pronounced infinitely less tasteful and beautiful.

Mrs. F----'s sons were school-fellows of my eldest brother, under Dr.
Malkin, the master of the grammar school of Bury St. Edmunds; and at
this time we always saw Dr. and Mrs. Malkin when they visited London,
and I was indebted to the doctor for a great deal of extremely kind
interest which he took in my mental development and cultivation.

He suggested books for my reading, and set me, as a useful exercise, to
translate Sismondi's fine historical work, "Les Républiques Italiennes,"
which he wished me to abridge for publication. I was not a little proud
of Dr. Malkin's notice and advice; he was my brother's school-master, an
object of respectful admiration, and a kind and condescending friend to
me.

He was a hearty, genial man, of portly person, and fine, intelligent,
handsome face; active and energetic in his habits and movements, in
spite of a slight lameness, which I remember he accounted for to me in
the following manner. He was very intimate with Miss O'Neil before she
left the stage and became Lady Becher. While dancing with her in a
country-dance one evening at her house, she exclaimed, on hearing a
sudden sonorous twang, "Dear me! there is one of the chords of my harp
snapped." "Indeed it is not," replied Dr. Malkin; "it is my
tendo-Achillis which has snapped." And so it was; and from that time he
always remained lame.

Mrs. Malkin was a more uncommon person than her husband; the strength of
her character and sweetness of her disposition were alike admirable, and
the bright vivacity of her countenance and singular grace and dignity of
her person must be a pleasant memory in the minds of all who, like
myself, knew her while she was yet in the middle bloom of life.

Dr. and Mrs. Malkin's sons were my brother's school and college mates.
They were all men of ability, and good scholars, as became their
father's sons. Sir Benjamin, the eldest, achieved eminence as a lawyer,
and became an Indian judge; and the others would undoubtedly have risen
to distinction but for the early death that carried off Frederick and
Charles, and the hesitation of speech which closed almost all public
careers to their brother Arthur.

He was a prominent and able contributor to the "Library of Useful
Knowledge," and furnished a great part of the first of a whole
generation of delightful publications, Murray's "Hand-Book" for
Switzerland.

One of the earliest of Alpine explorers, Arthur Malkin mounted to those
icy battlements which have since been scaled by a whole army of
besiegers, and planted the banner of English courage and enterprise on
"peaks, passes, and glaciers" which, when he first climbed the shining
summits of the Alps, were all but _terra incognita_ to his countrymen.

There is nothing more familiar to the traveling and reading British
public nowadays than Alpine adventures and their records; but when my
friend first conquered the passes between Evolena and Zermatt (still one
of the least overrun mountain regions of Switzerland), their sublime
solitudes were awful with the mystery of unexplored loneliness. Now
professors climb up them, and artists slide down them, and they are
photographed with "members" straddling over their dire crevasses, or
cutting capers on their scornful summits, or turning somersaults down
their infinite precipices. The air of the high Alps was inhaled by few
Englishmen before Arthur Malkin; one can not help thinking that now,
even on the top of the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, it must have lost some
of its freshness.

I have said that all Dr. Malkin's sons were men of more than average
ability; but one, who never lived to be a man, "died a most rare boy" of
about six years, fully justifying by his extraordinary precocity and
singular endowments the tribute which his bereaved father paid his
memory in a modest and touching record of his brief and remarkable
existence.

My Parisian education appeared, at this time, to have failed signally in
the one especial result that might have been expected from it: all my
French dancing lessons had not given me a good deportment, nor taught me
to hold myself upright. I stooped, slouched, and poked, stood with one
hip up and one shoulder down, and exhibited an altogether disgracefully
ungraceful carriage, which greatly afflicted my parents. In order that I
might "bear my body more seemly," various were the methods resorted to;
among others, a hideous engine of torture of the backboard species, made
of steel covered with red morocco, which consisted of a flat piece
placed on my back, and strapped down to my waist with a belt and secured
at the top by two epaulets strapped over my shoulders. From the middle
of this there rose a steel rod or spine, with a steel collar which
encircled my throat and fastened behind. This, it was hoped, would
eventually put my shoulders down and my head up, and in the meantime I
had the appearance of a young woman walking about in a portable pillory.
The ease and grace which this horrible machine was expected to impart to
my figure and movements were, however, hardly perceptible after
considerable endurance of torture on my part, and to my ineffable joy it
was taken off (my harness, as I used to call it; and no knight of old
ever threw off his iron shell with greater satisfaction), and I was
placed under the tuition of a sergeant of the Royal Foot Guards, who
undertook to make young ladies carry themselves and walk well, and not
exactly like grenadiers either. This warrior having duly put me through
a number of elementary exercises, such as we see the awkward squads on
parade grounds daily drilled in, took leave of me with the verdict, that
I "was fit to march before the Duke of York," then commander of the
forces; and, thanks to his instructions, I remained endowed with a flat
back, well-placed shoulders, an erect head, upright carriage, and
resolute step.

I think my education had come nearly to a standstill at this period,
for, with the exception of these physical exercises, and certain hours
of piano-forte practicing and singing lessons, I was left very much to
the irregular and unsystematic reading which I selected for myself. I
had a good contralto voice, which my mother was very desirous of
cultivating, but I think my progress was really retarded by the
excessive impatience with which her excellent ear endured my
unsuccessful musical attempts. I used to practice in her sitting-room,
and I think I sang out of tune and played false chords oftener, from
sheer apprehension of her agonized exclamations, than I should have done
under the supervision of a less sensitively organized person. I remember
my sister's voice and musical acquirements first becoming remarkable at
this time, and giving promise of her future artistic excellence. I
recollect a ballad from the Mexican opera by Bishop, called Cortex, "Oh,
there's a Mountain Palm," which she sang with a clear, high, sweet, true
little voice and touching expression, full of pathos, in which I used to
take great delight.

The nervous terror which I experienced when singing or playing before my
mother was carried to a climax when I was occasionally called upon to
accompany the vocal performances of our friendly acquaintance, James
Smith (one of the authors of the "Rejected Addresses"). He was famous
for his humorous songs and his own capital rendering of them, but the
anguish I endured in accompanying him made those comical performances of
his absolutely tragical to me; the more so that he had a lion-like cast
of countenance, with square jaws and rather staring eyes. But perhaps he
appeared so stern-visaged only to me; while he sang everybody laughed,
but I perspired coldly and felt ready to cry, and so have but a
lugubrious impression of some of the most amusing productions of that
description, heard to the very best advantage (if I could have listened
to them at all) as executed by their author.

Among our most intimate friends at this time were my cousin Horace Twiss
and his wife. I have been reminded of him in speaking of James Smith,
because he had a good deal of the same kind of humor, not unmixed with a
vein of sentiment, and I remember his songs, which he sang with great
spirit and expression, with the more pleasure that he never required me
to accompany them. One New-Year's Eve that he spent with us, just before
going away he sang charmingly some lines he had composed in the course
of the evening, the graceful turn of which, as well as the feeling with
which he sang them, were worthy of Moore. I remember only the burden:

    "Oh, come! one genial hour improve,
       And fill one measure duly;
     A health to those we truly love,
       And those who love us truly!"

And this stanza:

    "To-day has waved its parting wings,
       To join the days before it;
     And as for what the morning brings,
       The morning's mist hangs o'er it."

It was delightful to hear him and my mother talk together, and their
disputes, though frequent, seemed generally extremely amicable, and as
diverting to themselves as to us. On one occasion he ended their
discussion (as to whether some lady of their acquaintance had or had not
gone somewhere) by a vehement declaration which passed into a proverb in
our house: "Yes, yes, she did; for a woman will go anywhere, at any
time, with anybody, to see any thing--especially in a gig." Those were
days in which a gig was a vehicle the existence of which was not only
recognized in civilized society, but supposed to confer a diploma of
"gentility" upon its possessor.

Horace Twiss was one of the readiest and most amusing talkers in the
world, and when he began to make his way in London society, which he
eventually did very successfully, ill-natured persons considered his
first step in the right direction to have been a repartee made in the
crush-room of the opera, while standing close to Lady L----, who was
waiting for her carriage. A man he was with saying, "Look at that fat
Lady L----; isn't she like a great white cabbage?" "Yes," answered
Horace, in a discreetly loud tone, "she _is_ like one--all heart, I
believe." The white-heart cabbage turned affably to the rising
barrister, begged him to see her to her carriage, and gave him the
_entrée_ of H---- House. Lord Clarendon subsequently put him in
Parliament for his borough of Wootton-Basset, and for a short time he
formed part of the ministry, holding one of the under-secretaryships. He
was clever, amiable, and good-tempered, and had every qualification for
success in society.

He had married a Miss Searle, one of his mother's pupils at the
fashionable Bath boarding-school, the living image of Scott's Fenella,
the smallest woman that I have ever seen, with fairy feet and tiny
hands, the extraordinary power of which was like that of a steel talon.
On one occasion, when Horace Twiss happened to mention that his bright
little spark of a wife sat working in his library by him, while he was
engaged with his law or business papers, my mother suggested that her
conversation must disturb him. "Oh, she doesn't talk," said he, "but I
like to hear the scissors fall," a pretty conjugal reply, that left a
pleasant image in my mind. His only child by her, a daughter, married
first Mr. Bacon, then editor of the _Times_, and, after his death, John
Delane, who succeeded him in that office and still holds it; so that her
father said "she took the _Times_ and Supplement."

About this time I began to be aware of the ominous distresses and
disturbances connected with the affairs of the theater, that were to
continue and increase until the miserable subject became literally the
sauce to our daily bread; embittering my father's life with incessant
care and harassing vexation; and of the haunting apprehension of that
ruin which threatened us for years, and which his most strenuous efforts
only delayed, without averting it.

The proprietors were engaged in a lawsuit with each other, and finally
one of them threw the whole concern into chancery; and for years that
dreary chancery suit seemed to envelop us in an atmosphere of
palpitating suspense or stagnant uncertainty, and to enter as an
inevitable element into every hope, fear, expectation, resolution,
event, or action of our lives.

How unutterably heart-sick I became of the very sound of its name, and
how well I remember the expression on my father's careworn face one day,
as he turned back from the door, out of which he was going to his daily
drudgery at the theater, to say to my aunt, who had reproached him with
the loss of a button from his rather shabby coat, "Ah, Dall, my dear,
you see it is my chancery suit!"

Lord Eldon, Sir John Leach, Lord Lyndhurst, and Lord Brougham were the
successive chancellors before whom the case was heard; the latter was a
friend of my family, and on one occasion my father took me to the House
of Lords to hear the proceedings. We were shown into the chancellor's
room, where he indeed was not, but where his huge official wig was
perched upon a block; the temptation was irresistible, and for half a
minute I had the awful and ponderous periwig on my pate.

While we were still living in Soho Square our house was robbed; or
rather, my father's writing-desk was broken open, and sixty sovereigns
taken from it--a sum that he could very hardly spare. He had been at the
theater, acting, and my mother had spent the evening at some friend's
house, and the next morning great was the consternation of the family on
finding what had happened. The dining-room sideboard and _cellarette_
had been opened, and wine and glasses put on the table, as if our
robbers had drank our good health for the success of their attempt.

A Bow Street officer was sent for; I remember his portly and imposing
aspect very well; his name was Salmon, and he was a famous member of his
fraternity. He questioned my mother as to the honesty of our servants;
we had but three, a cook, housemaid, and footman, and for all of these
my mother answered unhesitatingly; and yet the expert assured her that
very few houses were robbed without connivance from within.

The servants were had up and questioned, and the cook related how,
coming down first thing in the morning, she had found a certain back
scullery window open, and, alarmed by that, had examined the lower
rooms, and found the dining-room table set out with the decanters and
glasses. Having heard her story, the officer, as soon as she left the
room, asked my mother if any thing else besides the money had been
taken, and if any quantity of the wine had been drank. She said, "No,"
and with regard to the last inquiry, she supposed, as the cook had
suggested when the decanters were examined, that the thieves had
probably been disturbed by some alarm, and had not had time to drink
much.

Mr. Salmon then requested to look at the kitchen premises; the cook
officiously led the way to the scullery window, which was still open,
"just as she found it," she said, and proceeded to explain how the
robbers must have got over the wall of a court which ran at the back of
the house. When she had ended her demonstrations and returned to the
kitchen, Salmon, who had listened silently to her story of the case,
detained my mother for an instant, and rapidly passed his hand over the
outside window-sill, bringing away a thick layer of undisturbed dust,
which the passage of anybody through the window must infallibly have
swept off. Satisfied at once of the total falsity of the cook's
hypothesis, he told my mother that he had no doubt at all that she was a
party to the robbery, that the scullery window and dining-room drinking
scene were alike mere blinds, and that in all probability she had let
into the house whoever had broken open the desk, or else forced it
herself, having acquired by some means a knowledge of the money it
contained; adding, that in the very few words of interrogatory which had
passed between him and the servants, in my mother's presence, he had
felt quite sure that the housemaid and man were innocent; but had
immediately detected something in the cook's manner that seemed to him
suspicious. What a fine tact of guilt these detectives acquire in their
immense experience of it! The cook was not prosecuted, but dismissed,
the money, of course, not being recoverable; it was fortunate that
neither she nor her honest friends had any suspicion of the contents of
three boxes lying in the drawing-room at this very time. They were
large, black leather cases, containing a silver helmet, shield, and
sword, of antique Roman pattern and beautiful workmanship--a public
tribute bestowed upon my uncle, and left by him to my father; they have
since become an ornamental trophy in my sister's house. They were then
about to be sent for safe keeping to Coutts's bank, and in the meantime
lay close to the desk that had been rifled of a more portable but far
less valuable booty.

Upon my uncle John's death his widow had returned to England, and fixed
her residence at a charming place called Heath Farm, in Hertfordshire.
Lord Essex had been an attached friend of my uncle's, and offered this
home on his property to Mrs. Kemble when she came to England, after her
long sojourn abroad with my uncle, who, as I have mentioned, spent the
last years of his life, and died, at Lausanne. Mrs. Kemble invited my
mother to come and see her soon after she settled in Hertfordshire, and
I accompanied her thither. Cashiobury Park thus became familiar ground
to me, and remains endeared to my recollection for its own beauty, for
the delightful days I passed rambling about it, and for the beginning of
that love bestowed upon my whole life by H---- S----. Heath Farm was a
pretty house, at once rural, comfortable, and elegant, with a fine
farm-yard adjoining it, a sort of cross between a farm and a manor
house; it was on the edge of the Cashiobury estate, within which it
stood, looking on one side over its lawn and flower-garden to the grassy
slopes and fine trees of the park, and on the other, across a road which
divided the two properties, to Lord Clarendon's place, the Grove. It had
been the residence of Lady Monson before her (second) marriage to Lord
Warwick. Close to it was a pretty cottage, also in the park, where lived
an old Miss M----, often visited by a young kinswoman of hers, who
became another of my life-long friends. T---- B----, Miss M----'s niece,
was then a beautiful young woman, whose singularly fine face and sweet
and spirited expression bore a strong resemblance to two eminently
handsome people, my father and Mademoiselle Mars. She and I soon became
intimate companions, though she was several years my senior. We used to
take long rambles together, and vaguely among my indistinct
recollections of her aunt's cottage and the pretty woodland round it,
mix sundry flying visions of a light, youthful figure, that of Lord
M----, then hardly more than a lad, who seemed to haunt the path of his
cousin, my handsome friend, and one evening caused us both a sudden
panic by springing out of a thicket on us, in the costume of a
Harlequin. Some years after this, when I was about to leave England for
America, I went to take leave of T---- B----. She was to be married the
next day to Lord M----, and was sitting with his mother, Lady W----, and
on a table near her lay a set of jewels, as peculiar as they were
magnificent, consisting of splendid large opals set in diamonds, black
enamel, and gold....

To return to our Cashiobury walks: T---- B---- and I used often to go
together to visit ladies, the garden round whose cottage overflowed in
every direction with a particular kind of white and maroon pink, the
powerful, spicy odor of which comes to me, like a warm whiff of summer
sweetness, across all these intervening fifty years. Another favorite
haunt of ours was a cottage (not of gentility) inhabited by an old man
of the name of Foster, who, hale and hearty and cheerful in extreme old
age, was always delighted to see us, used to give us choice flowers and
fruit out of his tiny garden, and make me sit and sing to him by the
half-hour together in his honeysuckle-covered porch. After my first
visit to Heath Farm some time elapsed before we went thither again. On
the occasion of our second visit Mrs. Siddons and my cousin Cecilia were
also Mrs. Kemble's guests, and a lady of the name of H---- S----. She
had been intimate from her childhood in my uncle Kemble's house, and
retained an enthusiastic love for his memory and an affectionate
kindness for his widow, whom she was now visiting on her return to
England. And so I here first knew the dearest friend I have ever known.
The device of her family is "Haut et Bon:" it was her description. She
was about thirty years old when I first met her at Heath Farm; tall and
thin, her figure wanted roundness and grace, but it was straight as a
dart, and the vigorous, elastic, active movements of her limbs, and
firm, fleet, springing step of her beautifully made feet and ankles,
gave to her whole person and deportment a character like that of the
fabled Atalanta, or the huntress Diana herself. Her forehead and eyes
were beautiful. The broad, white, pure expanse surrounded with thick,
short, clustering curls of chestnut hair, and the clear, limpid, bright,
tender gray eyes that always looked radiant with light, and seemed to
reflect radiance wherever they turned, were the eyes and forehead of
Aurora. The rest of her features were not handsome, though her mouth was
full of sensibility and sweetness, and her teeth were the most perfect I
ever saw. She was eccentric in many things, but in nothing more so than
the fashion of her dress, especially the coverings she provided for her
extremities, her hat and boots. The latter were not positively masculine
articles, but were nevertheless made by a man's boot-maker, and there
was only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently ugly
to suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy,
thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed and
disfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep.
Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as it
was, was so by malice prepense on her part. And whereas the general
result would have suggested a total disregard of the vanities of dress,
no Quaker coquette was ever more jealous of the peculiar texture of the
fabrics she wore, or of the fashion in which they were made. She wore no
colors, black and gray being the only shades I ever saw her in; and her
dress, bare and bald of every ornament, was literally only a covering
for her body; but it was difficult to find cashmere fine enough for her
scanty skirts, or cloth perfect enough for her short spencers, or lawn
clear and exquisite enough for her curious collars and cuffs of
immaculate freshness.

I remember a similar peculiarity of dress in a person in all other
respects the very antipodes of my friend H----. My mother took me once
to visit a certain Miss W----, daughter of a Stafford banker, her very
dear friend, and the godmother from whom I took my second name of Anne.

This lady inhabited a quaint, picturesque house in the oldest part of
the town of Stafford. Well do I remember its oak-wainscoted and
oak-paneled chambers, and the fine old oak staircase that led from the
hall to the upper rooms; also the extraordinary abundance and delicacy
of our meals, particularly the old-fashioned nine o'clock supper, about
every item of which, it seemed to me, more was said and thought than
about any food of which I ever before or since partook. It was in this
homely palace of good cheer that a saying originated, which passed into
a proverb with us, expressive of a rather _un_nice indulgence of
appetite.

One of the ladies, going out one day, called back to the servant who was
closing the door behind her: "Tell the cook not to forget the
sally-lunns" (a species of muffin) "for tea, well greased on both sides,
and we'll put on our cotton gowns to eat them."

The appearance of the mistress of this mansion of rather obsolete
luxurious comfort was strikingly singular. She was a woman about sixty
years old, tall and large and fat, of what Balzac describes as "un
embonpoint flottant," and was habitually dressed in a white linen
cambric gown, long and tending to train, but as plain and tight as a bag
over her portly middle person and prominent bust; it was finished at the
throat with a school-boy's plaited frill, which stood up round her heavy
falling cheeks by the help of a white muslin or black silk cravat. Her
head was very nearly bald, and the thin, short gray hair lay in distant
streaks upon her skull, white and shiny as an ostrich egg, which on the
rare occasions of her going out, or into her garden, she covered with a
man's straw or beaver hat.

It is curious how much minor eccentricity the stringent general spirit
of formal conformity allows individuals in England: nowhere else,
scarcely, in civilized Europe, could such a costume be worn in profound,
peaceful defiance of public usage and opinion, with perfect security
from insult or even offensive comment, as that of my mother's old
friend, Miss W----, or my dear H---- S----. In this same Staffordshire
family and its allies eccentricity seemed to prevail alike in life and
death; for I remember hearing frequent mention, while among them, of
connections of theirs who, when they died, one and all desired to be
buried in full dress and with their coffins _standing upright_.

To return to Heath Farm and my dear H----. Nobility, intelligence, and
tenderness were her predominating qualities, and her person, manner, and
countenance habitually expressed them.

This lady's intellect was of a very uncommon order; her habits of
thought and reading were profoundly speculative; she delighted in
metaphysical subjects of the greatest difficulty, and abstract questions
of the most laborious solution. On such subjects she incessantly
exercised her remarkably keen powers of analysis and investigation, and
no doubt cultivated and strengthened her peculiar mental faculties and
tendencies by the perpetual processes of metaphysical reasoning which
she pursued.

Between H---- S---- and myself, in spite of nearly twelve years'
difference in our age, there sprang up a lively friendship, and our time
at Heath Farm was spent in almost constant companionship. We walked and
talked together the livelong day and a good part of the night, in spite
of Mrs. Kemble's judicious precaution of sending us to bed with very
moderate wax candle ends; a prudent provision which we contrived to
defeat by getting from my cousin, Cecilia Siddons, clandestine alms of
fine, long, _life-sized_ candles, placed as mere supernumeraries on the
toilet table of a dressing-room adjoining her mother's bedroom, which
she never used. At this time I also made the acquaintance of my friend's
brother, who came down to Heath Farm to visit Mrs. Kemble and his
sister. He possessed a brilliant intellect, had studied for the bar, and
at the same time made himself favorably known by a good deal of clever
periodical writing; but he died too early to have fully developed his
genius, and left as proofs of his undoubtedly superior talents only a
few powerfully written works of fiction, indicating considerable
abilities, to which time would have given maturity, and more experience
a higher direction.

Among the principal interests of my London life at this time was the
production at our theater of Weber's opera, "Der Freyschütz." Few
operas, I believe, have had a wider or more prolonged popularity; none
certainly within my recollection ever had any thing approaching it.
Several causes conduced to this effect. The simple pathos of the love
story, and the supernatural element so well blended with it, which gave
such unusual scope to the stage effects of scenery, etc., were two
obvious reasons for its success.

From the inimitably gay and dramatic laughing chorus and waltz of the
first scene to the divine melody in which the heroine expresses her
unshaken faith in Heaven, immediately before her lover's triumph closes
the piece, the whole opera is a series of exquisite conceptions, hardly
one of which does not contain some theme or passage calculated to catch
the dullest and slowest ear and fix itself on the least retentive
memory; and though the huntsman's and bridesmaid's choruses, of course,
first attained and longest retained a street-organ popularity, there is
not a single air, duet, concerted piece, or chorus, from which extracts
were not seized on and carried away by the least musical memories. So
that the advertisement of a German gentleman for a valet, who to other
necessary qualifications was to add the indispensable one of not being
able to whistle a note of "Der Freyschütz," appeared a not unnatural
result of the universal furor for this music.

We went to hear it until we literally knew it by heart, and such was my
enthusiasm for it that I contrived to get up a romantic passion for the
great composer, of whom I procured a hideous little engraving (very ugly
he was, and very ugly was his "counterfeit presentment," with high
cheek-bones, long hooked nose, and spectacles), which, folded up in a
small square and sewed into a black silk case, I carried like an amulet
round my neck until I completely wore it out, which was soon after poor
Weber's death.




CHAPTER VI.


The immense success of "Der Freyschütz," and the important assistance it
brought to the funds of the theater, induced my father to propose to
Weber to compose an opera expressly for Covent Garden. The proposal met
with ready acceptance, and the chivalric fairy tale of Wieland's
"Oberon" was selected for the subject, and was very gracefully and
poetically treated by Mr. Planché, to whom the literary part of the
work--the libretto--was confided, and who certainly bestowed as much
pains on the versification of his lyrical drama as if it was not
destined to be a completely secondary object to the music in the public
estimation. Weber himself, however, was by no means a man to disregard
the tenor of the words and characters he was to associate with his
music, and was greatly charmed with his English coadjutor's operatic
version of Wieland's fairy epic. He was invited to come over to London
and himself superintend the production of his new work.

Representations of "Der Freyschütz" were given on his arrival, and night
after night the theater was crowded to see him preside in the orchestra
and conduct his own fine opera; and the enthusiasm of the London public
rose to fever height. Weber took up his abode at the house of Sir George
Smart, the leader of the Covent Garden orchestra, and our excellent old
friend--a capital musician and very worthy man. He was appointed
organist to King William IV., and for many years directed those
admirable performances of classical music called the Ancient Concerts.

He was a man of very considerable musical knowledge, and had a peculiar
talent for teaching and accompanying the vocal compositions of Handel.
During the whole of my father's management of Covent Garden, he had the
supervision of the musical representations and conducted the orchestra,
and he was principally instrumental in bringing out Weber's fine operas
of "Der Freyschütz" and "Oberon." Weber continued to reside in Sir
George Smart's house during the whole of his stay in London, and died
there soon after the production of his "Oberon." Sir George Smart was
the first person who presented Mendelssohn to me. I had been acting
Juliet one night, and at the end of the play was raised from the stage
by my kind old friend, who had been in the orchestra during the
performance, with the great composer, then a young man of nineteen, on
his first visit to England. He brought letters of introduction to my
father, and made his first acquaintance with me in my grave-clothes.
Besides my esteem and regard for Sir George's more valuable qualities, I
had a particular liking for some excellent snuff he always had, and used
constantly to borrow his snuff-box to sniff at it like a perfume, not
having attained a sufficiently mature age to venture upon "pinches;" and
a snuff-taking Juliet being inadmissible, I used to wish myself at the
elderly lady age when the indulgence might be becoming: but before I
attained it, snuff was no longer taken by ladies of any age, and now, I
think, it is used by very few men.

In a letter written to me by my mother, during my temporary absence from
London, just after the accession of King William IV., I find the
following passage with reference to Sir George Smart:

"London is all alive; the new king seems idolized by the people, and he
appears no less pleased with them; perhaps Sir George is amongst the
happiest of his subjects. His Majesty swears that nothing shall be
encouraged but _native talent_, and our friend is to get up a concert at
the Duke of Sussex's, where the royal family are all to dine, at which
none but English singers are to perform. Sir George dined with me on
Monday, and I perceive he has already arranged in his thoughts all he
proposes _to tell the queen about you_ on this occasion. It is evident
he flatters himself that he is to be deep in her Majesty's confidence."

Sir George Smart and his distinguished guest, Weber, were constantly at
our house while the rehearsals of "Oberon" went forward. The first day
they dined together at my father's was an event for me, especially as
Sir George, on my entering the room, took me by the hand, and drawing me
toward Weber, assured him that I and all the young girls in England were
over head and ears in love with him. With my guilty satchel round my
neck, I felt ready to sink with confusion, and stammered out something
about Herr von Weber's beautiful music, to which, with a comical,
melancholy smile, he replied, "Ah, my music! it is always my music, but
never myself!"

Baron Carl Maria von Weber was a noble-born Saxon German, whose very
irregular youth could hardly, one would suppose, have left him leisure
to cultivate or exercise his extraordinary musical genius; but though he
spent much of his early life in wild dissipation, and died in middle
age, he left to the world a mass of compositions of the greatest variety
and beauty, and a name which ranks among the most eminent in his
pre-eminently musical country. He was a little thin man, lame of one
foot, and with a slight tendency to a deformed shoulder. His hollow,
sallow, sickly face bore an expression of habitual suffering and ill
health, and the long, hooked nose, salient cheek-bones, light, prominent
eyes, and spectacles were certainly done no more than justice to in the
unattractive representation of my cherished portrait of him.

He had the air and manner of a well-born and well-bred man of the world,
a gentle voice, and a slow utterance in English, which he spoke but
indifferently and with a strong accent; he generally conversed with my
father and mother in French. One of the first visits he paid to Covent
Garden was in my mother's box, to hear Miss Paton and Braham (his prima
donna and tenor) in an oratorio. He was enthusiastic in his admiration
of Braham's fine performance of one of Handel's magnificent songs
("Deeper and deeper still," I think), but when, in the second part of
the concert, which consisted of a selection of secular music, the great
singer threw the house into ecstasies, and was tumultuously encored in
the pseudo-Scotch ballad of "Blue Bonnets over the Border," he was
extremely disgusted, and exclaimed two or three times, "Ah, that is
_beast_!" (Ah, cela est bête!) to our infinite diversion. Much more
aggravating proof was poor Weber destined to have of the famous tenor's
love of mere popularity in his art, and strange enough, no doubt, to the
great German composer was the thirst for ignorant applause which induced
Braham to reject the beautiful, tender, and majestic opening air Weber
had written for him in the character of Huon, and insist upon the
writing of a battle-piece which might split the ears of the groundlings
and the gods, and furnish him an opportunity for making some of the
startling effects of lyrical declamation which never failed to carry his
audience by storm.

No singer ever delivered with greater purity or nobler breadth Handel's
majestic music; the masterly simplicity of his execution of all really
fine compositions was worthy of his first-rate powers; but the desire of
obtaining by easier and less elevated means the acclamations of his
admirers seemed irresistible to him, and "Scots wha hae," with the
flourish of his stick in the last verse, was a sure triumph which he
never disdained. Weber expressed unbounded astonishment and contempt at
this unartistic view of things, and with great reluctance at length
consented to suppress, or rather transfer to the overture, the noble and
pathetic melody designed for Huon's opening song, for which he submitted
the fine warlike cantata beginning--

    "Oh,'tis a glorious sight to see
     The charge of the Christian chivalry!"

in which, to be sure, Braham charged with the Christians, and routed the
Paynims, and mourned for the wounded, and wept for the dead, and
returned in triumph to France in the joyous cabaletta, with wonderful
dramatic effect, such as, no doubt, the other song would never have
enabled him to produce. But the success of the song did not reconcile
Weber to what he considered the vulgarity and inappropriateness of its
subject, and the circumstance lowered his opinion both of the English
singer and of the English public very grievously.

How well I remember all the discussions of those prolonged, repeated,
anxious, careful rehearsals, and the comical despair of which Miss
Paton, the heroine of the opera, was the occasion to all concerned, by
the curious absence of dramatic congruity of gesture and action which
she contrived to combine with the most brilliant and expressive
rendering of the music. In the great shipwreck scene, which she sang
magnificently, she caught up the short end of a sash tied around her
waist, and twirled it about without unfastening it, by way of signaling
from the top of a rock for help from a distant vessel, the words she
sang being, "Quick, quick, for a signal this scarf shall be _waved_!"
This performance of hers drew from my father the desperate exclamation,
"That woman's an inspired idiot!" while Weber limped up and down the
room silently wringing his hands, and Sir George Smart went off into
ecstatic reminiscences of a certain performance of my mother's, when--in
some musical arrangement of "Blue Beard" (by Kelly or Storace, I think),
in the part of Sister Anne--she waved and signaled and sang from the
castle wall, "I see them galloping! I see them galloping!" after a very
different fashion, that drew shouts of sympathetic applause from her
hearers.

Miss Paton married Lord William Lennox, was divorced from her husband
and married Mr. Wood, and pursued her career as a public singer for many
years successfully after this event; nor was her name in any way again
made a subject of public animadversion, though she separated herself
from Mr. Wood, and at one time was said to have entertained thoughts of
going into a Roman Catholic nunnery. Her singing was very admirable, and
her voice one of the finest in quality and compass that I ever heard.
The effects she produced on the stage were very remarkable, considering
the little intellectual power or cultivation she appeared to possess. My
father's expression of "an inspired idiot," though wrung from him by the
irritation of momentary annoyance, was really not inapplicable to her.
She sang with wonderful power and pathos her native Scotch ballads, she
delivered with great purity and grandeur the finest soprano music of
Handel, and though she very nearly drove poor Weber mad with her
apparent want of intelligence during the rehearsals of his great opera,
I have seldom heard any thing finer than her rendering of the difficult
music of the part of Reiza, from beginning to end, and especially the
scene of the shipwreck, with its magnificent opening recitative, "Ocean,
thou mighty monster!"

"Oberon" was brought out and succeeded; but in a degree so far below the
sanguine expectations of all concerned, that failure itself, though more
surprising, would hardly have been a greater disappointment than the
result achieved at such a vast expenditure of money, time, and labor.
The expectations of the public could not have been realized by any work
which was to be judged by comparison with their already permanent
favorite, "Der Freyschütz." No second effort could have seemed any thing
but second-best, tried by the standard of that popular production; and
whatever judgment musicians and connoisseurs might pronounce as to the
respective merits of the two operas, the homely test of the "proof of
the pudding" being "in the eating" was decidedly favorable to the
master's earlier work; and my own opinion is, that either his
"Euryanthe" or his "Preciosa" would have been more popular with the
general English public than the finer and more carefully elaborated
music of "Oberon." The story of the piece (always a main consideration
in matters of art, with average English men and women) wanted interest,
certainly, as compared with that of its predecessor; the chivalric loves
and adventures of Huon of Bordeaux and the caliph's daughter were
indifferent to the audience, compared with the simple but deep interest
of the fortunes of the young German forester and his village bride; and
the gay and brilliant fairy element of the "Oberon" was no sort of
equivalent for the startling _diablerie_ of Zamiel, and the incantation
scene. The music, undoubtedly of a higher order than that of "Der
Freyschütz," was incomparably more difficult and less popular. The whole
of the part of Reiza was trying in the extreme, even to the powers of
the great singer for whom it was written, and quite sure not to be a
favorite with prime donne from its excessive strain upon the voice,
particularly in what is the weaker part of almost all soprano registers;
and Reiza's first great aria, the first song of the fairy king, and
Huon's last song in the third act, are all compositions of which the
finest possible execution must always be without proportionate effect on
any audience, from the extreme difficulty of rendering them and their
comparative want of melody. By amateurs, out of Germany, the performance
of any part of the music was not likely ever to be successfully
attempted; and I do not think that a single piece in the opera found
favor with the street organists, though the beautiful opening chorus was
made into a church hymn by discarding the exquisite aerial fairy
symphonies and accompaniments; and the involuntary dance of the caliph's
court and servants at the last blast of the magical horn was for a short
time a favorite waltz in Germany.

Poor Weber's health, which had been wretched before he came to England,
and was most unfavorably affected by the climate, sank entirely under
the mortification of the comparatively small success of his great work.
He had labored and fretted extremely with the rehearsals, and very soon
after its production he became dangerously ill, and died--not, as people
said, of a broken heart, but of disease of the lungs, already far
advanced when he came to London, and doubtless accelerated by these
influences. He died in Sir George Smart's house, who gave me, as a
memorial of the great composer whom I had so enthusiastically admired, a
lock of his hair, and the opening paragraph of his will, which was
extremely touching and impressive in its wording.

The plaintive melody known as "Weber's Waltz" (said to have been his
last composition, found after his death under his pillow) was a tribute
to his memory by some younger German composer (Reichardt or Ries); but
though not his own, it owed much of its popularity to his name, with
which it will always be associated. Bellini transferred the air,
verbatim, into his opera of "Beatrice di Tenda," where it appears in her
song beginning, "Orombello, ah Sciagurato!" A circumstance which tended
to embitter a good deal the close of Weber's life was the arrival in
London of Rossini, to whom and to whose works the public immediately
transferred its demonstrations of passionate admiration with even more,
than its accustomed fickleness. Disparaging comparisons and contrasts to
Weber's disadvantage were drawn between the two great composers in the
public prints; the enthusiastic adulation of society and the great world
not unnaturally followed the brilliant, joyous, sparkling, witty
Italian, who was a far better subject for London _lionizing_ than his
sickly, sensitive, shrinking, and rather soured German competitor for
fame and public favor.

The proud, morbid sensitiveness of the Northern genius was certainly in
every respect the very antipodes of the healthy, robust, rejoicing,
artistic nature of the Southern.

No better instance, though a small one, perhaps, could be given of the
tone and temper in which Rossini was likely to encounter both adverse
criticism and the adulation of amateur idolatry, than his reply to the
Duchess of Canizzaro, one of his most fanatical worshipers, who asked
him which he considered his best comic opera; when, with a burst of
joyous laughter, he named "Il Matrimonio Secreto," Cimarosa's enchanting
_chef-d'oeuvre_, from which, doubtless, Rossini, after the fashion of
great geniuses, had accepted more than one most felicitous suggestion,
especially that of the admirable finale to the second act of the
"Barbiere." It was during this visit of his to London, while Weber lay
disappointed and dying in the dingy house in Great Portland Street, that
this same Duchess of Canizzaro, better known by her earlier title of
Countess St. Antonio, as a prominent leader of fashionable taste in
musical matters, invited all the great and gay and distinguished world
of London to meet the famous Italian composer; and, seated in her
drawing-room with the Duke of Wellington and Rossini on either side of
her, exclaimed, "Now I am between the two greatest men in Europe." The
Iron Duke not unnaturally rose and left his chair vacant; the great
genius retained his, but most assuredly not without humorous
appreciation of the absurdity of the whole scene, for he was almost
"plus fin que tous les autres," and certainly "bien plus fin que tous
_ces_ autres."

About this time I returned again to visit Mrs. Kemble at Heath Farm, and
renew my days of delightful companionship with H---- S----. Endless were
our walks and talks, and those were very happy hours in which, loitering
about Cashiobury Park, I made its echoes ring with the music of
"Oberon," singing it from beginning to end--overture, accompaniment,
choruses, and all; during which performances my friend, who was no
musician, used to keep me company in sympathetic silence, reconciled by
her affectionate indulgence for my enthusiasm to this utter postponement
of sense to sound. What with her peculiar costume and my bonnetless head
(I always carried my bonnet in my hand when it was possible to do so)
and frenzied singing, any one who met us might have been justified in
supposing we had escaped from the nearest lunatic asylum.

Occasionally we varied our rambles, and one day we extended them so far
that the regular luncheon hour found us at such a distance from home,
that I--hungry as one is at sixteen after a long tramp--peremptorily
insisted upon having food; whereupon my companion took me to a small
roadside ale-house, where we devoured bread and cheese and drank beer,
and while thus vulgarly employed beheld my aunt's carriage drive past
the window. If that worthy lady could have seen us, that bread and
cheese which was giving us life would inevitably have been her death;
she certainly would have had a stroke of apoplexy (what the French call
_foudroyante_), for gentility and propriety were the breath of life to
her, and of the highest law of both, which can defy conventions, she
never dreamed.

Another favorite indecorum of mine (the bread and cheese was mere mortal
infirmity, not moral turpitude) was wading in the pretty river that ran
through Lord Clarendon's place, the Grove; the brown, clear, shallow,
rapid water was as tempting as a highland brook, and I remember its
bright, flashing stream and the fine old hawthorn trees of the avenue,
alternate white and rose-colored, like clouds of fragrant bloom, as one
of the sunniest pictures of those sweet summer days.

The charm and seduction of bright water has always been irresistible to
me, a snare and a temptation I have hardly ever been able to withstand;
and various are the chances of drowning it has afforded me in the wild
mountain brooks of Massachusetts. I think a very attached maid of mine
once saved my life by the tearful expostulations with which she opposed
the bewitching invitations of the topaz-colored flashing rapids of
Trenton Falls, that looked to me in some parts so shallow, as well as so
bright, that I was just on the point of stepping into them, charmed by
the exquisite confusion of musical voices with which they were
persuading me, when suddenly a large tree-trunk of considerable weight
shot down their flashing surface and was tossed over the fall below,
leaving me to the natural conclusion, "Just such a log should I have
been if I had gone in there." Indeed, my worthy Marie, overcome by my
importunity, having selected what seemed to her a safe, and to me a very
tame, bathing-place, in another and quieter part of the stream, I had
every reason, from my experience of the difficulty of withstanding its
powerful current there, to congratulate myself upon not having tried the
experiment nearer to one of the "springs" of the lovely torrent, whose
Indian name is the "Leaping Water." Certainly the pixies--whose cousin
my friends accused me of being, on account of my propensity for their
element--if they did not omit any opportunity of alluring me, allowed me
to escape scathless on more than one occasion, when I might have paid
dearly for being so much or so little related to them.

This fascination of living waters for me was so well known among my
Lenox friends of all classes, that on one occasion a Yankee Jehu of our
village, driving some of them by the side of a beautiful mountain brook,
said, "I guess we should hardly have got Mrs. Kemble on at all,
alongside of this stream," as if I had been a member of his _team_, made
restive by the proximity of water. A pool in a rocky basin, with foaming
water dashing in and out of it, was a sort of trap for me, and I have
more than once availed myself of such a shower-bath, without any further
preparation than taking my hat and shoes and stockings off. Once, on a
visit to the Catskills, during a charming summer walk with my dear
friend, Catherine Sedgwick, I walked into the brook we were coasting,
and sat down in the water, without at all interrupting the thread of our
conversation; a proceeding which, of course, obliged me to return to the
hotel dripping wet, my companion laughing so immoderately at my
appearance, that, as I represented to her, it was quite impossible for
me to make anybody believe that I had met with an accident and _fallen_
into the water, which was the impression I wished (in the interest of my
reputation for sanity) to convey to such spectators as we might
encounter.

On another occasion, coming over the Wengern Alp from Grindelwald one
sultry summer day, my knees were shaking under me with the steep and
prolonged descent into Lauterbrunnen. Just at the end of the wearisome
downward way an exquisite brook springs into the Lutschine, as it flies
through the valley of waterfalls, and into this I walked straight, to
the consternation of my guides and dear companion, a singularly
dignified little American lady, of Quaker descent and decorum, who was
quite at a loss to conceive how, after such an exploit, I was to present
myself to the inhabitants, tourists, and others of the little street and
its swarming hotels, in my drenched and dripping condition; but, as I
represented to her, nothing would be easier: "I shall get on my mule and
ride sprinkling along, and people will only say, 'Ah, cette pauvre dame!
qui est tombée à l'eau!'"

My visit to my aunt Kemble was prolonged beyond the stay of my friend
H----, and I was left alone at Heath Farm. My walks were, of course,
circumscribed, and the whole complexion of my life much changed by my
being given over to lonely freedom limited only by the bounds of our
pleasure-grounds, and my living converse with my friend exchanged for
unrestricted selection from my aunt's book-shelves; from which I made a
choice of extreme variety, since Lord Byron and Jeremy Taylor were among
the authors with whom I then first made acquaintance, my school
introduction to the former having been followed up by no subsequent
intimacy.

I read them on alternate days, sitting on the mossy-cushioned lawn,
under a beautiful oak tree, with a cabbage-leaf full of fresh-gathered
strawberries and a handful of fresh-blown roses beside me, which
Epicurean accompaniments to my studies appeared to me equally adapted to
the wicked poet and the wise divine. Mrs. Kemble in no way interfered
with me, and was quite unconscious of the subjects of my studies; she
thought me generally "a very odd girl," but though I occasionally took a
mischievous pleasure in perplexing her by fantastical propositions, to
which her usual reply was a rather acrimonious "Don't be absurd, Fanny,"
she did not at all care to investigate my oddity, and left me to my own
devices.

Among her books I came upon Wraxall's "Memoirs of the House of Valois,"
and, reading it with great avidity, determined to write an historical
novel, of which the heroine should be Françoise de Foix, the beautiful
Countess de Châteaubriand. At this enterprise I now set eagerly to work,
the abundant production of doggerel suffering no diminution from this
newer and rather soberer literary undertaking, to which I added a brisk
correspondence with my absent friend, and a task she had set me (perhaps
with some vague desire of giving me a little solid intellectual
occupation) of copying for her sundry portions of "Harris's Hermes;" a
most difficult and abstruse grammatical work, much of which was in
Latin, not a little in Greek. All these I faithfully copied, Chinese
fashion, understanding the English little better than the two dead
languages which I transcribed--the Greek without much difficulty, owing
to my school-day proficiency in the alphabet of that tongue. These
literary exercises, walks within bounds, drives with my aunt, and the
occasional solemnity of a dinner at Lord Essex's, were the events of my
life till my aunt, Mrs. Whitelock, came to Heath Farm and brought an
element of change into the procession of our days.

I think these two widowed ladies had entertained some notion that they
might put their solitude together and make society; but the experiment
did not succeed, and was soon judiciously abandoned, for certainly two
more hopelessly dissimilar characters never made the difficult
experiment of a life in common.

Mrs. Kemble, before she went to Switzerland, had lived in the best
London society, with which she kept up her intercourse by zealous
correspondence; the names of lords and ladies were familiar in her mouth
as household words, and she had undoubtedly an undue respect for
respectability and reverence for titled folk; yet she was not at all
superficially a vulgar woman. She was quick, keen, clever, and shrewd,
with the air, manner, dress, and address of a finished woman of the
world. Mrs. Whitelock was simple-hearted and single-minded, had never
lived in any English society whatever, and retorted but feebly the
fashionable gossip of the day which reached Mrs. Kemble through the
London post, with her transatlantic reminiscences of Prince Talleyrand
and General Washington. She was grotesque in her manner and appearance,
and a severe thorn in the side of her conventionally irreproachable
companion, who has been known, on the approach of some coroneted
carriage, to observe pointedly, "Mrs. Whitelock, there is an
_ekkipage_." "I see it, ma'am," replied the undaunted Mrs. Whitelock,
screwing up her mouth and twirling her thumbs in a peculiarly emphatic
way, to which she was addicted in moments of crisis. Mrs. Kemble, who
was as quick as Pincher in her movements, rang the bell and snapped out,
"Not at home!" denying herself her stimulating dose of high-life gossip,
and her companion what she would have called a little "genteel
sociability," rather than bring face to face her fine friends and Mrs.
Whitelock's flounced white muslin apron and towering Pamela cap, for she
still wore such things. I have said that Mrs. Kemble was not
(superficially) a vulgar woman, but it would have taken the soul of
gentility to have presented, without quailing, her amazingly odd
companion to her particular set of visitors. A humorist would have found
his account in the absurdity of the scene all round; and Jane Austen
would have made a delicious chapter of it; but Mrs. Kemble had not the
requisite humor to perceive the fun of her companion, her acquaintances,
and herself in juxtaposition. I have mentioned her mode of pronouncing
the word equipage, which, together with several similar peculiarities
that struck me as very odd, were borrowed from the usage of London good
society in the days when she frequented it. My friend, Lord Lansdowne,
never called London any thing but _Lunnon_, and always said _obleege_
for oblige, like the Miss Berrys and Mrs. F---- and other of their
contemporaries, who also said _ekkipage_, _pettikits_, _divle_. Since
their time the pronunciation of English in good society, whose usage is
the only acknowledged law in that matter, and the grammatical
construction of the language habitual in that same good society, has
become such as would have challenged the severest criticism, if we had
ventured upon it in my father's house.

The unsuccessful partnership of my aunts was dissolved. Mrs. Kemble
found the country intolerably dull, declared that the grass and trees
made her sick, and fixed her abode in Leamington, then a small,
unpretending, pretty country town, which (principally on account of the
ability, reputation, and influence of its celebrated and popular
resident physician, Dr. Jephson) was a sort of aristocratic-invalid Kur
Residenz, and has since expanded into a thriving, populous, showy,
semi-fashionable, Anglo-American watering-place in summer, and
hunting-place in winter. Mrs. Kemble found the Leamington of her day a
satisfactory abode; the Æsculapius, whose especial shrine it was, became
her intimate friend; the society was comparatively restricted and
select; and the neighborhood, with Warwick Castle, Stoneleigh Abbey, and
Guy's Cliff, full of state and ancientry, within a morning's drive, was
(which she cared less for) lovely in every direction. Mrs. Whitelock
betook herself to a really rural life in a cottage in the beautiful
neighborhood of Addlestone, in Surrey, where she lived in much simple
content, bequeathing her small mansion and estate, at her death, to my
mother, who passed there the last two years of her life and died there.
I never returned to Heath Farm again; sometimes, as I steam by Watford,
the image of the time I spent there rises again before me, but I pass
from it at forty miles an hour, and it passed from me upwards of forty
years ago.

We were now occupying the last of the various houses which for a series
of years we inhabited at Bayswater; it belonged to a French Jew diamond
seller, and was arranged and fitted up with the peculiar tastefulness
which seems innate across the Channel, and inimitable even on the
English side of it. There was one peculiarity in the drawing-room of
this house which I have always particularly liked: a low chimney with a
window over it, the shutter to which was a sliding panel of
looking-glass, so that both by day and candle light the effect was
equally pretty.

At this time I was promoted to the dignity of a bedroom "to myself,"
which I was able to make into a small study, the privacy of which I
enjoyed immensely, as well as the window opening above our suburban bit
of garden, and the sloping meadows beyond it. The following letters,
written at this time to my friend Miss S----, describe the interests and
occupations of my life. It was in the May of 1827. I was between sixteen
and seventeen, which will naturally account for the characteristics of
these epistles.

                                                 BAYSWATER, May, 1827.
     DEAR H----:

     I fear you will think me forgetful and unkind in not having
     answered your last letter; but if you do, you are mistaken--nor
     ungrateful, which my silence, after the kind interest you have
     taken in me and mine, seems to be. But when I tell you that besides
     the many things that have occupied my mind connected with the
     present situation of our affairs, my hands have been full of work
     nearly as dismal as my thoughts--mourning--you will easily
     understand and excuse the delay.

     Do not be alarmed; the person for whom we are in black has been so
     little known to me since my childhood, was so old and infirm, and
     so entirely cheerful, resigned, and even desirous of leaving this
     world, that few, even of those who knew and loved him better than I
     did, could, without selfishness, lament his release. Mr. Twiss, the
     father of my cousin Horace, is dead lately; and it is of him that I
     speak. He has unfortunately left three daughters, who, though doing
     well for themselves in the world, will now feel a sad void in the
     circle of their home affections and interests.

     And now, dear H----, for myself, or ourselves, rather; for, as you
     may well suppose, my whole thoughts are taken up with our
     circumstances.

     I believe in my last I told you pretty nearly all I knew, or indeed
     any of us knew, of our affairs; the matter is now much clearer, and
     not a whit pleasanter.

     It seems that my father, as proprietor of Covent Garden Theater, in
     consequence of this lawsuit and the debts which encumber the
     concern, is liable at any time to be called upon for twenty-seven
     thousand pounds; which, for a man who can not raise five thousand,
     is not a pleasant predicament. On the other hand, Mr. Harris, our
     adversary, and joint proprietor with my father, is also liable to
     enormous demands, if the debts should be insisted upon at present.

     The creditors have declared that they are entirely satisfied that
     my father, and Messrs. Forbes and Willett, the other partners, have
     done every thing with respect to them which honorable men could do,
     and offer to wait till some compromise can be made with Mr. Harris,
     who, it is thought, will be willing to enter into any arrangement
     rather than be irretrievably ruined, as we all must be unless some
     agreement takes place between the proprietors. In the meantime, the
     lawyers have advised our party to appeal from the decision of the
     Vice-Chancellor. Amid all this perplexity and trouble, we have had
     the satisfaction of hearing that John and Henry are both doing
     well; we received a letter from the latter a short time ago, full
     of affection and kindness to us all. I wish you could have seen my
     father's countenance as he read it, and with what fondness and
     almost gratitude he kissed dear Henry's name, while the tears were
     standing in his eyes. I can not help thinking sometimes that my
     father deserved a less hard and toilsome existence.

     He has resolved that, come what may, he will keep those boys at
     their respective schools, if he can by any means compass it; and if
     (which I fear is the case) he finds Bury St. Edmunds too expensive,
     we shall remove to Westminster, in order that Henry's education may
     not suffer from our circumstances. Last Thursday was my father's
     benefit, and a very indifferent one, which I think is rather hard,
     considering that he really slaves night and day, and every night
     and every day, in that theater. Cecilia Siddons and I have opened a
     poetical correspondence; she writes very prettily indeed. Perhaps,
     had she not had such a bad subject as myself to treat of, I might
     have said more of her verses. You will be sorry to hear that not
     only my poor mother's health, but what is almost as precious, her
     good spirits, have been dreadfully affected by all her anxiety;
     indeed, her nerves have been so utterly deranged that she has been
     alternately deaf and blind, and sometimes both, for the last
     fortnight. Thank Heaven she is now recovering!


                                    CRAVEN HILL, BAYSWATER, May, 1827.
     MY DEAREST H----:

     I received your letter the day before yesterday, and felt very much
     obliged to you for it, and was particularly interested by your
     description of Kenilworth, round which Walter Scott's admirable
     novel has cast a halo of romance forever; for many who would have
     cared little about it as the residence of Leicester, honored for
     some days by the presence of Elizabeth, will remember with a thrill
     of interest and pity the night poor Amy Robsart passed there, and
     the scene between her, Leicester, and the queen, when that prince
     of villains, Varney, claims her as his wife. But in spite of the
     romantic and historical associations belonging to the place, I do
     not think it would have "inspired my muse."

     Of our affairs I know nothing, except that we are going to remove
     to Westminster, on account of Henry's schooling, as soon as we can
     part with this house.

     You will be glad to hear that my mother is a great deal better,
     though still suffering from nervousness. She desires to be most
     kindly remembered to you and to my aunt Kemble, and would feel very
     much obliged to you if you can get from Mrs. Kemble the name and
     address of the man who built her pony carriage. Do this, and send
     it in the next letter you write to me, which must be long, but not
     "long a-coming."

     I am glad you like Miss W----, but take care not to like her better
     than me; and I am very glad you think of Heath Farm sometimes, for
     there, I know, I must be in some corner or other of the picture, be
     the foreground what it may. At this time, when the hawthorn is all
     out and the nightingales are singing, even here, I think of the
     quantities of May we gathered for my wreaths, and the little scrap
     of the nightingale's song we used to catch on the lawn between tea
     and bedtime. I have been writing a great deal of poetry--at least I
     mean it for such, and I hope it is not all very bad, as my father
     has expressed himself surprised and pleased at some things I read
     him lately. I wish I could send you some of my perpetrations, but
     they are for the most part so fearfully long that it is impossible.
     You ask about my uncle's monument: I can tell you nothing about it
     at present; it is where the memory of the public, the perseverance
     of the projectors, Flaxman's genius, and John Kemble's fame are. Do
     you know where that is? No more do I.


                                 CRAVEN HILL, BAYSWATER, June 8, 1827.
     MY DEAR H----:

     I am sure you will rejoice with us all when I inform you that John
     has at length exerted himself successfully, and has obtained one of
     the highest literary honors conferred by Cambridge on its students:
     these are his tutor's very words, therefore I leave you to imagine
     how delighted and grateful we all are; indeed, the day we received
     the intelligence, we all, with my father at our head, looked more
     like hopeful candidates for Bedlam than any thing else. My poor
     father jumped, and clapped his hands, and kissed the letter, like a
     child; as my mother says, "I am glad he has one gleam of sunshine,
     at least;" he sadly wanted it, and I know nothing that could have
     given him so much pleasure. Pray tell my aunt Kemble of it. I dare
     say she will be glad to hear it. [My brother's tutor was Mr.
     Peacock, the celebrated mathematician, well known at Cambridge as
     one of the most eminent members of the university, and a private
     tutor of whom all his pupils were deservedly proud; even those who,
     like my brother John, cultivated the classical studies in
     preference to the severe scientific subjects of which Mr. Peacock
     was so illustrious a master. His praise of my brother was
     regretful, though most ungrudging, for his own sympathy was
     entirely with the intellectual pursuits for which Cambridge was
     peculiarly famous, as the mathematical university, in
     contradistinction to the classical tendency supposed to prevail at
     this time among the teachers and students of Oxford.]

     And now let me thank you for your last long letter, and the
     detailed criticism it contained of my lines; if they oftener passed
     through such a wholesome ordeal, I should probably scribble less
     than I do. You ask after my novel of "Françoise de Foix," and my
     translation of Sismondi's History; the former may, perhaps, be
     finished some time these next six years; the latter is, and has
     been, in Dr. Malkin's hands ever since I left Heath Farm. What you
     say of scriptural subjects I do not always think true; for
     instance, "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept," does not
     appear to me to have lost much beauty by Byron's poetical
     paraphrase. We are really going to leave this pleasant place, and
     take up our abode in Westminster; how I shall regret my dear little
     room, full of flowers and books, and with its cheerful view. Enfin
     il n'y faut plus penser. I have, luckily, the faculty of easily
     accommodating myself to circumstances, and though sorry to leave my
     little hermitage, I shall soon take root in the next place. With
     all my dislike to moving, my great wish is to travel; but perhaps
     that is not an absolute inconsistency, for what I wish is never to
     remain long enough in a place to take root, or, having done so,
     never to be transplanted. I am writing a journal, and its pages,
     like our many pleasant hours of conversation, are a whimsical
     medley of the sad, the sober, the gay, the good, the bad, and the
     ridiculous; not at all the sort of serious, solemn journal you
     would write.


                                   CRAVEN HILL, BAYSWATER, ----, 1827.
     MY DEAREST H----:

     I am afraid you are wondering once more whether I have the gout in
     my hands; but so many circumstances have latterly arisen to occupy
     my time and attention that I have had but little leisure for
     letter-writing. You are now once more comfortably re-established in
     your little turret chamber [Miss S----'s room in her home,
     Ardgillan Castle], which I intend to come and storm some day,
     looking over your pleasant lawn to the beautiful sea and hills. I
     ought to envy you, and yet, when I look round my own little
     snuggery, which is filled with roses and the books I love, and
     where not a ray of sun penetrates, though it is high noon and
     burning hot, I only envy you your own company, which I think would
     be a most agreeable addition to the pleasantness of my little room.
     I am sadly afraid, however, that I shall soon be called upon to
     leave it, for though our plans are still so unsettled as to make it
     quite impossible to say what will be our destination, it is, I
     think, almost certain that we shall leave this place.

     We have had Mrs. Henry Siddons, with her youngest daughter, staying
     with us for a short time; she is now going on through Paris to
     Switzerland, on account of my cousin's delicate health, which
     renders Scotland an unsafe residence for her. John is also at home
     just now, which, as you may easily believe, is an invaluable gain
     to me; I rather think, however, that my mother is not of that
     opinion, for he talks and thinks of nothing but politics, and she
     has a great dread of my becoming imbued with his mania; a needless
     fear, I think, however, for though I am willing and glad to listen
     to his opinions and the arguments of his favorite authors, I am
     never likely to study them myself, and my interest in the whole
     subject will cease with his departure for Cambridge.

     Henry returned from Bury St. Edmunds, and my father left us for
     Lancaster last night, and we are now in daily expectation of
     departing for Weybridge, so that the last fortnight has been one
     continual bustle.

     I have had another reason for not writing to you, which I have only
     just made up my mind to tell you. Dick ---- has been taking my
     likeness, or rather has begun to do so. I thought, dear H----, that
     you would like to have this sketch, and I was in hopes that the
     first letter you received in Ireland from me would contain it; but,
     alas! Dick is as inconstant and capricious as a genius need be, and
     there lies my fac-simile in a state of non-conclusion; they all
     tell me it is very like, but it does appear to me so pretty that I
     am divided between satisfaction and incredulity. My father, I
     lament to say, left us last night in very bad spirits. I never saw
     him so depressed, and feared that my poor mother would suffer
     to-day from her anxiety about him; however, she is happily pretty
     well to-day, and I trust will soon, what with Weybridge and
     pike-fishing, recover her health and spirits entirely.

     I suspect this will be the last summer we shall spend at Weybridge,
     as we are going to give our cottage up, I believe. I shall regret
     it extremely for my mother; it is agreeable to and very good for
     her. I do not care much about it for myself; indeed, I care very
     little where I go; I do not like leaving any place, but the tie of
     habit, which is quickly formed and strong in me, once broken, I can
     easily accommodate myself to the next change, which, however, I
     always pray may be the last. My mother and myself had yesterday a
     serious, and to me painful, conversation on the necessity of not
     only not hating society, but tolerating and mixing in it. She and
     my father have always been disinclined to it, but their
     disinclination has descended to me in the shape of active dislike,
     and I feel sometimes inclined to hide myself, to escape sitting
     down and communing with my fellow-creatures after the fashion that
     calls itself social intercourse. I can't help fancying (which,
     however, _may_ be a great mistake) that the hours spent in my own
     room reading and writing are better employed than if devoted to
     people and things in which I feel no interest whatever, and do not
     know how to pretend the contrary.

     I must do justice to my mother, however, for any one more
     reasonable, amiable, and kind, in this as in most respects, can not
     exist than herself; but nevertheless, when I went to bed last night
     I sat by my open window, looking at the moon and thinking of my
     social duties, and then scribbled endless doggerel in a highly
     Byronic mood to deliver my mind upon the subject, after which,
     feeling amazingly better, I went to bed and slept profoundly,
     satisfied that I had given "society" a death-blow. But really,
     jesting apart, the companionship of my own family--those I live
     with, I mean--satisfies me entirely, and I have not the least
     desire for any other.

     Good-by, my dearest H----; do not punish me for not writing sooner
     by not answering this for two months; but be a nice woman and write
     very soon to yours ever,

                                                                FANNY.

     P.S.--I am reading the memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, la
     Grande Mademoiselle, written by herself: if you never read them,
     do; they are very interesting and amusing.

The "Dick" mentioned in this letter was the nephew of my godmother, Miss
A---- W----, of Stafford, and son of Colonel ----, a Staffordshire
gentleman of moderate means, who went to Germany and settled at
Darmstadt, for the sake of giving a complete education in foreign
languages and accomplishments to his daughters. His eldest son was in
the Church. They resided at the little German court till the young girls
became young women, remarkable for their talents and accomplishments. In
the course of their long residence at Darmstadt they had become intimate
with the reigning duke and his family, whose small royalty admitted of
such friendly familiarity with well-born and well-bred foreigners. But
when Colonel ---- brought his wife and daughters back to England, like
most other English people who try a similar experiment, the change from
being decided _somebodies_ in the court circle of a German principality
(whose sovereign was chiefly occupied, it is true, with the government
of his opera-house) to being decided _nobodies_ in the huge mass of
obscure, middle-class English gentility, was all but intolerable to
them.

The peculiar gift of their second son, my eccentric friend Richard, was
a genius for painting, which might have won him an honored place among
English artists, had he ever chosen to join their ranks as a competitor
for fame and fortune.

                             EASTLANDS COTTAGE, WEYBRIDGE, ----, 1827.
     MY DEAR H----:

     I wrote to you immediately upon our arriving here, which is now
     nearly a month ago, but having received no answer, and not having
     heard from you for some time, I conjecture that our charming
     post-office has done as it did last year, and kept my letters to
     itself. I therefore take the opportunity, which my brother's
     departure for town to-morrow gives me, of writing to you and having
     my letter posted in London. John's going to town is an extreme loss
     to me, for here we are more thrown together and companionable than
     we can be in London. His intellectual occupations and interests
     engross him very much, and though always very interesting to me,
     are seldom discussed with or communicated to me as freely there as
     they are here--I suppose for want of better fellowship. I have
     latterly, also, summoned up courage enough to request him to walk
     with me; and to my some surprise and great satisfaction, instead of
     the "I can't, I am really so busy," he has acquiesced, and we have
     had one or two very pleasant long strolls together. He is certainly
     a very uncommon person, and I admire, perhaps too enthusiastically,
     his great abilities.

     My father is in Paris, where he was to arrive yesterday, and where
     to-morrow he will act in the first regularly and decently organized
     English theater that the French ever saw. He is very nervous, and
     we, as you may easily conceive, very anxious about it; when next I
     write to you I will let you know all that we hear of the result. I
     must repeat some part of my last letter, in case you did not
     receive it. We have taken a house in James Street, Buckingham Gate,
     Westminster, which appears to be in every way a desirable and
     convenient abode; in itself it is comfortable and cheerful, and its
     nearness to Henry's school and comparative nearness to the theatre,
     together with its view over the park, and (though last, not least)
     its moderate rent, make up a mass of combined advantages which few
     other situations that we could afford can present.

     I am extremely busy, dearest H----, and extremely elated about my
     play; I know I mentioned it before to you, but you may have
     reckoned it as one of the soap-bubbles which I am so fond of
     blowing, admiring, and forgetting; however, when I tell you that I
     have finished three acts of it, and that the proprietors of Covent
     Garden have offered me, if it succeeds, two hundred pounds (the
     price Miss Mitford's "Foscari" brought her), you will agree that I
     have some reason to be proud as well as pleased.

     As nobody but myself can give you any opinion of it, you must be
     content to take my own, making all allowances for etc., etc., etc.
     I think, irrespective of age or sex, it is not a bad play--perhaps,
     considering both, a tolerably fair one; there is some good writing
     in it, and good situations; the latter I owe to suggestions of my
     mother's, who is endowed with what seems to me really a science by
     itself, i.e. the knowledge of producing dramatic effect; more
     important to a playwright than even true delineation of character
     or beautiful poetry, in spite of what Alfieri says: "Un attore che
     dirà bene, delle cose belle si farà ascoltare per forza." But the
     "ben dire cose belle" will not make a play without striking
     situations and effects succeed, for all that; at any rate with an
     English audience of the present day. Moreover (but this, as well as
     everything about my play, must be _entre nous_ for the present), my
     father has offered me either to let me sell my play to a
     bookseller, or to buy it for the theatre at fifty pounds.

     Fifty pounds is the very utmost that any bookseller would give for
     a successful play, _mais en revanche_, by selling my play to the
     theater it cannot be read or known as a literary work, and as to
     make a name for myself as a writer is the aim of my ambition, I
     think I shall decline his offer. My dearest H----, this quantity
     about myself and my pursuits will, I am afraid, appear very
     egotistical to you, but I rely on your unchangeable affection for
     me to find some interest in what is interesting me so much.

                     Always you most affectionate
                                                                FANNY.




CHAPTER VII.


The success of the English theater in Paris was quite satisfactory; and
all the most eminent members of the profession--Kean, Young, Macready,
and my father--went over in turn to exhibit to the Parisian public
Shakespeare the Barbarian, illustrated by his barbarian
fellow-countrymen. I do not remember hearing of any very eminent actress
joining in that worthy enterprise; but Miss Smithson, a young lady with
a figure and face of Hibernian beauty, whose superfluous native accent
was no drawback to her merits in the esteem of her French audience,
represented to them the heroines of the English tragic drama; the
incidents of which, infinitely more startling than any they were used
to, invested their fair victim with an amazing power over her foreign
critics, and she received from them, in consequence, a rather
disproportionate share of admiration--due, perhaps, more to the
astonishing circumstances in which she appeared before them than to the
excellence of her acting under them.

One of the most enthusiastic admirers of the English representations
said to my father, "Ah! parlez moi d'Othello! voilà, voilà la passion,
la tragédie. Dieu! que j'aime cette pièce! il y a tant de
_remue-ménage_."

A few rash and superficial criticisms were hardly to be avoided; but in
general, my father has often said, in spite of the difficulty of the
foreign language, and the strangeness of the foreign form of thought and
feeling and combination of incident, his Parisian audience never
appeared to him to miss the finer touches or more delicate and refined
shades of his acting; and in this respect he thought them superior to
his own countrymen. Lamartine and Victor Hugo had already proclaimed the
enfranchisement of French poetical thought from the rigid rule of
classical authority; and all the enthusiastic believers in the future
glories of the "Muse Romantique" went to the English theater, to be
amazed, if not daunted, by the breadth of horizon and height of empyrean
which her wings might sweep, and into which she might soar, "puisque
Shakespeare l'a bien osé."

                  ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, October 11, 1827,
     MY DEAREST H----,

     I do not think you would have been surprised at my delay in
     answering your last, when I told you that on arriving here I found
     that all my goods and chattels had been (according to my own
     desire) only removed hither, and that their arrangement and
     bestowal still remained to be effected by myself; and when I tell
     you that I have settled all these matters, and moreover _finished
     my play_, I think you will excuse my not having answered you
     sooner. Last Monday, having in the morning achieved the termination
     of the fourth act, and finding that my father did not act on
     Tuesday, I resolved, if possible, to get it finished in order to
     read it to him on Tuesday evening. So on Monday evening at six
     o'clock I sat down to begin my fifth act, and by half-past eleven
     had completed my task; I am thus minute because I know you will not
     think these details tiresome, and also because, even if it succeeds
     and is praised and admired, I shall never feel so happy as when my
     father greeted my entrance into the drawing-room with, "Is it done,
     my love? I shall be the happiest man alive if it succeeds!"

     On Tuesday evening I read it to them, and I was so encouraged by
     the delighted looks my father and mother were continually
     exchanging, that I believe I read it with more effect than they
     either of them had thought me capable of. When it was done I was
     most richly rewarded, for they all seemed so pleased with me and so
     proud of me, that the most inordinate author's vanity would have
     been satisfied. And my dear mother, oh, how she looked at
     me!--forgive me, dear, and grant some little indulgence to my
     exultation. I thought I deserved some praise, but thrice my deserts
     were showered upon me by those I love above everything in the
     world.

     When commendation and congratulation had a little given way to
     reflection, my mother and John entreated my father not to let the
     play be acted, or, if he did, to have it published first; for they
     said (and their opinion has been sanctioned by several literary
     men) that the work as a literary production (I repeat what they
     say, mind) has merit enough to make it desirable that the public
     should judge of it as a poetical composition before it is submitted
     to the mangling necessary for the stage.

     Of course, my task being finished, I have nothing more to do with
     it; nor do I care whether it is published first or after, provided
     only it may be acted: though I dare say that process may not prove
     entirely satisfactory to me either; for though Mr. Young and my
     father would thoroughly embody my conception of the parts intended
     for them, yet there is a woman's part which, considering the
     materials history has furnished, ought to be a very fine
     one--Louisa of Savoy; and it must be cut down to the capacity of a
     second-rate actress. The character would have been the sort of one
     for Mrs. Siddons; how I wish she was yet in a situation to afford
     it the high preferment of her acceptance!

     My father has obtained a most unequivocal success in Paris, the
     more flattering as it was rather doubtful, and the excellent
     Parisians not only received him very well, but forthwith threw
     themselves into a headlong _furor_ for Shakespeare and Charles
     Kemble, which, although they might not improbably do the same
     to-morrow for two dancing dogs, _we_ are quite willing to attribute
     to the merits of the poet and his interpreter. The French papers
     have been profuse in their praises of both, and some of our own
     have quoted their commendations. My mother is, I think, recovering,
     though slowly, from her long illness. She is less deaf, and rather
     less blind; but for the general state of her health, time, and time
     alone, will, I am sure, restore it entirely. I have just seen the
     dress that my father had made abroad for his part in my play: a
     bright amber-colored _velours épinglé_, with a border of rich
     silver embroidery; this, together with a cloak of violet velvet
     trimmed with imitation sable. The fashion is what you see in all
     the pictures and prints of Francis I. My father is very anxious, I
     think, to act the play; my mother, to have it published before it
     is acted; and I sit and hear it discussed and praised and
     criticised, only longing (like a "silly wench," as my mother calls
     me when I confess as much to her) to see my father in his lovely
     dress and hear the _alarums of my fifth act_.

     I am a little mad, I suppose, and my letter a little tipsy, I dare
     say, but I am ever your most affectionate

                                                                FANNY.


                    16 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, WESTMINSTER,
                                                     October 21, 1827.
     MY DEAR H----,

     Your letter was short and sweet, but none the sweeter for being
     short. I should have thought no one could have been worse provided
     than myself with news or letter chit-chit, and yet I think my
     letters are generally longer than yours; brevity, in you, is a
     fault; do not be guilty of it again: "car du reste," as Madame de
     Sévigné says, "votre style est parfait." John returned to Cambridge
     on Thursday night. He is a great loss to me, for though I have seen
     but little of him since our return to town, that little is too much
     to lose of one we love. He is an excellent fellow in every way, and
     in the way of abilities he is particularly to my mind. We all miss
     him very much; however, his absence will be broken now by visits to
     London, in order to keep his term [about this time my brother was
     entered at the Inner Temple, I think], so that we shall
     occasionally enjoy his company for a day or two. I should like to
     tell you something about my play, but unluckily have nothing to
     tell; everything about it is as undecided as when last I wrote to
     you. It is in the hands of the copyist of Covent Garden, but what
     its ultimate fate is to be I know not. If it is decided that it is
     to be brought out on the stage before publication, that will not
     take place at present, because this is a very unfavorable time of
     year. If I can send it to Ireland, tell me how I can get it
     conveyed to you, and I will endeavor to do so. I should like you to
     read it, but oh, _how_ I should like to go and see it acted with
     you! I am now full of thoughts of writing a comedy, and have drawn
     out the plan of one--plot, acts, and scenes in due order--already;
     and I mean to make it Italian and mediæval, for the sake of having
     one of those bewitching creatures, a jester, in it; I have an
     historical one in my play, Triboulet, whom I have tried to make an
     interesting as well as an amusing personage.

     My mother, by the aid of a blister and _my play_, is, I think,
     recovering, though slowly, from her illness; she is still, though,
     in a state of great suffering, which is by no means alleviated by
     being unable to write, read, work, or occupy herself in any manner.

     We have been to the play pretty regularly twice a week for the last
     three weeks, and shall continue to do so during the whole winter;
     which is a plan I much approve of. I am very fond of going to the
     play, and Kean, Young, and my father make one of Shakespeare's
     plays something well worth seeing. I saw the "Merchant of Venice"
     the other evening, for the first time, and returned home a violent
     _Keanite_. That man is an extraordinary creature! Some of the
     things he did, appeared, on reflection, questionable to my judgment
     and open to criticism; but while under the influence of his amazing
     power of passion it is impossible to reason, analyze, or do
     anything but surrender one's self to his forcible appeals to one's
     emotions. He entirely divested Shylock of all poetry or elevation,
     but invested it with a concentrated ferocity that made one's blood
     curdle. He seemed to me to combine the supernatural malice of a
     fiend with the base reality of the meanest humanity. His passion is
     prosaic, but all the more intensely terrible for that very reason.
     I am to see him to-morrow in "Richard III.," and, though I never
     saw the play before, am afraid I shall be disappointed, because
     Richard III. is a Plantagenet Prince, and should be a royal
     villain, and I am afraid Mr. Kean will not have the innate
     _majesty_ which I think belongs to the part; however, we shall see,
     and when next I write I will tell you how it impressed me.

     You deserve that I should bestow all my tediousness upon you, for
     loving me as well as you do. Mrs. Harry Siddons and her daughter
     are here for two or three days, on their return from their tour
     through Switzerland. Mrs. Harry is all that is excellent, though
     she does not strike me as particularly clever; and Lizzy is a very
     pretty, very good, very sweet, very amiable girl. Her brother, my
     cousin, the midshipman, is here too, having come up from Portsmouth
     to meet his mother and sister, so that the house is full. Think of
     that happy girl having travelled all through Switzerland, seen the
     Jungfrau--Manfred's mountain--been in two violent storms at night
     on the lakes, and telling me placidly that "she liked it all very
     well." Oh dear, oh dear! how queerly Heaven does distribute
     privileges! Good-by, dear.

                             Yours ever,
                                                                FANNY.


                 16 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, December, 1827.
     MY DEAREST H----,

     My heart is full of joy, and I write that you may rejoice with me;
     our dear John has distinguished himself greatly, but lest my words
     should seem sisterly and exaggerated, I will repeat what Mr.
     Peacock, his tutor, wrote to my father: "He has covered himself
     with glory. Such an oration as his has not been heard for many
     years in Cambridge, and it was as tastefully and modestly delivered
     as it was well written." This has made us all _very, very_ happy,
     and though the first news of it overcame my poor mother, whose
     nerves are far from firm, she soon recovered, and we are
     impatiently expecting his return from college. My play is at
     present being pruned by my father, and will therefore not occupy my
     thoughts again till it comes out, which I hope will be at Easter. I
     did not write sooner, because I had nothing to say; but now that
     this joy about my brother has come to me, _je te l'envoie_. Since
     last you heard from me I have seen the great West India Dock and
     the Thames Tunnel. Oh, H----, "que c'est une jolie chose que
     l'homme!" Annihilated by any one of the elements if singly opposed
     to its power, he by his genius yet brings their united forces into
     bondage, and compels obedience from all their manifold combined
     strength. We penetrate the earth, we turn the course of rivers, we
     exalt the valleys and bow down the mountains; and we die and return
     to our dust, and they remain and remember us no more. Often enough,
     indeed, the names of great inventors and projectors have been
     overshadowed or effaced by mere finishers of their work or adapters
     of their idea, who have reaped the honor and emolument due to an
     obscure originator, who passes away from the world, his rightful
     claim to its admiration and gratitude unknown or unacknowledged.
     But these obey the law of their being; they cannot but do the work
     God's inspiration calls them to.

     But I must tell you what this tunnel is like, or at least try to do
     so. You enter, by flights of stairs, the first door, and find
     yourself on a circular platform which surrounds the top of a well
     or shaft, of about two hundred feet in circumference and five
     hundred in depth. This well is an immense iron frame of cylindrical
     form, filled in with bricks; it was constructed on level ground,
     and then, by some wonderful mechanical process, sunk into the
     earth. In the midst of this is a steam engine, and above, or below,
     as far as your eye can see, huge arms are working up and down,
     while the creaking, crashing, whirring noises, and the swift
     whirling of innumerable wheels all round you, make you feel for the
     first few minutes as if you were going distracted. I should have
     liked to look much longer at all these beautiful, wise, working
     creatures, but was obliged to follow the last of the party through
     all the machinery, down little wooden stairs and along tottering
     planks, to the bottom of the well. On turning round at the foot of
     the last flight of steps through an immense dark arch, as far as
     sight could reach stretched a vaulted passage, smooth earth
     underfoot, the white arches of the roof beyond one another
     lengthening on and on in prolonged vista, the whole lighted by a
     line of gas lamps, and as bright, almost, as if it were broad day.
     It was more like one of the long avenues of light that lead to the
     abodes of the genii in fairy tales, than anything I had ever
     beheld. The profound stillness of the place, which was first broken
     by my father's voice, to which the vaulted roof gave extraordinary
     and startling volume of tone, the indescribable feeling of
     subterranean vastness, the amazement and delight I experienced,
     quite overcame me, and I was obliged to turn from the friend who
     was explaining everything to me, to cry and ponder in silence. How
     I wish you had been with us, dear H----! Our name is always worth
     something to us: Mr. Brunel, who was superintending some of the
     works, came to my father and offered to conduct us to where the
     workmen were employed--an unusual favor, which of course delighted
     us all. So we left our broad, smooth path of light, and got into
     dark passages, where we stumbled among coils of ropes and heaps of
     pipes and piles of planks, and where ground springs were welling up
     and flowing about in every direction, all which was very strange.
     As you may have heard, the tunnel caved in once, and let the Thames
     in through the roof; and in order that, should such an accident
     occur again, no lives may be lost, an iron frame has been
     constructed--a sort of cage, divided into many compartments, in
     each of which a man with his lantern and his tools is placed--and
     as they clear the earth away this iron frame is moved onward and
     advances into new ground. All this was wonderful and curious beyond
     measure, but the appearance of the workmen themselves, all
     begrimed, with their brawny arms and legs bare, some standing in
     black water up to their knees, others laboriously shovelling the
     black earth in their cages (while they sturdily sung at their
     task), with the red, murky light of links and lanterns flashing and
     flickering about them, made up the most striking picture you can
     conceive. As we returned I remained at the bottom of the stairs
     last of all, to look back at the beautiful road to Hades, wishing I
     might be left behind, and then we reascended, through wheels,
     pulleys, and engines, to the upper day. After this we rowed down
     the river to the docks, lunched on board a splendid East Indiaman,
     and came home again. I think it is better for me, however, to look
     at the trees, and the sun, moon, and stars, than at tunnels and
     docks; they make me too _humanity proud_.

     I am reading "Vivian Grey." Have you read it? It is very clever.

                     Ever your most affectionate

                                                                FANNY.


                  16 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, January, 1828.
     DEAREST H----,

     I jumped, in despite of a horrid headache, when I saw your letter.
     Indeed, if you knew how the sight of your handwriting delights me,
     you would not talk of lack of matter; for what have I to tell you
     of more interest for you, than the health and proceedings of those
     you love must be to me?

     Dear John is come home with his trophy. He is really a highly
     gifted creature; but I sometimes fear that the passionate eagerness
     with which he _pursues his pursuit_, the sort of frenzy he has
     about politics, and his constant excitement about political
     questions, may actually injure his health, and the vehemence with
     which he speaks and writes in support of his peculiar views will
     perhaps endanger his future prospects.

     He is neither tory nor whig, but a radical, a utilitarian, an
     adorer of Bentham, a worshiper of Mill, an advocate for vote by
     ballot, an opponent of hereditary aristocracy, the church
     establishment, the army and navy, which he deems sources of
     unnecessary national expense; though who is to take care of our
     souls and bodies, if the three last-named institutions are done
     away with, I do not quite see. Morning, noon, and night he is
     writing whole volumes of arguments against them, full of a good
     deal of careful study and reading, and in a close, concise,
     forcible style, which is excellent in itself, and the essays are
     creditable to his laborious industry; but they will not teach him
     mathematics, or give him a scholarship or his degree. That he will
     distinguish himself hereafter I have no doubt; but at present he is
     engrossed by a passion (for it seems to me nothing less) which
     occupies his mind and time, to the detriment, if not the exclusion,
     of all other studies.

     I feel almost ashamed of saying anything about myself, after the
     two or three scoldings you have sent me of late. Perhaps while my
     blue devils found vent in ridiculous verses, they did not much
     matter; but their having prompted me lately to throw between seven
     and eight hundred pages (about a year's work) into the fire, seems
     to me now rather deplorable. You perhaps will say that the fire is
     no bad place for seven or eight hundred pages of my manuscript; but
     I had spent time and pains on them, and I think they should not
     have been thrown away in a foolish fit of despondency. I am at
     present not very well. I do not mean that I have any specific
     illness, but headaches and side-aches, so that I am one moment in a
     state of feverish excitement and the next nervous and low-spirited;
     this is not a good account, but a true one.

     I have no "new friends," dearest H----; perhaps because my dislike
     to society makes me stupid and disagreeable when I am in it. I have
     made one acquaintance, which might perhaps grow to a friendship
     were it not that distance and its attendant inconveniences have
     hitherto prevented my becoming more intimate with the lady I refer
     to. She is a married woman; her name is Jameson. She is an
     Irishwoman, and the authoress of the "Diary of an Ennuyée." I like
     her very much; she is extremely clever; I wish I knew her better. I
     have been to one dance and one or two dinners lately, but to tell
     you the truth, dear H----, the old people naturally treat me after
     my years, as a young person, and the young people (perhaps from my
     self-conceit) seem to me stupid and uninteresting, and so, you see,
     I do not like society. Cecilia Siddons is out of town at present,
     and I have not seen her for some time. You may have heard that the
     theatre has gained a lawsuit against Sinclair, the celebrated
     singer, by a reversal of the former verdict in the case. We were
     not even aware that such a process was going on, and when my father
     came home and said, "We have won our cause," my mother and myself
     started up, supposing he meant _the_ chancery suit. That,
     unfortunately, is still pending, pending, like the sword of
     Damocles, over our heads, banishing all security for the present or
     hope for the future. The theatre is, I believe, doing very well
     just now, and we go pretty often to the play, which I like. I have
     lately been seeing my father playing Falstaff several times, and I
     think it is an excellent piece of acting; he gives all the humor
     without too much coarseness, or _charging_, and through the whole,
     according to the fat knight's own expression, he is "Sir John to
     all the world," with a certain courtly deportment which prevents
     him from degenerating into the mere gross buffoon. They are in sad
     want of a woman at both the theatres. I've half a mind to give
     Covent Garden one. Don't be surprised. I have something to say to
     you on this subject, but have not room for it in this letter. My
     father is just now acting in the north of England. We expect him
     back in a fortnight. God bless you, dear H----.

                             Yours ever,
                                                                FANNY.

The vehement passion of political interest which absorbed my brother at
this time was in truth affecting the whole of English society almost as
passionately. In a letter written in 1827, the Duke of Wellington, after
speaking of the strong partisan sentiment which was agitating the
country, added, "The ladies and all the youth are with us;" that is,
with the Tory party, which, under his leadership, was still an active
power of obstruction to the imminent changes to which both he and his
party were presently to succumb. His ministry was a period of the
stormiest excitement in the political world, and the importance of the
questions at issue--Catholic emancipation and parliamentary
reform--powerfully affected men's minds in the ranks of life least
allied to the governing class. Even in a home so obscure and so devoted
to other pursuits and interests as ours, the spirit of the times made
its way, and our own peculiar occupations became less interesting to us
than the intense national importance of the public questions which were
beginning to convulse the country from end to end. About this time I met
with a book which produced a great and not altogether favorable effect
upon my mind (the blame resting entirely with me, I think, and not with
what I read). I had become moody and fantastical for want of solid
wholesome mental occupation, and the excess of imaginative stimulus in
my life, and was possessed with a wild desire for an existence of lonely
independence, which seemed to my exaggerated notions the only one fitted
to the intellectual development in which alone I conceived happiness to
consist. Mrs. Jameson's "Diary of an Ennuyée," which I now read for the
first time, added to this desire for isolation and independence such a
passionate longing to go to Italy, that my brain was literally filled
with chimerical projects of settling in the south of Europe, and there
leading a solitary life of literary labor, which, together with the fame
I hoped to achieve by it, seemed to me the only worthy purpose of
existence. While under the immediate spell of her fascinating book, it
was of course very delightful to me to make Mrs. Jameson's acquaintance,
which I did at the house of our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu.
They were the friends of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Proctor
(Barry Cornwall, who married Mrs. Montagu's daughter), and were
themselves individually as remarkable, if not as celebrated, as many of
their more famous friends. Basil Montagu was the son of the Earl of
Sandwich and the beautiful Miss Wray, whose German lover murdered her at
the theatre by shooting her in her private box, and then blew his own
brains out. Mr. Montagu inherited ability, eccentricity, and personal
beauty, from his parents. His only literary productions that I am
acquainted with were a notice of Bacon and his works, which he published
in a small pamphlet volume, and another volume of extracts from some of
the fine prose writers of the seventeenth century. I have a general
impression that his personal intercourse gave a far better idea of his
intellectual ability than anything that he achieved either in his
profession or in letters.

His conversation was extremely vivid and sparkling, and the quaint
eccentricity of his manner added to the impression of originality which
he produced upon one. Very unlike the common run of people as he was,
however, he was far less so than his wife, who certainly was one of the
most striking and remarkable persons I have known. Her appearance was
extraordinary: she was much above middle height, with a beautiful figure
and face, the outline of which was of classical purity and severity,
while her whole carriage and appearance was dignified and majestic to
the highest degree. I knew her for upwards of thirty years, and never
saw her depart from a peculiar style of dress, which she had adopted
with the finest instinct of what was personally becoming as well as
graceful and beautiful in itself. She was so superior in this point to
her sex generally, that, having found that which was undoubtedly her own
proper individual costume, she never changed the fashion of it. Her
dress deserved to be called (what all dress should be) a lesser fine
art, and seemed the proper expression in clothes of her personality, and
really a part of herself. It was a long, open robe, over an underskirt
of the same material and color (always moonlight silver gray, amethyst
purple, or black silk or satin of the richest quality), trimmed with
broad velvet facings of the same color, the sleeves plain and tight
fitting from shoulder to wrist, and the bosom covered with a fine lace
half-body, which came, like the wimple of old mediæval portraits, up
round her throat, and seemed to belong in material and fashion to the
clear chin-stay which followed the noble contour of her face, and the
picturesque cap which covered, without concealing, her auburn hair and
the beautiful proportions of her exquisite head.

This lady knew no language but her own, and to that ignorance (which one
is tempted in these days occasionally to think desirable) she probably
owed the remarkable power and purity with which she used her mother
tongue. Her conversation and her letters were perfect models of spoken
and written English. Her marriage with Mr. Montagu was attended with
some singular circumstances, the knowledge of which I owe to herself.
She was a Yorkshire widow lady, and came with her only child (a little
girl) to visit some friends in London, with whom Basil Montagu was
intimate. Mrs. S---- had probably occasionally been the subject of
conversation between him and her hosts, when they were expecting her;
for one evening soon after her arrival, as she was sitting partly
concealed by one of the curtains in the drawing-room, Basil Montagu came
rapidly into the room, exclaiming (evidently not perceiving her), "Come,
where is your wonderful Mrs. S----? I want to see her." During the whole
evening he engrossed her attention and talked to her, and the next
morning at breakfast she laughingly complained to her hosts that he had
not been content with that, but had tormented her in dreams all night.
"For," said she, "I dreamt I was going to be married to him, and the day
before the wedding he came to me with a couple of boxes, and said
solemnly, 'My dear Anne, I want to confide these relics to your keeping;
in this casket are contained the bones of my dear first wife, and in
this those of my dear second wife; do me the favor to take charge of
them for me.'" The odd circumstance was that Basil Montagu had been
married twice, and that when he made his third matrimonial venture, and
was accepted by Mrs. S----, he appeared before her one day, and with
much solemnity begged her to take charge of two caskets, in which were
respectively treasured, not the bones, but the letters of her two
predecessors. It is quite possible that he might have heard of her dream
on the first night of their acquaintance, and amused himself with
carrying it out when he was about to marry her; but when Mrs. Montagu
told me the story I do not think she suggested any such rationalistic
solution of the mystery. Her daughter, Anne S---- (afterwards Mrs.
Procter), who has been all my life a kind and excellent friend to me,
inherited her remarkable mother's mental gifts and special mastery over
her own language; but she added to these, as part of her own
individuality, a power of sarcasm that made the tongue she spoke in and
the tongue she spoke with two of the most formidable weapons any woman
was ever armed with. She was an exceedingly kind-hearted person,
perpetually occupied in good offices to the poor, the afflicted, her
friends, and all whom she could in any way serve; nevertheless, such was
her severity of speech, not unfrequently exercised on those she appeared
to like best, that Thackeray, Browning, and Kinglake, who were all her
friendly intimates, sometimes designated her as "Our Lady of
Bitterness," and she is alluded to by that title in the opening chapter
of "Eothen." A daily volume of wit and wisdom might have been gathered
from her familiar talk, which was _crisp_, with suggestions of thought
in the liveliest and highest form. Somebody asking her how she and a
certain acrid critic of her acquaintance got on together, she replied,
"Oh, very well; we sharpen each other like two knives." Being
congratulated on the restoration of cordiality between herself and a
friend with whom she had had some difference, "Oh yes," said she, "the
cracked cup is mended, but it will never hold water again." Both these
ladies, mother and daughter, had a most extraordinary habit of crediting
their friends with their own wise and witty sayings; thus Mrs. Montagu
and Mrs. Procter would say, "Ah yes, you know, as you once said," and
then would follow something so sparkling, profound, concise, incisive,
and brilliant, that you remained, eyes and mouth open, gasping in
speechless astonishment at the merit of the saying you never said (and
couldn't have said if your life had depended on it), and the
magnificence of the gift its author was making you. The princes in the
Arabian Nights, who only gave you a ring worth thousands of sequins,
were shabby fellows compared with these ladies, who declared that the
diamonds and rubies of their own uttering had fallen from your lips.
Persons who lay claim to the good things of others are not rare; those
who do not only disclaim their own, but even credit others with them,
are among the very rarest. In all my intercourse with the inhabitants of
_two_ worlds, I have known no similar instance of self-denial; and
reflecting upon it, I have finally concluded that it was too superhuman
to be a real virtue, and could proceed only from an exorbitant
superabundance of natural gift, which made its possessors reckless,
extravagant, and even unprincipled in the use of their wealth; they had
wit enough for themselves, and to spare for all their friends, and these
were many.

At an evening party at Mrs. Montagu's, in Bedford Square, in 1828, I
first saw Mrs. Jameson. The Ennuyée, one is given to understand, dies;
and it was a little vexatious to behold her sitting on a sofa, in a very
becoming state of blooming _plumptitude_; but it was some compensation
to be introduced to her. And so began a close and friendly intimacy,
which lasted for many years, between myself and this very accomplished
woman. She was the daughter of an Irish miniature-painter of the name of
Murphy, and began life as a governess, in which capacity she educated
the daughters of Lord H----, and went to Italy with the family of Mrs.
R----. When I first knew her she had not long been married to Mr. Robert
Jameson, a union so ill-assorted that it restored Mrs. Jameson to the
bosom of her own family, to whom her conjugal ill-fortune proved a
blessing, for never did daughter and sister discharge with more loving
fidelity the duties of those relationships. Her life was devoted to her
parents while they lived, and after their death to her sisters and a
young niece whom she adopted. Her various and numerous gifts and
acquirements were exercised, developed, and constantly increased by a
life of the most indefatigable literary study, research, and labor. Her
reading was very extensive; her information, without being profound, was
general; she was an excellent modern linguist, and perfectly well versed
in the literature of her own country and of France, Germany, and Italy.
She had an uncommon taste and talent for art, and as she added to her
knowledge of the theory and history of painting familiar acquaintance
with most of the fine public and private galleries in Europe, a keen
sensibility to beauty, and considerable critical judgment, her works
upon painting, and especially the exceedingly interesting volumes she
published on the "Sacred and Legendary Art of the Romish Church," are at
once delightful and interesting sources of information, and useful and
accurate works of reference, to which considerable value is added by her
own spirited and graceful etchings.

The literary works of hers in which I have a direct personal interest,
are a charming book of essays on Shakespeare's female characters,
entitled "Characteristics of Women," which she did me the honor to
dedicate to me; some pages of letterpress written to accompany a series
of sketches John Hayter made of me in the character of Juliet; and a
notice of my sister's principal operatic performances after she came out
on the stage. Mrs. Jameson at one time contemplated writing a life of my
aunt Siddons, not thinking Boaden's biography of her satisfactory; in
this purpose, however, she was effectually opposed by Campbell, who had
undertaken the work, and, though he exhibited neither interest nor zeal
in the fulfillment of his task, doggedly (in the manger) refused to
relinquish it to her. Certainly, had Mrs. Jameson carried out her
intention, Mrs. Siddons would have had a monument dedicated to her
memory better calculated to preserve it than those which the above-named
gentlemen bestowed on her. It would have been written in a spirit of far
higher artistic discrimination, and with infinitely more sympathy both
with the woman and with the actress.




CHAPTER VIII.


Late in middle life Mrs. Jameson formed an intimate acquaintance, which
at one time assumed the character of a close friendship, with Lady
Byron, under the influence of whose remarkable mind and character the
subjects of artistic and literary interest, which had till then absorbed
Mrs. Jameson's attention and occupied her pen, gave place to others of a
very different kind--those which engrossed for a time, to the exclusion
of almost all others, the minds of men and women in England at the
beginning of the Crimean War; when the fashion of certain forms of
philanthropy set by that wonderful woman, Florence Nightingale, was
making hospital nurses of idle, frivolous fine ladies, and turning into
innumerable channels of newly awakened benevolence and activity--far
more zealous than discreet--the love of adventure, the desire for
excitement, and the desperate need of occupation, of many women who had
no other qualifications for the hard and holy labors into which they
flung themselves.

Mrs. Jameson felt the impulse of the time, as it reached her through
Lady Byron and Miss Nightingale, and warmly embraced the wider and more
enlightened aspect of women's duties beginning to be advocated with
extreme enthusiasm in English society. One of the last books she
published was a popular account of foreign Sisters of Mercy, their
special duties, the organization of their societies, and the sphere of
their operations; suggesting the formation of similar bodies of
religiously charitable sisterhoods in England. She had this subject so
much at heart, she told me, that she had determined to give a series of
public lectures upon it, provided she found her physical power equal to
the effort of making herself heard by an audience in any public room of
moderate size. She tested the strength of her chest and voice by
delivering one lecture to an audience assembled in the drawing-rooms of
a friend; but, as she never repeated the experiment, I suppose she found
the exertion too great for her.

When first I met Mrs. Jameson she was an attractive-looking young woman,
with a skin of that dazzling whiteness which generally accompanies
reddish hair, such as hers was; her face, which was habitually refined
and _spirituelle_ in its expression, was capable of a marvelous power of
concentrated feeling, such as is seldom seen on any woman's face, and is
peculiarly rare on the countenance of a fair, small, delicately featured
woman, all whose personal characteristics were essentially feminine. Her
figure was extremely pretty; her hands and arms might have been those of
Madame de Warens.

Mrs. Jameson told me that the idea of giving public lectures had
suggested itself to her in the course of her conversations with Lady
Byron upon the possible careers that might be opened to women. I know
Lady Byron thought a very valuable public service might be rendered by
women who so undertook to advocate important truths of which they had
made special study, and for the dissemination of which in this manner
they might be especially gifted. She accepted in the most liberal manner
the claim put forward by women to more extended spheres of usefulness,
and to the adoption of careers hitherto closed to them; she was deeply
interested, personally, in some who made the arduous attempt of studying
and practicing medicine, and seemed generally to think that there were
many directions in which women might follow paths yet unopened, of high
and noble exertion, and hereafter do society and the cause of progress
good service.

Lady Byron was a peculiarly reserved and quiet person, with a manner
habitually deliberate and measured, a low, subdued voice, and rather
diffident hesitation in expressing herself: and she certainly conveyed
the impression of natural reticence and caution. But so far from ever
appearing to me to justify the description often given of her, of a
person of exceptionally cold, hard, measured intellect and character,
she always struck me as a woman capable of profound and fervid
enthusiasm, with a mind of rather a romantic and visionary order.

She surprised me extremely one evening as she was accompanying me to one
of my public readings, by exclaiming, "Oh, how I envy you! What would I
not give to be in your place!" As my vocation, I am sorry to say,
oftener appeared to me to justify my own regret than the envy of others,
I answered, "What! to read Shakespeare before some hundreds of people?"
"Oh no," she said; "not to read Shakespeare to them, but to have all
that mass of people under your control, subject to your influence, and
receiving your impressions." She then went on to say she would give
anything to lecture upon subjects which interested her deeply, and that
she should like to advocate with every power she possessed. Lady Byron,
like most enthusiasts, was fond of influencing others and making
disciples to her own views. I made her laugh by telling her that more
than once, when looking from my reading-desk over the sea of faces
uplifted towards me, a sudden feeling had seized me that I must say
something _from myself_ to all those human beings whose attention I felt
at that moment entirely at my command, and between whom and myself a
sense of sympathy thrilled powerfully and strangely through my heart, as
I looked steadfastly at them before opening my lips; but that, on
wondering afterwards _what_ I might, could, would, or should have said
to them from myself, I never could think of anything but two words: "Be
good!" which as a preface to the reading of one of Shakespeare's plays
("The Merry Wives of Windsor," for instance) might have startled them.
Often and strongly as the temptation recurred to me, I never could think
of anything better worth saying to my audience. I have some hope that
sometimes in the course of the reading I said it effectually, without
shocking them by a departure from my proper calling, or deserving the
rebuke of "Ne sutor ultra crepidam."

In February, 1828, I fell ill of the measles, of which the following
note to Miss S---- is a record.

     MY DEAREST H----,

     I am in a great hurry, because my parcel is not made up yet, and I
     expect your brother's emissary to call at every moment. I send you
     my play, also an album of mine, also an unfinished sketch of me,
     also a copy of my will. The play you must not keep, because it is
     my only copy; neither must you keep my album, because I want to
     finish one of the pieces of verse begun in it; my picture--such as
     it is--begun, but never finished, by Dick ----, I thought you would
     like better than nothing. He has finished one that is a very good
     likeness of me, but it was done for my mother, or I should have
     wished you to have it. My will I made last week, while I was in bed
     with the measles, and want you to keep that.

     I have been very ill for the last fortnight, but am well again now.
     I am pressed for time to-day, but will soon write to you in
     earnest.

     I'm afraid you'll find my play very long; when my poor father began
     cutting it, he looked ruefully at it, and said, "There's plenty of
     it, Fan," to which my reply is Madame de Sévigné's, "Si j'eusse eu
     plus de temps, je ne t'aurais pas écrit si longuement." Dear H----,
     if you knew how I thought of you, and the fresh, sweet mayflowers
     with which we filled our baskets at Heath Farm, while I lay parched
     and full of pain and fever in my illness!

                             Yours ever,
                                                                FANNY.

My beloved aunt Dall nursed and tended me in my sickness with unwearied
devotion; and one day when I was convalescent, finding me depressed in
spirits and crying, she said laughingly to me, "Why, child, there is
nothing the matter with you; but you are weak in body and mind." This
seemed to me the most degraded of all conceivable conditions, and I fell
into a redoublement of weeping over my own abasement and imbecility.

My attention was suddenly attracted to a large looking-glass opposite my
bed, and it occurred to me that in my then condition of nerves nothing
was more likely than that I should turn visionary and fancy I beheld
apparitions. And under this conviction I got up and covered the glass,
in which I felt sure I should presently "see sic sights as I daured na
tell." I speak of this because, though I was in a physical condition not
unlikely to produce such phenomena, I retained the power of perceiving
that they would be the result of my physical condition, and that I
should in some measure be accessory to my own terror, whatever form it
might assume.

I have so often in my life been on the very edge of ghost-seeing, and
felt so perfectly certain that the least encouragement on my part would
set them before me, and that nothing but a resolute effort of will would
save me from such a visitation, that I have become convinced that of the
people who have seen apparitions, one half have--as I should term
it--chosen to do so. I have all my life suffered from a tendency to
imaginary terrors, and have always felt sure that a determined exercise
of self-control would effectually keep them from having the dominion
over me. The most distressing form of nervous excitement that I have
ever experienced was one that for many years I was very liable to, and
which always recurred when I was in a state of unusual exaltation or
depression of spirits; both which states in me were either directly
caused or greatly aggravated by certain electrical conditions of the
atmosphere, which seemed to affect my whole nervous system as if I had
been some machine expressly constructed for showing and testing the
power of such influences on the human economy.

I habitually read while combing and brushing my hair at night, and
though I made no use of my looking-glass while thus employed, having my
eyes fixed on my book, I sat (for purposes of general convenience) at my
toilet table in front of the mirror. While engrossed in my book it has
frequently happened to me accidentally to raise my eyes and suddenly to
fix them on my own image in the glass, when a feeling of startled
surprise, as if I had not known I was there and did not immediately
recognize my own reflection, would cause me to remain looking at myself,
the intentness with which I did so increasing as the face appeared to me
not my own; and under this curious fascination my countenance has
altered, becoming gradually so dreadful, so much more dreadful in
expression than any human face I ever saw or could describe, while it
was next to impossible for me to turn my eyes away from the hideous
vision confronting me, that I have felt more than once that unless by
the strongest effort of will I immediately averted my head, I should
certainly become insane. Of course I was myself a party to this strange
fascination of terror, and must, no doubt, have exercised some power of
volition in the assumption of the expression that my face gradually
presented, and which was in no sense a distortion or grimace, but a
terrible look suggestive of despair and desperate wickedness, the memory
of which even now affects me painfully. But though in some measure
voluntary, I do not think I was conscious at the time that the process
was so; and I have never been able to determine the precise nature of
this nervous affection, which, beginning thus in a startled feeling of
sudden surprise, went on to such a climax of fascinated terror.

I was already at this time familiar enough with the theory of ghosts, of
which one need not be afraid, through Nicolai of Berlin's interesting
work upon the curious phantasmagoria of apparitions, on which he made
and recorded so many singular observations. Moreover, my mother, from a
combination of general derangement of the system and special affection
of the visual nerves, was at one time constantly tormented by whole
processions and crowds of visionary figures, of the origin and nature of
which she was perfectly aware, but which she often described as
exceedingly annoying by their grotesque and distorted appearance, and
wearisome from their continual recurrence and thronging succession. With
the recovery of her general health she obtained a release from this
disagreeable haunting.

One of the most remarkable and painful instances of affection of the
visual organs in consequence of a violent nervous shock was that
experienced by my friend Miss T----, who, after seeing her cousin, Lady
L----, drowned while bathing off the rocks at her home at Ardgillan, was
requested by Lord L---- to procure for him, before his wife's burial,
the wedding ring from her finger. The poor lady's body was terribly
swollen and discolored, and Miss T---- had to use considerable effort to
withdraw the ring from the dead finger. The effect of the whole
disastrous event upon her was to leave her for several months afflicted
with an affection of the eyes, which represented half of the face of
every person she saw with the swollen, livid, and distorted features of
her drowned cousin; a horrible and ghastly result of the nervous shock
she had undergone, which she feared she should never be delivered from,
but which gradually wore itself out.

The only time I ever saw an apparition was under singularly unfavorable
circumstances for such an experience. I was sitting at midday in an
American railroad car, which every occupant but my maid and myself had
left to go and get some refreshment at the station, where the train
stopped some time for that purpose. I was sitting with my maid in a
small private compartment, sometimes occupied by ladies travelling
alone, the door of which (wide open at the time) communicated with the
main carriage, and commanded its entire length. Suddenly a person
entered the carriage by a door close to where I sat, and passed down the
whole length of the car. I sprang from my seat, exclaiming aloud, "There
is C----!" and rushed to the door before, by any human possibility, any
one could have reached the other end of the car; but nobody was to be
seen. My maid had seen nothing. The person I imagined I had seen was
upwards of two hundred miles distant; but what was to me the most
curious part of this experience was that had I really met the person I
saw anywhere, my most careful endeavor would have been to avoid her,
and, if possible, to escape being seen by her; whereas this apparition,
or imagination, so affected my nerves that I rushed after it as if
desirous of pursuing and overtaking it, while my deliberate desire with
regard to the image I thus sprang towards would have been never to have
seen it again as long as I lived. The state of the atmosphere at the
time of this occurrence was extraordinarily oppressive, and charged with
a tremendous thunder-storm, a condition of the air which, as I have
said, always acts with extremely distressing and disturbing influence
upon my whole physical system.

                    ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, February, 1828.
     MY DEAREST H----,

     I have this instant received your letter, and, contrary to John's
     wise rule of never answering an epistle till three days after he
     receives it, I sit down to write, to talk, to be with you. Pray,
     when your potatoes flourish, your fires are put out by the sun, and
     your hills are half hid in warm mist, wish one hearty wish for me,
     such as I spend by the dozen on you. I confess I am disappointed,
     as far as I can be with a letter of yours, at finding you had not
     yet received my parcel, for my vanity has been in considerable
     anxiety respecting your judgment on my production. Now that the
     effervescence of my poetical _furor_ has subsided, and that
     repeated perusals have taken a little of the charm of novelty from
     my play, my own opinion of it is that it is a clever performance
     _for so young a person_, but nothing more. The next will, I hope,
     be better, and I think you will agree with me in regard to this.
     Dearest H----, in my last letter want of time and room prevented my
     enlarging on my hint about the stage, but as far as my own
     determination goes at present, I think it is the course that I
     shall most likely pursue. You know that independence of mind and
     body seems to me the great desideratum of life; I am not patient of
     restraint or submissive to authority, and my head and heart are
     engrossed with the idea of exercising and developing the literary
     talent which I think I possess. This is meat, drink, and sleep to
     me; my world, in which I live, and have my happiness; and,
     moreover, I hope, by means of fame (the prize for which I pray). To
     a certain degree it may be my means of procuring benefits of a more
     substantial nature, which I am by no means inclined to estimate at
     less than their worth. I do not think I am fit to marry, to make an
     obedient wife or affectionate mother; my imagination is paramount
     with me, and would disqualify me, I think, for the every-day,
     matter-of-fact cares and duties of the mistress of a household and
     the head of a family. I think I should be unhappy and the cause of
     unhappiness to others if I were to marry. I cannot swear I shall
     never fall in love, but if I do I will fall out of it again, for I
     do not think I shall ever so far lose sight of my best interest and
     happiness as to enter into a relation for which I feel so unfit.
     Now, if I do not marry, what is to become of me in the event of
     anything happening to my father? His property is almost all gone; I
     doubt if we shall ever receive one pound from it. Is it likely
     that, supposing I were willing to undergo the drudgery of writing
     for my bread, I could live by my wits and the produce of my brain;
     or is such an existence desirable?

     Perhaps I might attain to the literary dignity of being the lioness
     of a season, asked to dinner parties "because I am so clever;"
     perhaps my writing faculty might become a useful auxiliary to some
     other less precarious dependence; but to write to eat--to live, in
     short--that seems to me to earn hard money after a very hard
     fashion. The stage is a profession that people who have a talent
     for it make lucrative, and which honorable conduct may make
     respectable; one which would place me at once beyond the fear of
     want, and that is closely allied in its nature to my beloved
     literary pursuits.

     If I should (as my father and mother seem to think not unlikely)
     change my mind with respect to marrying, the stage need be no bar
     to that, and if I continue to write, the stage might both help me
     in and derive assistance from my exercise of the pursuit of
     dramatic authorship. And the mere mechanical labor of writing costs
     me so little, that the union of the two occupations does not seem
     to me a difficulty. My father said the other day, "There is a fine
     fortune to be made by any young woman, of even decent talent, on
     the stage now." A fine fortune is a fine thing; to be sure, there
     remains a rather material question to settle, that of "even decent
     talent." A passion for all beautiful poetry I am sure you will
     grant me; and you would perhaps be inclined to take my father and
     mother's word for my dramatic capacity. I spoke to them earnestly
     on this subject lately, and they both, with some reluctance, I
     think, answered me, to my questions, that they thought, as far as
     they could judge (and, unless partiality blinds them entirely, none
     can be better judges), I might succeed. In some respects, no girl
     intending herself for this profession can have had better
     opportunities of acquiring just notions on the subject of acting. I
     have constantly heard refined and thoughtful criticism on our
     greatest dramatic works, and on every various way of rendering them
     effective on the stage. I have been lately very frequently to the
     theater, and seen and heard observingly, and exercised my own
     judgment and critical faculty to the best of my ability, according
     to these same canons of taste by which it has been formed. Nature
     has certainly not been as favorable to me as might have been
     wished, if I am to embrace a calling where personal beauty, if not
     indispensable, is so great an advantage. But if the informing
     spirit be mine, it shall go hard if, with a face and voice as
     obedient to my emotions as mine are, I do not in some measure make
     up for the want of good looks. My father is now proprietor and
     manager of the theatre, and those certainly are favorable
     circumstances for my entering on a career which is one of great
     labor and some exposure, at the best, to a woman, and where a young
     girl cannot be too prudent herself, nor her protectors too careful
     of her. I hope I have not taken up this notion hastily, and I have
     no fear of looking only on the bright side of the picture, for ours
     is a house where that is very seldom seen.

     Good-by; God bless you! I shall be very anxious to hear from you; I
     sent you a note with my play, telling you I had just got up from
     the measles; but as my note has not reached you, I tell you so
     again. I am quite well, however, now, and shall not give them to
     you by signing myself

                      Yours most affectionately,
                                                                 FANNY.

     P.S.--I forgot to answer your questions in telling you all this,
     but I will do so methodically now. My side-ache is some disturbance
     in my liver, evidently, and does not give way entirely either to
     physic or exercise, as the slightest emotion, either pleasurable or
     painful, immediately brings it on; my blue devils I pass over in
     silence; such a liver and my kind of head are sure to breed them.

     Certainly I reverence Jeremy Bentham for his philanthropy, plain
     powerful sense, and lucid forcible writing; but as for John's
     politics, they are, as Beatrice tells the prince he is, "too costly
     for every-day wear." His theories are so perfect that I think
     imperfect men could never be brought to live under a scheme of
     government of his devising.

     I think Mrs. Jameson would like you, and you her, if you met, but
     my mind is running on something else than this. My father's income
     is barely eight hundred a year. John's expenses, since he has been
     at college, have been nearly three. Five hundred a year for such a
     family as ours is very close and careful work, dear H----, and if
     my going on the stage would nearly double that income, lessen my
     dear father's anxieties for us all, and the quantity of work which
     he latterly has often felt too much for him, and remove the many
     privations which my dear mother cheerfully endures, as well as the
     weight of her uncertainty about our future provision, would not
     this be a "consummation devoutly to be wished"?


                       ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, March, 1828.
     MY DEAREST H----,

     I have been thinking what you have been thinking of my long
     silence, about which, however, perhaps you have not been thinking
     at all. What, you say in one of your last about my destroying your
     letters troubles me a good deal, dearest H----. I really cannot
     bear to think of it; why, those letters are one of my very few
     precious possessions. When I am unhappy (as I sometimes am), I read
     them over, and I feel strengthened and comforted; if it is your
     _positive desire_ that I should burn them, of course I must do it;
     but if it is only a sort of "I think you had better" that you have
     about it, I shall keep them, and you must be satisfied with one of
     my old "I can't help it's." As for my own scrawls, I do _not_
     desire that you should keep them. I write, as I speak, on the
     impulse of the moment, and I should be sorry that the incoherent
     and often contradictory thoughts that I pour forth daily should be
     preserved against me by anybody.

     My father is now in Edinburgh. He has been absent from London about
     a week. I had a conversation with him about the stage some time
     before he went, in which he allowed that, should our miserably
     uncertain circumstances finally settle unfavorably, the theatre
     might be an honorable and advantageous resource for me; but that at
     present he should be sorry to see me adopt that career. As he is
     the best and kindest father and friend to us all, such a decision
     on his part was conclusive, as you will easily believe; and I have
     forborne all further allusion to the subject, although on some
     accounts I regret being obliged to do so.

     I was delighted with your long letter of criticisms; I am grateful
     to you for taking the trouble of telling me so minutely all you
     thought about my play. For myself, although at the time I wrote it
     I was rather puffed up and elated in spirit, and looked at it
     naturally in far too favorable a light, I assure you I have long
     since come to a much soberer frame of mind respecting it. I think
     it is quite unfit for the stage, where the little poetical merit it
     possesses would necessarily be lost; besides, its construction is
     wholly undramatic. The only satisfaction I now take in it is
     entirely one of hope; I am very young, and I cannot help feeling
     that it offers some promise for the future, which I trust may be
     fulfilled. Now even, already, I am sure I could do infinitely
     better; nor will it be long, I think, before I try my strength
     again. If you could see the multiplicity of subjects drawn up in my
     book under the head of "projected works," how you would shake your
     wise head, and perhaps your lean sides. I wish I could write a good
     prose work, but that, I take it, is really difficult, as good,
     concise, powerful, clear prose must be much less easy to write than
     even tolerable poetry. I have been reading a quantity of German
     plays (translations, of course, but literal ones), and I have been
     reveling in that divine devildom, "Faust." Suppose it does send one
     to bed with a side-ache, a headache, and a heartache, isn't it
     worth while? Did you ever read Goethe's "Tasso"? Certainly he makes
     the mad poet a mighty disagreeable person; but in describing him it
     seemed to me as if Goethe was literally transcribing my thoughts
     and feelings, my mind and being.

     Now, dearest H----, don't bear malice, and, because I have not
     written for so long, wait still longer before you answer. My mother
     has been in the country for a few days, and has returned with a
     terrible cough and cold, with which pleasant maladies she finds the
     house full here to welcome her, so that we all croak in unison most
     harmoniously. I was at the Siddonses' the other evening. My aunt
     was suffering, I am sorry to say, with one of her terrible
     headaches; Cecilia was pretty well, but as it was a _soirée
     chantante_, I had little opportunity of talking to either of them.
     Did you mention my notion about going on the stage in any of your
     letters to Cecy?

     The skies are brightening and the trees are budding; it will soon
     be the time of year when we first met. Pray remember me when the
     hawthorn blossoms; hail, snow, or sunshine, I remember you, and am
     ever your affectionate

                                                                FANNY.

The want of a settled place of residence compelled me, many years after
writing this letter, to destroy the letters of my friend, which I had
preserved until they amounted to many hundreds; my friend kept, in the
house that was her home from her fourteenth to her sixtieth year, all
mine to her--several thousands, the history of a whole human life--and
gave them back to me when she was upwards of seventy and I of sixty
years old; they are the principal aid to my memory in my present task of
retrospection.

My life at home at this time became difficult and troublesome, and
unsatisfactory to myself and others; my mind and character were in a
chaotic state of fermentation that required the wisest, firmest, and
gentlest guidance. I was vehement and excitable, violently impulsive,
and with a wild, ill-regulated imagination.

The sort of smattering acquirements from my schooling, and the desultory
reading which had been its only supplement, had done little or nothing
(perhaps even worse than nothing) towards my effectual moral or mental
training. A good fortune, for which I can never be sufficiently
thankful, occurred to me at this time, in the very intimate intercourse
which grew up just then between our family and that of my cousin, Mrs.
Henry Siddons.

She had passed through London on her way to the Continent, whither she
was going for the sake of the health of her youngest daughter, an
interesting and attractive young girl some years older than myself, who
at this time seemed threatened with imminent consumption. She had a
sylph-like, slender figure, tall, and bending and wavering like a young
willow sapling, and a superabundant profusion of glossy chestnut
ringlets, which in another might have suggested vigor of health and
constitution, but always seemed to me as if their redundant masses had
exhausted hers, and were almost too great a weight for her slim throat
and drooping figure. Her complexion was transparently delicate, and she
had dark blue eyes that looked almost preternaturally large. It seems
strange to remember this ethereal vision of girlish fragile beauty as
belonging to my dear cousin, who, having fortunately escaped the doom by
which she then seemed threatened, lived to become a most happy and
excellent wife and mother, and one of the largest women of our family,
all of whose female members have been unusually slender in girlhood and
unusually stout in middle and old age. When Mrs. Henry Siddons was
obliged to return to Edinburgh, which was her home, she was persuaded by
my mother to leave her daughter with us for some time; and for more than
a year she and her elder sister and their brother, a lad studying at the
Indian Military College of Addiscombe, were frequent inmates of our
house. The latter was an extremely handsome youth, with a striking
resemblance to his grandmother, Mrs. Siddons; he and my brother Henry
were certainly the only two of the younger generation who honorably
maintained the reputation for beauty of their elders; in spite of which,
and the general admiration they excited (especially when seen together),
perhaps indeed from some uncomfortable consciousness of their personal
advantages, they were both of them shamefaced and bashful to an unusual
degree.

I remember a comical instance of the shy _mauvaise honte_, peculiar to
Englishmen, which these two beautiful boys exhibited on the occasion of
a fancy ball, to which we were all invited, at the house of our friend,
Mrs. E. G----. To me, of course, my first fancy ball was an event of
unmixed delight, especially as my mother had provided for me a lovely
Anne Boleyn costume of white satin, point-lace, and white Roman pearls,
which raised my satisfaction to rapture. The two Harrys, however, far
from partaking of my ecstasy, protested, pouted, begged off, all but
broke into open rebellion at the idea of making what they called "guys"
and "chimney-sweeps" of themselves; and though the painful sense of any
singularity might have been mitigated by the very numerous company of
their fellow-fools assembled in the ball-room, to keep them in
countenance, and the very unpretending costume of simple and, elegant
black velvet in which my mother had attired them, as Hamlet and Laertes
(it must have been in their very earliest college days), they hid
themselves behind the ball-room door and never showed as much as their
noses or their toes, while I danced beatifically till daylight, and
would have danced on till noon.

Mrs. Henry Siddons, in her last stay with us, obtained my mother's
consent that I should go to Edinburgh to pay her a visit, which began by
being of indeterminate length, and prolonged itself for a year--the
happiest of my life, as I often, while it lasted, thought it would
prove; and now that my years are over I know to have been so. To the
anxious, nervous, exciting, irritating tenor of my London life succeeded
the calm, equable, and all but imperceptible control of my dear friend,
whose influence over her children, the result of her wisdom in dealing
with them, no less than of their own amiable dispositions, was absolute.
In considering Mrs. Henry Siddons's character, when years had modified
its first impression upon my own, my estimate of it underwent, of
course, some inevitable alteration; but when I stayed with her in
Edinburgh I was at the idolatrous period of life, and never, certainly,
had an enthusiastic young girl worshiper a worthier or better idol.

She was not regularly handsome, but of a sweet and most engaging
countenance; her figure was very pretty, her voice exquisite, and her
whole manner, air, and deportment graceful, attractive, and charming.
Men, women, and children not only loved her, but inevitably _fell in
love_ with her, and the fascination which she exercised over every one
that came in contact with her invariably deepened into profound esteem
and confidence in those who had the good fortune to share her intimacy.
Her manner, which was the most gentle and winning imaginable, had in it
a touch of demure playfulness that was very charming, at the same time
that it habitually conveyed the idea of extreme self-control, and a
great reserve of moral force and determination underneath this quiet
surface.

Mrs. Harry's manner was artificial, and my mother told me she thought it
the result of an early determination to curb the demonstrations of an
impetuous temper and passionate feelings. It had become her second
nature when I knew her, however, and contributed not a little to the
immense ascendency she soon acquired over my vehement and stormy
character. She charmed me into absolute submission to her will and
wishes, and I all but worshiped her.

She was a Miss Murray, and came of good Scottish blood, her
great-grandfather having at one time been private secretary to the Young
Pretender. She married Mrs. Siddons's youngest son, Harry, the only one
of my aunt's children who adopted her own profession, and who, himself
an indifferent actor, undertook the management of the Edinburgh theater,
fell into ill-health, and died, leaving his lovely young widow with four
children to the care of her brother, William Murray, who succeeded him
in the government of the theater, of which his sister and himself became
joint proprietors.

Edinburgh at that time was still the small but important capital of
Scotland, instead of what railroads and modern progress have reduced it
to, merely the largest town. Those were the days of the giants, Scott,
Wilson, Hogg, Jeffrey, Brougham, Sidney Smith, the Horners, Lord Murray,
Allison, and all the formidable intellectual phalanx that held mental
dominion over the English-speaking world, under the blue and yellow
standard of the _Edinburgh Review_.

The ancient city had still its regular winter season of fashionable
gayety, during which sedan chairs were to be seen carrying through its
streets, to its evening assemblies, the more elderly members of the
_beau monde_. The nobility and gentry of Scotland came up from their
distant country residences to their town-houses in "Auld Reekie," as
they now come up to London.

Edinburgh was a brilliant and peculiarly intellectual center of society
with a strongly marked national character, and the theater held a
distinguished place among its recreations; the many eminent literary and
professional men who then made the Scotch capital illustrious being
zealous patrons of the drama and frequenters of the play-house, and
proud, with reason, of their excellent theatrical company, at the head
of which was William Murray, one of the most perfect actors I have ever
known on any stage, and among whom Terry and Mackay, admirable actors
and cultivated, highly intelligent men, were conspicuous for their
ability.

Mrs. Henry Siddons held a peculiar position in Edinburgh, her widowed
condition and personal attractions combining to win the sympathy and
admiration of its best society, while her high character and blameless
conduct secured the respect and esteem of her theatrical subjects and
the general public, with whom she was an object of almost affectionate
personal regard, and in whose favor, as long as she exercised her
profession, she continued to hold the first place, in spite of their
temporary enthusiasm for the great London stars who visited them at
stated seasons. "_Our_ Mrs. Siddons," I have repeatedly heard her called
in Edinburgh, not at all with the slightest idea of comparing her with
her celebrated mother-in-law, but rather as expressing the kindly
personal good-will and the admiring approbation with which she was
regarded by her own townsfolk, who were equally proud and fond of her.
She was not a great actress, nor even what in my opinion could be called
a good actress, for she had no natural versatility or power of
assumption whatever, and what was opposed to her own nature and
character was altogether out of the range of her powers.

On the other hand, when (as frequently happened) she had to embody
heroines whose characteristics coincided with her own, her grace and
beauty and innate sympathy with every thing good, true, pure, and
upright made her an admirable representative of all such characters. She
wanted physical power and weight for the great tragic drama of
Shakespeare, and passion for the heroine of his love tragedy; but Viola,
Rosalind, Isabel, Imogen, could have no better representative. In the
first part Sir Walter Scott has celebrated (in the novel of "Waverley")
the striking effect produced by her resemblance to her brother, William
Murray, in the last scene of "Twelfth Night;" and in many pieces founded
upon the fate and fortune of Mary Stuart she gave an unrivaled
impersonation of the "enchanting queen" of modern history.

My admiration and affection for her were, as I have said, unbounded; and
some of the various methods I took to exhibit them were, I dare say,
intolerably absurd, though she was graciously good-natured in tolerating
them.

Every day, summer and winter, I made it my business to provide her with
a sprig of myrtle for her sash at dinner-time; this, when she had worn
it all the evening, I received again on bidding her good night, and
stored in a _treasure_ drawer, which, becoming in time choked with
fragrant myrtle leaves, was emptied with due solemnity into the fire,
that destruction in the most classic form might avert from them all
desecration. I ought by rights to have eaten their ashes, or drunk a
decoction of them, or at least treasured them in a golden urn, but
contented myself with watching them shrivel and crackle with much
sentimental satisfaction. I remember a most beautiful myrtle tree,
which, by favor of a peculiarly sunny and sheltered exposure, had
reached a very unusual size in the open air in Edinburgh, and in the
flowering season might have borne comparison with the finest shrubs of
the warm terraces of the under cliff of the Isle of Wight. From this I
procured my daily offering to my divinity.

The myrtle is the least voluptuous of flowers; the legend of Juno's
myrtle-sheltered bath seems not unnaturally suggested by the vigorous,
fresh, and healthy beauty of the plant, and the purity of its snowy
blossoms. The exquisite quality, too, which myrtle possesses, of
preserving uncorrupted the water in which it is placed, with other
flowers, is a sort of moral attribute, which, combined with the peculiar
character of its fragrance, seems to me to distinguish this lovely shrub
from every other flower of the field or garden.

To return to my worship of Mrs. Harry Siddons. On one occasion the sash
of her dress came unfastened and fell to the ground, and, having secured
possession of it, I retained my prize and persisted in wearing it,
baldric fashion, over every dress I put on. It was a silk scarf, of a
sober dark-gray color, and occasionally produced a most fantastical and
absurd contrast with what I was wearing.

These were childish expressions of a feeling the soberer portion of
which remains with me even now, and makes the memory of that excellent
woman, and kind, judicious friend, still very dear to my grateful
affection. Not only was the change of discipline under which I now lived
advantageous, but the great freedom I enjoyed, and which would have been
quite impossible in London, was delightful to me; while the wonderful,
picturesque beauty of Edinburgh, contrasted with the repulsive dinginess
and ugliness of my native city, was a constant source of the liveliest
pleasure to me.

The indescribable mixture of historic and romantic interest with all
this present, visible beauty, the powerful charm of the Scotch ballad
poetry, which now began to seize upon my imagination, and the
inexhaustible enchantment of the associations thrown by the great modern
magician over every spot made memorable by his mention, combined to
affect my mind and feelings at this most susceptible period of my life,
and made Edinburgh dear and delightful to me above all other places I
ever saw, as it still remains--with the one exception of Rome, whose
combined claim to veneration and admiration no earthly city can indeed
dispute.

Beautiful Edinburgh! dear to me for all its beauty and all the happiness
that I have never failed to find there, for the keen delight of my year
of youthful life spent among its enchanting influences, and for the kind
friends and kindred whose affectionate hospitality has made each return
thither as happy as sadder and older years allowed--my blessing on every
stone of its streets!

I had the utmost liberty allowed me in my walks about the city, and at
early morning have often run up and round and round the Calton Hill,
delighting, from every point where I stopped to breathe, in the noble
panorama on every side. Not unfrequently I walked down to the sands at
Porto Bello and got a sea bath, and returned before breakfast; while on
the other side of the town my rambles extended to Newhaven and the rocks
and sands of Cramond Beach.

While Edinburgh had then more the social importance of a capital, it had
a much smaller extent; great portions of the present new town did not
then exist. Warriston and the Bridge of Dean were still out of town;
there was no Scott's monument in Princess Street, no railroad terminus
with its smoke and scream and steam scaring the echoes of the North
Bridge; no splendid Queen's Drive encircled Arthur's Seat. Windsor
Street, in which Mrs. Harry Siddons lived, was one of the most recently
finished, and broke off abruptly above gardens and bits of meadow land,
and small, irregular inclosures, and mean scattered houses, stretching
down toward Warriston Crescent; while from the balcony of the
drawing-room the eye, passing over all this untidy suburban district,
reached, without any intervening buildings, the blue waters of the Forth
and Inchkeith with its revolving light.

Standing on that balcony late one cold, clear night, watching the rising
and setting of that sea star that kept me fascinated out in the chill
air, I saw for the first time the sky illuminated with the aurora
borealis. It was a magnificent display of the phenomenon, and I feel
certain that my attention was first attracted to it by the crackling
sound which appeared to accompany the motion of the pale flames as they
streamed across the sky; indeed, _crackling_, is not the word that
properly describes the sound I heard, which was precisely that made by
the _flickering_ of blazing fire; and as I have often since read and
heard discussions upon the question whether the motion of the aurora is
or is not accompanied by an audible sound, I can only say that on this
occasion it was the sound that first induced me to observe the sheets of
white light that were leaping up the sky. At this time I knew nothing of
these phenomena, or the debates among scientific men to which they had
given rise, and can therefore trust the impression made on my senses.

I have since then witnessed repeated appearances of these beautiful
meteoric lights, but have never again detected any sound accompanying
their motion. The finest aurora I ever saw was at Lenox, Massachusetts;
a splendid rose-colored pavilion appeared to be spread all over the sky,
through which, in several parts, the shining of the stars was distinctly
visible, while at the zenith the luminous drapery seemed gathered into
folds, the color of which deepened almost to crimson. It was wonderfully
beautiful. At Lenox, too, one night during the season of the appearance
of the great comet of 1858, the splendid flaming plume hovered over one
side of the sky, while all round the other horizon streams of white fire
appeared to rise from altars of white light. It was awfully glorious,
and beyond all description beautiful. The sky of that part of the United
States, particularly in the late autumn and winter, was more frequently
visited by magnificent meteors than any other with which I have been
acquainted.

The extraordinary purity, dryness, and elasticity of the atmosphere in
that region was, I suppose, one cause of these heavenly shows; the clear
transparency of the sky by day often giving one the feeling that one was
looking straight into heaven without any intermediate window of
atmospheric air, while at night (especially in winter) the world of
stars, larger, brighter, more numerous than they ever seemed to me
elsewhere, and yet apparently infinitely higher and farther off, were
set in a depth of dark whose blackness appeared transparent rather than
opaque.

Midnight after midnight I have stood, when the thermometer was twenty
and more degrees below freezing, looking over the silent, snow-smothered
hills round the small mountain village of Lenox, fast asleep in their
embrace, and from thence to the solemn sky rising above them like a huge
iron vault hung with thousands of glittering steel weapons, from which,
every now and then, a shining scimitar fell flashing earthward; it was a
cruel looking sky, in its relentless radiance.

My solitary walks round Edinburgh have left two especial recollections
in my mind; the one pleasant, the other very sad. I will speak of the
latter first; it was like a leaf out of the middle of a tragedy, of
which I never knew either the beginning or the end.




CHAPTER IX.


I was coming home one day from a tramp toward Cramond Beach, and was
just on the brow of a wooded height looking towards Edinburgh and not
two miles from it, when a heavy thunder-cloud darkened the sky above my
head and pelted me with large drops of ominous warning. On one side of
the road the iron gate and lodge of some gentleman's park suggested
shelter; and the half-open door of the latter showing a tidy,
pleasant-looking woman busy at an ironing table, I ventured to ask her
to let me come in till the sponge overhead should have emptied itself.
She very good-humoredly consented, and I sat down while the rain rang
merrily on the gravel walk before the door, and smoked in its vehement
descent on the carriage-road beyond.

The woman pursued her work silently, and I presently became aware of a
little child, as silent as herself, sitting beyond her, in a small
wicker chair; on the baby's table which fastened her into it were some
remnants of shabby, broken toys, among which her tiny, wax-like fingers
played with listless unconsciousness, while her eyes were fixed on me.
The child looked wan and wasted, and had in its eyes, which it never
turned from me, the weary, wistful, unutterable look of "far away and
long ago" longing that comes into the miserably melancholy eyes of
monkeys.

"Is the baby ill?" said I.

"Ou na, mem; it's no to say that ill, only just always peaking and
pining like"--and she stopped ironing a moment to look at the little
creature.

"Is it your own baby?" said I, struck with the absence of motherly
tenderness in spite of the woman's compassionate tone and expression.

"Ou na, mem, it's no my ain; I hae nane o' my ain."

"How old is it?" I went on.

"Nigh upon five year old," was the answer, with which the ironing was
steadily resumed, with apparently no desire to encourage more questions.

"Five years old!" I exclaimed, in horrified amazement: its size was that
of a rickety baby under three, while its wizened face was that of a
spell-struck creature of no assignable age, or the wax image of some
dwindling life wasting away before the witch-kindled fire of a
diabolical hatred. The tiny hands and arms were pitiably thin, and
showed under the yellow skin sharp little bones no larger than a
chicken's; and at her wrists and temples the blue tracery of her veins
looked like a delicate map of the blood, that seemed as if it could
hardly be pulsing through her feeble frame; while below the eyes a livid
shadow darkened the faded face that had no other color in it.

The tears welled up into my eyes, and the woman, seeing them, suddenly
stopped ironing and exclaimed eagerly: "Ou, mem, ye ken the family; or
maybe ye'll hae been a friend of the puir thing's mither!" I was obliged
to say that I neither knew them nor any thing about them, but that the
child's piteous aspect had made me cry.

In answer to the questions with which I then plied her, the woman, who
seemed herself affected by the impression I had received from the poor
little creature's appearance, told me that the child was that of the
only daughter of the people who owned the place; that there was
"something wrong" about it all, she did not know what--a marriage
ill-pleasing to the grandparents perhaps, perhaps even worse than that;
but the mother was dead, the family had been abroad for upward of three
years, and the child had been left under her charge. This was all she
told me, and probably all she knew; and as she ended she wiped the tears
from her own eyes, adding, "I'm thinking the puir bairn will no live
long itsel'."

The rain was over and the sun shone, and I got up to go; as I went, the
child's dreary eyes followed me out at the door, and I cried all the way
home. Was it possible that my appearance suggested to that tiny soul the
image of its young lost mother?

The other incident in my rambles that I wish to record was of a far
pleasanter sort. I had gone down to the pier at Newhaven, one blowy,
blustering day (the fine Granton Pier Hotel and landing-place did not
yet exist), and stood watching the waves taking their mad run and leap
over the end of the pier, in a glorious, foaming frenzy that kept me
fascinated with the fine uproar, till it suddenly occurred to me that it
would be delightful to be out among them (I certainly could have had no
recollections of sea-sickness), and I determined to try and get a boat
and go out on the frith.

I stopped at a cottage on the outskirts of the fishing town (it was not
much more than a village then) of Newhaven, and knocked. Invited to come
in, I did so, and there sat a woman, one of the very handsomest I ever
saw, in solitary state, leisurely combing a magnificent curtain of fair
hair that fell over her ample shoulders and bosom and almost swept the
ground. She was seated on a low stool, but looked tall as well as large,
and her foam-fresh complexion and gray-green eyes might have become
Venus Anadyomene herself, turned into a Scotch fish-wife of five and
thirty, or "thereawa." "Can you tell me of any one who will take me out
in a boat for a little while?" quoth I. She looked steadily at me for a
minute, and then answered laconically, "Ay, my man and boy shall gang
wi' ye." A few lusty screams brought her husband and son forth, and at
her bidding they got a boat ready, and, with me well covered with
sail-cloths, tarpaulins, and rough dreadnaughts of one sort and another,
rowed out from the shore into the turmoil of the sea. A very little of
the dancing I got now was delight enough for me, and, deadly sick, I
besought to be taken home again, when the matronly Brinhilda at the
cottage received me with open-throated peals of laughter, and then made
me sit down till I had conquered my qualms and was able to walk back to
Edinburgh. Before I went, she showed me a heap of her children, too many,
it seemed to me, to be counted; but as they lay in an inextricable mass
on the floor in an inner room, there may have seemed more arms and legs
forming the radii, of which a clump of curly heads was the center, than
there really were.

The husband was a comparatively small man, with dark eyes, hair, and
complexion; but her "boy," the eldest, who had come with him to take
care of me, was a fair-haired, fresh-faced young giant, of his mother's
strain, and, like her, looked as if he had come of the Northern Vikings,
or some of the Niebelungen Lied heroes.

When I went away, my fish-wife bade me come again in smooth weather, and
if her husband and son were at home they should take me out; and I gave
her my address, and begged her, when she came up to town with her fish,
to call at the house.

She was a splendid specimen of her tribe, climbing the steep Edinburgh
streets with bare white feet, the heavy fish-basket at her back hardly
stooping her broad shoulders, her florid face sheltered and softened in
spite of its massiveness into something like delicacy by the transparent
shadow of the white handkerchief tied hoodwise over her fair hair, and
her shrill sweet voice calling "Caller haddie!" all the way she went, in
the melancholy monotone that resounds through the thoroughfares of
Edinburgh--the only melodious street-cry (except the warning of the
Venetian gondoliers) that I ever heard.

I often went back to visit my middle-aged Christie Johnstone, and more
than once saw her and her fellow fish-women haul up the boats on their
return after being out at sea. They all stood on the beach clamoring
like a flock of sea-gulls, and, as a boat's keel rasped the shingles,
rushed forward and seized it; and while the men in their sea clothes,
all dripping like huge Newfoundland dogs, jumped out in their heavy
boots and took each the way to their several houses, their stalwart
partners, hauling all together at the rope fastened to the boat, drew it
up beyond water-mark, and seized and sorted its freight of fish, and
stalked off each with her own basketful, with which she trudged up to
trade and chaffer with the "gude wives" of the town, and bring back to
the men the value of their work. It always seemed to me that these women
had about as equal a share of the labor of life as the most zealous
champion of the rights of their sex could desire.

I did not indulge in any more boating expeditions, but admired the sea
from the pier, and became familiar with all the spokes of the
fish-wife's family wheel; at any rate, enough to distinguish Jamie from
Sandy, and Willie from Johnnie, and Maggie from Jeanie, and Ailsie from
Lizzie, and was great friends with them all.

When I returned to Edinburgh, a theatrical star of the first magnitude,
I took a morning's holiday to drive down to Newhaven, in search of my
old ally, Mistress Sandie Flockhart. She no longer inhabited the little
detached cottage, and divers and sundry were the Flockhart "wives" that
I "speired at" through the unsavory street of Newhaven, before I found
the right one at last, on the third flat of a filthy house, where noise
and stench combined almost to knock me down, and where I could hardly
knock loud enough to make myself heard above the din within and without.
She opened the door of a room that looked as if it was running over with
live children, and confronted me with the unaltered aspect of her
comely, smiling face. But I had driven down from Edinburgh in all the
starlike splendor of a lilac silk dress and French crape bonnet, and my
dear fish-wife stared at me silently, with her mouth and gray eyes wide
open; only for a moment, however, for in the next she joyfully
exclaimed, "Ech, sirs! but it's yer ain sel come back again at last!"
Then seizing my hand, she added breathlessly, "I'se gotten anither ane,
and ye maun come in and see him;" so she dragged me bodily through and
over her surging progeny to a cradle, where, soothed by the strident
lullabies of its vociferating predecessors, her last-born and eleventh
baby lay peaceably slumbering, an infant Hercules.

Among Mrs. Harry Siddons's intimate friends and associates were the
remarkable brothers George and Andrew Combe; the former a lawyer by
profession, but known to the literary and scientific world of Europe and
America as the Apostle of Phrenology, and the author of a work entitled
"The Constitution of Man," and other writings, whose considerable merit
and value appear to me more or less impaired by the craniological theory
which he made the foundation of all his works, and which to my mind
diminished the general utility of his publications for those readers who
are not prepared to accept it as the solution of all the mysteries of
human existence.

His writings are all upon subjects of the greatest importance and
universal interest, and full of the soundest moral philosophy and the
most enlightened humanity; and their only drawback, to me, is the
phrenological element which enters so largely into his treatment of
every question. Indeed, his life was devoted to the dissemination of
this new philosophy of human nature (new, at any rate, in the precise
details which Gall, Spurzheim, and he elaborated from it), which, Combe
believed, if once generally accepted, would prove the clew to every
difficulty, and the panacea for every evil existing in modern
civilization. Political and social, religious and civil, mental and
moral government, according to him, hinged upon the study and knowledge
of the different organs of the human brain, and he labored incessantly
to elucidate and illustrate this subject, upon which he thought the
salvation of the world depended. For a number of years I enjoyed the
privilege of his friendship, and I have had innumerable opportunities of
hearing his system explained by himself; but as I was never able to get
beyond a certain point of belief in it, it was agreed on all hands that
my brain was deficient in the organ of causality, _i.e._, in the
capacity of logical reasoning, and that therefore it was not in my power
to perceive the force of his arguments or the truth of his system, even
when illustrated by his repeated demonstrations.

I am bound to say that my cousin Cecilia Combe had quite as much trouble
with her household, her lady's-maids were quite as inefficient, her
housemaids quite as careless, and her cooks quite as fiery-tempered and
unsober as those of "ordinary Christians," in spite of Mr. Combe's
observation and manipulation of their bumps previous to engaging them.

I remember once, when I was sitting to Lawrence Macdonald for my bust,
which was one of the first he ever executed, before he left Edinburgh to
achieve fame and fortune as the most successful marble portrait-maker in
Rome, an absurd instance of Mr. Combe's insight into character occurred
at my expense.

Macdonald was an intimate friend of the Combes, and I used to see him at
their house very frequently, and Mr. Combe often came to the studio when
I was sitting. One day while he was standing by, grimly observing
Macdonald's absorbed manipulation of his clay, while I, the original
_clay_, occupied the "bad eminence" of an artist's studio throne, my
aunt came in with a small paper bag containing raspberry tarts in her
hand. This was a dainty so peculiarly agreeable to me that, even at that
advanced stage of my existence, those who loved me, or wished to be
loved by me, were apt to approach me with those charming three-cornered
puff paste propitiations.

As soon as I espied the confectioner's light paper bag I guessed its
contents, and, springing from my dignified station, seized on the tarts
as if I had been the notorious knave of the nursery rhyme. "There now,
Macdonald, I told you so!" quoth Mr. Combe, and they both began to
laugh; and so did I, with my mouth full of raspberry puff, for it was
quite evident to me that my phrenological friend had impressed upon my
artistic friend the special development of my organ of alimentiveness,
as he politely called it, which I translated into the vulgate as "bump
of greediness." In spite of my reluctance to sit to him, from the
conviction that the thick outline of my features would turn the edge of
the finest chisel that "ever yet cut breath," and perhaps by dint of
phrenology, Macdonald succeeded in making a very good bust of me; and
some time after, to my great amusement, having seen me act in the
"Grecian Daughter," he said to me, "Oh, but what I want to do now is a
statue of you."

"Yes," said I, "and I will tell you exactly where--in the last scene,
where I cover my face."

"Precisely so!" cried my enthusiastic friend, and then burst out
laughing, on seeing the trap I had laid for him; but he was a very
honest man, and stood by his word.

The attitude he wished to represent in a statue was that when, having
stabbed Dionysius, I raised the dagger toward heaven with one hand, and
drew my drapery over my face with the other. For my notion of heroic
women has always been, I am afraid, rather base--a sort of "They do not
mind death, but they can not bear pinching;" and though Euphrasia might,
could, would, and should stab the man who was about to murder her
father, I have no idea that she would like to look at the man she had
stabbed. "O Jupiter, no blood!" is apt to be the instinct, I suspect,
even in very villainous feminine natures, and those who are and those
who are not cowards alike shrink from sights of horror.

When I made Macdonald's acquaintance I was a girl of about seventeen,
and he at the very beginning of his artistic career; but he had an
expression of power and vivid intelligence which foretold his future
achievements in the exquisite art to which he devoted himself.

When next I met Macdonald it was after a long lapse of time, in 1846, in
Rome. Thither he had gone to study his divine art, and there he had
remained for a number of years in the exercise of it. He was now the
Signor Lorenzo of the Palazzo Barberini, the most successful and
celebrated maker of busts, probably, in Rome, having achieved fame,
fortune, the favor of the great, and the smiles of the fair, of the most
fastidious portion of the English society that makes its winter season
in Italy. He dined several times at our house (I was living with my
sister and her husband); under his guidance we went to see the statutes
of the Vatican by torchlight; and he came out once or twice in the
summer of that year to visit us at our villa at Frascati.

I returned to Rome in 1852, and saw Macdonald frequently, in his studio,
in our own house, and in general society; and shortly before leaving
Rome I met him at dinner at Mrs. Archer Clive's (the authoress of "Paul
Ferrol"). I had a nosegay of snowdrops in the bosom of my dress, and
Macdonald, who sat next me, observed that they reminded him of Scotland,
that he had never seen one in all the years he had passed in Italy, and
did not even know that they grew there.

The next day I went to the gardener of the Villa Medici, an old friend
of mine, and begged him to procure a pot of snowdrops for me, which I
carried to Macdonald's studio, thinking an occasional reminiscence of
his own northern land, which he had not visited for years, not a bad
element to infuse into his Roman life and surroundings. Macdonald's
portraits are generally good likenesses, sufficiently idealized to be
also good works of art. In statuary he never accomplished any thing of
extraordinary excellence. I think the "Ulysses Recognized by his Dog"
his best performance in sculpture. His studio was an extremely
interesting place of resort, from the portraits of his many remarkable
sitters with which it was filled.

I met dear old Macdonald, in the winter of 1873, creeping in the sun
slowly up the Pincio as I waddled heavily down it (_Eheu!_), his
snow-white hair and moustache making his little-altered and strongly
marked features only more striking. I visited his studio and found
there, ardently and successfully creating immortal gods, a handsome,
pleasing youth, his son, inheriting his father's genius, and, strange to
say, his broadest of Scotch accents, though he had himself never been
out of Rome, where he was born.

On one occasion Mr. Combe was consulted by Prince Albert with regard to
the royal children, and was desired to examine their heads. He did not,
of course, repeat any of the opinions he had given upon the young
princes' "developments," but said they were very nice children, and
likely to be capitally educated, for, he added (though shaking his head
over cousinly intermarriages among royal personages), Prince Albert was
well acquainted with the writings of Gall and Spurzheim, and his own
work on "The Constitution of Man." Prince Albert seems to have known
something of every thing that was worthy of a Wiseman's knowledge.

In spite of my inability to accept his science of human nature, Mr.
Combe was always a most kind and condescending friend to me. He was a
man of singular integrity, uprightness, and purity of mind and
character, and of great justice and impartiality of judgment; he was
extremely benevolent and humane, and one of the most reasonable human
beings I have ever known. From first to last my intercourse with him was
always delightful and profitable to me. Of the brothers, however, the
younger, Dr. Andrew Combe, was by far the most generally popular, and
deservedly so. He was one of the most excellent and amiable of men; his
countenance, voice, and manner were expressive of the kindliest
benevolence; he had none of the angular rigidity of person and harshness
of feature of his brother: both were worthy and distinguished men, but
Andrew Combe was charming, which George Combe was not--at least to those
who did not know him. Although Dr. Combe completely indorsed his
brother's system, he was far lass fanatical and importunate in his
advocacy of it. Indeed, his works upon physiology, hygiene, and the
physical education of children are of such universal value and
importance that no parent or trainer of youth should be unfamiliar with
them. Moreover, to them and their excellent author society is indebted
for an amount of knowledge on these subjects which has now passed into
general use and experience, and become so completely incorporated in the
practice of the present day, that it is hardly remembered to whom the
first and most powerful impression of the importance of the "natural
laws," and their observance in our own lives and the training of our
children, is due. I knew a school of young girls in Massachusetts, where
taking regular exercise, the use of cold baths, the influence of fresh
air, and all the process of careful physical education to which they
were submitted, went by the general name of _Combeing_, in honor of Dr.
Combe.

Dr. Combe was Mrs. Harry Siddons's medical adviser, most trusted friend,
and general counselor. The young people of her family, myself included,
all loved and honored him; and the gleam of genial pleasant humor (a
quality of which his worthy brother had hardly a spark) which frequently
brightened the gentle gravity of his countenance and demeanor made his
intercourse delightful to us; and great was the joy when he proposed to
take one or other of us in his gig for a drive to some patient's house,
in the lovely neighborhood of Edinburgh. I remember my poor dear
mother's dismay when, on my return home, I told her of these same
drives. She was always in a fever of apprehension about people's falling
in love with each other, and begged to know how old a man this
delightful doctor, with whom Mrs. Harry allowed her own daughters and my
mother's daughters to go _gigging_, might be. "Ah," replied I,
inexpressibly amused at the idea of Dr. Combe in the character of a gay
gallant, "ever so old!" I had the real school-girl's estimate of age,
and honestly thought that dear Dr. Combe was quite an old man. I believe
he was considerably under forty. But if he had been much younger, the
fatal disease which had set its seal upon him, and of which he
died--after defending his life for an almost incredible space of time
from its ultimate victory (which all his wisdom and virtue could but
postpone)--was so clearly written upon his thin, sallow face, deep-sunk
eyes, and emaciated figure, and gave so serious and almost sad an
expression to his countenance and manner, that one would as soon have
thought of one's grandfather as an unsafe companion for young girls. I
still possess a document, duly drawn up and engrossed in the form of a
deed by his brother, embodying a promise which he made to me jestingly
one day, that when he was dead he would not fail to let me know, if ever
ghosts were permitted to revisit the earth, by appearing to me, binding
himself by this contract that the vision should be unaccompanied by the
smallest smell of sulphur or flash of blue flame, and that instead of
the indecorous undress of a slovenly winding-sheet, he would wear his
usual garments, and the familiar brown great-coat with which, to use his
own expression, he "buttoned his bones together" in his life. I
remembered that laughing promise when, years after it was given, the
news of his death reached me, and I thought how little dismay I should
feel if it could indeed have been possible for me to see again, "in his
image as he lived," that kind and excellent friend. On one of the
occasions when Dr. Combe took me to visit one of his patients, we went
to a quaint old house in the near neighborhood of Edinburgh. If the
Laird of Dumbiedike's mansion had been still standing, it might have
been that very house. The person we went to visit was an old Mr. M----,
to whom he introduced me, and with whom he withdrew, I suppose for a
professional consultation, leaving me in a strange, curious,
old-fashioned apartment, full of old furniture, old books, and faded,
tattered, old nondescript articles, whose purpose it was not easy to
guess, but which must have been of some value, as they were all
protected from the air and dust by glass covers. When the gentlemen
returned, Mr. M---- gratified my curiosity by showing every one of them
to me in detail, and informing me that they had all belonged to, or were
in some way relics of, Charles Edward Stuart. "And this," said the old
gentleman, "was his sword." It was a light dress rapier, with a very
highly cut and ornamented steel hilt. I half drew the blade, thinking
how it had flashed from its scabbard, startling England and dazzling
Scotland at its first unsheathing, and in what inglorious gloom of
prostrate fortunes it had rusted away at last, the scorn of those who
had opposed, and the despair of those who had embraced, its cause. "And
so that was the Pretender's sword!" said I, hardly aware that I had
spoken until the little, withered, snuff-colored gentleman snatched
rather than took it from me, exclaiming, "Wha' did ye say, madam? it was
the _prince's_ sword!" and laid it tenderly back in the receptacle from
which he had taken it.

As we drove away, Dr. Combe told me, what indeed I had perceived, that
this old man, who looked like a shriveled, russet-colored leaf for age
and feebleness, was a passionate partisan of Charles Edward, by whom my
mention of him as the Pretender, if coming from a man, would have been
held a personal insult. It was evident that I, though a mere chit of the
irresponsible sex, had both hurt and offended him by it. His sole
remaining interest in life was hunting out and collecting the smallest
records or memorials of this shadow of a hero; surely the merest "royal
apparition" that ever assumed kingship. "What a set those Stuarts must
have been!" exclaimed an American friend of mine once, after listening
to "Bonnie Prince Charlie," "to have had all those glorious Jacobite
songs made and sung for them, and not to have been more of men than they
were!" And so I think, and thought even then, for though I had a passion
for the Jacobite ballads, I had very little enthusiasm for their
thoroughly inefficient hero, who, for the claimant of a throne, was
undoubtedly _un très pauvre sire_. Talking over this with me, as we
drove from Mr. M----'s, Dr. Combe said he was persuaded that at that
time there were men to be found in Scotland ready to fight a duel about
the good fame of Mary Stuart.

Sir Walter Scott told me that when the Scottish regalia was discovered,
in its obscure place of security, in Edinburgh Castle, pending the
decision of government as to its ultimate destination, a committee of
gentlemen were appointed its guardians, among whom he was one; and that
he received a most urgent entreaty from an old lady of the Maxwell
family to be permitted to see it. She was nearly ninety years old, and
feared she might not live till the crown jewels of Scotland were
permitted to become objects of public exhibition, and pressed Sir Walter
with importunate prayers to allow her to see them before she died. Sir
Walter's good sense and good nature alike induced him to take upon
himself to grant the poor old lady's petition, and he himself conducted
her into the presence of these relics of her country's independent
sovereignty; when, he said, tottering hastily forward from his support,
she fell on her knees before the crown, and, clasping and wringing her
wrinkled hands, wailed over it as a mother over her dead child. His
description of the scene was infinitely pathetic, and it must have
appealed to all his own poetical and imaginative sympathy with the
former glories of his native land.

My mother's anxiety about Dr. Combe's age reminds me that my intimacy
with my cousin, Harry Siddons, who was now visiting his mother previous
to his departure for India to begin his military career, had been a
subject of considerable perplexity to her while I was still at home and
he used to come from Addiscombe to see us. Nothing could be more
diametrically opposite than his mother's and my mother's system (if
either could be called so) of dealing with the difficulty, though I have
my doubts whether Mrs. Harry perceived any in the case; and whereas I
think my mother's apprehensions and precautions would have very probably
been finally justified by some childish engagement between Harry and
myself, resulting in all sorts of difficulties and complications as time
went on and absence and distance produced their salutary effect on a boy
of twenty and a girl of seventeen, Mrs. Harry remained passive, and
apparently unconscious of any danger; and we walked and talked and
danced and were sentimental together after the most approved cousinly
fashion, and Harry went off to India with my name engraved upon his
sword--a circumstance which was only made known to me years after by his
widow (his and my cousin, Harriet Siddons), whom he met and loved and
married in India, and who made me laugh, telling me how hard he and she
had worked, scratched, and scrubbed together to try and efface my name
from the good sword; which, however, being true steel, and not
inconstant heart of man, refused to give up its dedication. I should
have much objected to any such inscription had I been consulted.

My cousin Harry's wife was the second daughter of George Siddons, Mrs.
Siddons's eldest son, who through her interest was appointed, while
still quite a young man, to the influential and lucrative post of
collector of the port at Calcutta, which position he retained for nearly
forty years. He married a lady in whose veins ran the blood of the kings
of Delhi, and in whose descendants, in one or two instances, even in the
fourth generation, this ancestry reveals itself by a type of beauty of
strikingly Oriental character. Among these is the beautiful Mrs.
Scott-Siddons, whose exquisite features present the most perfect living
miniature of her great-grandmother's majestic beauty. In two curiously
minute, highly finished miniatures of the royal Hindoo personages, her
ancestors, which Mrs. George Siddons gave Miss Twiss (and the latter
gave me), it is wonderful how strong a likeness may be traced to several
of their remote descendants born in England of English parents.

To return to Edinburgh: another intimate acquaintance, or rather friend,
of Mr. Combe's whom I frequently met at his house was Duncan McLaren,
father of the present member of Parliament, the able editor of the
_Scotsman_. Between him and the Combes all matters of public interest
and importance were discussed from the most liberal and enlightened
point of view, and it was undoubtedly a great advantage to an
intelligent girl of my age to hear such vigorous, manly, clear
expositions of the broadest aspects of all the great political and
governmental questions of the day. Admirable sound sense was the
characteristic that predominated in that intellectual circle, and was
brought to bear upon every subject; and I remember with the greatest
pleasure the evenings I passed at Mr. Combe's residence in
Northumberland Street, with these three grave men. Among the younger
associates to whom these elders and betters extended their kindly
hospitality was William Gregory, son of the eminent professor of
chemistry, who himself has since pursued the same scientific course with
equal success and distinction, adding a new luster to the honorable name
he inherited.

Mr. William Murray, my dear Mrs. Harry's brother, was another member of
our society, to whom I have alluded, in speaking of the Edinburgh
Theater, as an accomplished actor; and sometimes I used to think that
was all he was, for it was impossible to determine whether the romance,
the sentiment, the pathos, the quaint humor, or any of the curiously
capricious varying moods in which these were all blended, displayed real
elements of his character or only shifting exhibitions of the peculiar
versatility of a nature at once so complex and so superficial that it
really was impossible for others, and I think would have been difficult
for himself, to determine what was genuine thought and feeling in him,
and what the mere appearance or demonstration or imitation of thought
and feeling. Perhaps this peculiarity was what made him such a perfect
actor. He was a very melancholy man, with a tendency to moody morbidness
of mind which made him a subject of constant anxiety to his sister. His
countenance, which was very expressive without being at all handsome,
habitually wore an air of depression, and yet it was capable of
brilliant vivacity and humorous play of feature. His conversation, when
he was in good spirits, was a delightful mixture of sentiment, wit,
poetry, fun, fancy and imagination. He had married the sister of Mrs.
Thomas Moore (the Bessie so tenderly invited to "fly from the world"
with the poet), and I used to think that he was like an embodiment of
Moore's lyrical genius: there was so much pathos and wit and humor and
grace and spirit and tenderness, and such a quantity of factitious
flummery besides in him, that he always reminded me of those pretty and
provoking songs in which some affected attitudinizing conceit mingles
with almost every expression of genuine feeling, like an artificial rose
in a handful of wild flowers.

I do not think William Murray's diamonds were of the finest water, but
his _paste_ was; and it was difficult enough to tell the one from the
other. He had a charming voice, and sang exquisitely, after a fashion
which I have no doubt he copied (as, however, only original genius can
copy) from Moore; but his natural musical facility was such that,
although no musician, and singing everything only by ear, he executed
the music of the Figaro in Mozart's "Nozze" admirably. He had a good
deal of his sister's winning charm of manner, and was (but not, I think,
of malice prepense) that pleasantly pernicious creature, a male flirt.
It was quite out of his power to address any woman (sister or niece or
cookmaid) without an air and expression of sentimental courtesy and
tender chivalrous devotion, that must have been puzzling and perplexing
in the extreme to the uninitiated; and I am persuaded that until some
familiarity bred--if not contempt, at least comprehension--every woman
of his acquaintance (his cook included) must have felt convinced that he
was struggling against a respectful and hopeless passion for her.

Of another acquaintance of ours in Edinburgh, a Mrs. A----, I wish to
say a word. She was a very singular woman; not perhaps in being
tolerably ignorant and silly, with an unmeaning face and a foolish,
commonplace manner, an average specimen of vacuity of mind and vapidity
of conversation, but undoubtedly singular in that she combined with
these not un-frequent human conditions a most rare gift of musical and
poetical interpretation--a gift so peculiar that when she sang she
literally seemed inspired, taken possession of, by some other soul, that
entered into her as she opened her mouth and departed from her as she
shut it. She had a dull, brick-colored, long, thin face, and dull,
pale-green eyes, like boiled gooseberries; but when in a clear, high,
sweet, passionless soprano, like the voice of a spirit, and without any
accompaniment, she sang the old Scotch ballads which she had learned in
early girlhood from her nurse, she produced one of the most powerful
impressions that music and poetry combined can produce. From her I heard
and learned by ear "The Douglas Tragedy," "Fine Flowers in the Valley,"
"Edinbro'," and many others, and became completely enamored of the wild
beauty of the Scotch ballads, the terror and pity of their stories, and
the strange, sweet, mournful music to which they were told. I knew every
collection of them, that I could get hold of, by heart, from Scott's
"Border Minstrelsy" to Smith's six volumes of "National Scottish Songs
with their Musical Settings," and I said and sang them over in my lonely
walks perpetually; and they still are to me among the deepest and
freshest sources of poetical thought and feeling that I know. It is
impossible, I think, to find a truer expression of passion, anguish,
tenderness, and supernatural terror, than those poems contain. The dew
of heaven on the mountain fern is not more limpid than the simplicity of
their diction, nor the heart's blood of a lover more fervid than the
throbbing intensity of their passion. Misery, love, longing, and despair
have found no finer poetical utterance out of Shakespeare; and the
deepest chords of woe and tenderness have been touched by these often
unknown archaic song-writers, with a power and a pathos inferior only to
his. The older ballads, with the exquisite monotony of their burdens
soothing and relieving the tragic tenor of their stories, like the
sighing of wind or the murmuring of water; the clarion-hearted Jacobite
songs, with the fragrance of purple heather and white roses breathing
through their strains of loyal love and death-defying devotion; and the
lovely, pathetic, and bewitchingly humorous songs of Burns, with their
enchanting melodies, were all familiar to me, and, during the year that
I spent in Edinburgh, were my constant study and delight.

On one occasion I sat by Robert Chambers, and heard him relate some
portion of the difficulties and distresses of his own and his brother's
early boyhood (the interesting story has lately become generally known
by the publication of their memoirs); and I then found it very difficult
to swallow my dinner, and my tears, while listening to him, so deeply
was I affected by his simple and touching account of the cruel struggle
the two brave lads--destined to become such admirable and eminent
men--had to make against the hardships of their position. I remember his
describing the terrible longing occasioned by the smell of newly baked
bread in a baker's shop near which they lived, to their poor,
half-starved, craving appetites, while they were saving every farthing
they could scrape together for books and that intellectual sustenance of
which, in after years, they became such bountiful dispensers to all
English-reading folk. Theirs is a very noble story of virtue conquering
fortune and dedicating it to the highest purposes. I used to meet the
Messrs. Chambers at Mr. Combe's house; they were intimate and valued
friends of the phrenologist, and I remember when the book entitled
"Vestiges of Creation" came out, and excited so great a sensation in the
public mind, that Mr. Combe attributed the authorship of it, which was
then a secret, to Robert Chambers.

Another Edinburgh friend of ours was Baron Hume, a Scottish law
dignitary, a charming old gentleman of the very old school, who always
wore powder and a pigtail, knee-breeches, gold-buckles, and black silk
stockings; and who sent a thrill of delight through my girlish breast
when he addressed me, as he invariably did, by the dignified title of
"madam;" though I must sorrowfully add that my triumph on this score was
considerably abated when, on the occasion of my second visit to
Edinburgh, after I had come out on the stage, I went to see my kind old
friend, who was too aged and infirm to go to the theater, and who said
to me as I sat on a low stool by his sofa, "Why, madam, they tell me you
are become a great tragic actress! But," added he, putting his hand
under my chin, and raising my face toward him, "how am I to believe that
of this laughing face, madam?" No doubt he saw in his memory's eye the
majestic nose of my aunt, and my "visnomy" under the effect of such a
contrast must have looked comical enough, by way of a tragic mask. By
the bye, it is on record that while Gainsborough was painting that
exquisite portrait of Mrs. Siddons which is now in the South Kensington
Gallery, and which for many fortunate years adorned my father's house,
after working in absorbed silence for some time he suddenly exclaimed,
"Damn it, madam, there is no end to your nose!" The _restoration_ of
that beautiful painting has destroyed the delicate charm of its
coloring, which was perfectly harmonious, and has as far as possible
made it coarse and vulgar: before it had been spoiled, not even Sir
Joshua's "Tragic Muse" seemed to me so noble and beautiful a
representation of my aunt's beauty as that divine picture of
Gainsborough's.

Two circumstances occurred during my stay in Edinburgh which made a
great impression upon me: the one was the bringing of the famous old
gun, Mons Meg, up to the castle; and the other was the last public
appearance of Madame Catalani. I do not know where the famous old cannon
had been kept till it was resolved to place it in Edinburgh Castle, but
the event was made quite a public festival, and by favor of some of the
military authorities who presided over the ceremony we were admirably
placed in a small angle or turret that commanded the beautiful land and
sea and town, and immediately overlooked the hollow road up which, with
its gallant military escort of Highland troops, and the resounding
accompaniment of their warlike music, the great old lumbering piece of
ordnance came slowly, dragged by a magnificent team of horses, into the
fortress. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast presented by
this huge, clumsy, misshapen, obsolete engine of war, and the spruce,
trim, shining, comparatively little cannon (mere pocket-pistols for
Bellona) which furnished the battery just below our stand, and which, as
soon as the unwieldy old warrioress had occupied the post of honor
reserved for her in their midst, sent forth a martial acclaim of welcome
that made the earth tremble under our feet, and resounded through the
air, shivering, with the strong concussion, more than one pane of glass
in the windows of Princess Street far below.

Of Madame Catalani, all I can say is that I think she sang only "God
save the King" and "Rule Britannia" on the occasion on which I heard
her, which was that of her last public appearance in Edinburgh. I
remember only these, and think had she sung any thing else I could not
have forgotten it. She was quite an old woman, but still splendidly
handsome. Her magnificent dark hair and eyes, and beautiful arms, and
her blue velvet dress with a girdle flashing with diamonds, impressed me
almost as much as her singing; which, indeed, was rather a declamatory
and dramatic than a musical performance. The tones of her voice were
still fine and full, and the majestic action of her arms as she uttered
the words, "When Britain first arose from the waves," wonderfully
graceful and descriptive; still, I remember better that I _saw_, than
that I _heard_, Madame Catalani. She is the first of the queens of song
that I have seen ascend the throne of popular favor, in the course of
sixty years, and pretty little Adelina Patti the last; I have heard all
that have reigned between the two, and above them all Pasta appears to
me pre-eminent for musical and dramatic genius--alone and unapproached,
the muse of tragic song.




CHAPTER X.


I can not remember any event, or series of events, the influence of
which could, during my first stay in Edinburgh, have made a distinctly
serious or religious impression on my mind, or have directed my thoughts
especially toward the more solemn concerns and aspects of life. But from
some cause or other my mind became much affected at this time by
religious considerations, and a strong devotional element began to
predominate among my emotions and cogitations. In my childhood in my
father's house we had no special religious training; our habits were
those of average English Protestants of decent respectability. My mother
read the Bible to us in the morning before breakfast; Mrs. Trimmer's and
Mrs. Barbauld's Scripture histories and paraphrases were taught to us;
we learnt our catechism and collects, and went to church on Sunday, duly
and decorously, as a matter of course. Grace was always said before and
after meals by the youngest member of the family present; and I remember
a quaint, old-fashioned benediction which, when my father happened to be
at home at our bedtime, we used to kneel down by his chair to receive,
and with which he used to dismiss us for the night: "God bless you! make
you good, happy, healthy, and wise!" These, with our own daily morning
and evening prayers, were our devotional habits and pious practices. In
Mrs. Harry Siddons's house religion was never, I think, directly made a
subject of inculcation or discussion; the usual observances of Church of
England people were regularly fulfilled by all her family, the spirit of
true religion governed her life and all her home relations, but special,
direct reference to religious subjects was infrequent among us. God's
service in that house took the daily and hourly form of the
conscientious discharge of duty, unselfish, tender affection toward each
other, and kindly Christian charity toward all. At various times in my
life, when hearing discussions on the peculiar (technical, I should be
disposed to call it) profession and character supposed by some very good
people of a certain way of thinking to be the only indication of what
they considered real religion, I have remembered the serene, courageous
self-devotion of my dear friend, when, during a dangerous (as it was at
one time apprehended, fatal) illness of her youngest daughter, she would
leave her child's bedside to go to the theater, and discharge duties
never very attractive to her, and rendered distasteful then by cruel
anxiety, but her neglect of which would have injured the interests of
her brother, her fellow-actors, and all the poor people employed in the
theater, and been a direct infringement of her obligations to them. I
have wondered what amount of religion a certain class of "professing
Christians" would have allowed entered into that great effort.

We attended habitually a small chapel served by the Rev. William
Shannon, an excellent but not exciting preacher, who was a devoted
friend of Mrs. Harry Siddons; and occasionally we went to Dr. Allison's
church and heard him--then an old man--preach, and sometimes his young
assistant, Mr. Sinclair, whose eloquent and striking sermons, which
impressed me much, were the only powerful direct appeals made to my
religious sentiments at that time. I rather incline to think that I had,
what a most unclerical young clergyman of my acquaintance once assured
me I had, a natural turn for religion. I think it not unlikely that a
great deal of the direct religious teaching and influences of my Paris
school-days was, as it were, coming up again to the surface of my mind,
and occupying my thoughts with serious reflections upon the most
important subjects. The freedom I enjoyed gave scope and leisure to my
character to develop and strengthen itself; and to the combined
healthful repose and activity of all my faculties, the absence of all
excitement and irritation from external influences, the pure moral
atmosphere and kindly affection by which I lived surrounded during this
happy year, I attribute whatever perception of, desire for, or endeavor
after goodness I was first consciously actuated by. In the rest and
liberty of my life at this time, I think, whatever was best in me had
the most favorable chance of growth, and I have remained ever grateful
to the wise forbearance of the gentle authority under which I lived, for
the benefit as well as the enjoyment I derived from the time I passed in
Edinburgh.

I think that more harm is frequently done by over than by under culture
in the moral training of youth. Judicious _letting alone_ is a precious
element in real education, and there are certain chords which, often
touched and made to vibrate too early, are apt to lose instead of
gaining power; to grow first weakly and morbidly sensitive, and then
hard and dull; and finally, when the full harmony of the character
depends upon their truth and depth of tone, to have lost some measure of
both under repeated premature handling.

I sometimes think that instead of beginning, as we do, with a whole
heaven-and-earth-embracing theory of duty to God and man, it might be
better to adopt with our children the method of dealing only with each
particular instance of moral obligation empirically as it occurs; with
each particular incident of life, detached, as it were, from the notion
of a formal system, code, or theory of religious belief, until the
recurrence of the same rules of morality under the same governing
principle, invoked only in immediate application to some instance of
conduct or incident of personal experience, built up by degrees a body
of precedent which would have the force and efficacy of law before it
was theoretically inculcated as such. Whoever said that principles were
_moral habits_ spoke, it seems to me, a valuable truth, not generally
sufficiently recognized or acted upon in the task of education.

The only immediate result, that I can remember, of my graver turn of
thought at this time upon my conduct was a determination to give up
reading Byron's poetry. It was a great effort and a very great
sacrifice, for the delight I found in it was intense; but I was quite
convinced of its injurious effect upon me, and I came to the conclusion
that I would forego it.

"Cain" and "Manfred" were more especially the poems that stirred my
whole being with a tempest of excitement that left me in a state of
mental perturbation impossible to describe for a long time after reading
them. I suppose the great genius touched in me the spirit of our time,
which, chit as I was, was common to us both; and the mere fact of my
being _un enfant du siècle_ rendered me liable to the infection of the
potent, proud, desponding bitterness of his writing.

The spirit of an age creates the spirit that utters it, and though
Byron's genius stamped its impress powerfully upon the thought and
feeling of his contemporaries, he was himself, after all, but a sort of
quintessence of _them_, and gave them back only an intensified,
individual extract of themselves. The selfish vanity and profligate vice
which he combined with his extraordinary intellectual gifts were as
peculiar to himself as his great mental endowments; and though fools may
have followed the fashion of his follies, the heart of all Europe was
not stirred by a fashion of which he set the example, but by a passion
for which he found the voice, indeed, but of which the key-note lay in
the very temper of the time and the souls of the men of his day. Goethe,
Alfieri, Châteaubriand, each in his own language and with his peculiar
national and individual accent, uttered the same mind; they stamped
their own image and superscription upon the coin to which, by so doing,
they gave currency, but the mine from whence they drew their metal was
the civilized humanity of the nineteenth century. It is true that some
of Solomon's coining rings not unlike Goethe's and Byron's; but Solomon
forestalled his day by being _blasé_ before the nineteenth century.
Doubtless the recipe for that result has been the same for individuals
ever since the world rolled, but only here and there a great king, who
was also a great genius, possessed it in the earlier times; it took all
the ages that preceded it to make the _blasé_ age, and Byron,
pre-eminently, to speak its mind in English--which he had no sooner done
than every nineteenth-century shop-boy in England quoted Byron, wore his
shirt-collar open, and execrated his destiny. Doubtless by grace of his
free-will a man may wring every drop of sap out of his own soul and help
his fellows like-minded with himself to do the same; but the everlasting
spirit of truth renews the vitality of the world, and while Byron was
growling and howling, and Shelley was denying and defying, Scott was
telling and Wordsworth singing things beautiful and good, and new and
true.

Certain it is, however, that the noble poet's glorious chanting of much
inglorious matter did me no good, and so I resolved to read that grand
poetry no more. It was a severe struggle, but I persevered in it for
more than two years, and had my reward; I broke through the thraldom of
that powerful spell, and all the noble beauty of those poems remained to
me thenceforth divested of the power of wild excitement they had
exercised over me. A great many years after this girlish effort and
sacrifice, Lady Byron, who was a highly esteemed friend of mine, spoke
to me upon the subject of a new and cheap edition of her husband's works
about to be published, and likely to be widely disseminated among the
young clerk and shopkeeper class of readers, for whom she deprecated
extremely the pernicious influence it was calculated to produce. She
consulted me on the expediency of appending to it some notice of Lord
Byron written by herself, which she thought might modify or lessen the
injurious effect of his poetry upon young minds. "Nobody," she said,
"knew him as I did" (this certainly was not the general impression upon
the subject); "nobody knew as well as I the causes that had made him
what he was; nobody, I think, is so capable of doing justice to him, and
therefore of counteracting the injustice he does to himself, and the
injury he might do to others, in some of his writings." I was strongly
impressed by the earnestness of her expression, which seemed to me one
of affectionate compassion for Byron and profound solicitude lest, even
in his grave, he should incur the responsibility of yet further evil
influence, especially on the minds of the young. I could not help
wondering, also, whether she did not shrink from being again, to a new
generation and a wider class of readers, held up to cruel ridicule and
condemnation as the cold-hearted, hard, pedantic prude, without sympathy
for suffering or relenting toward repentance. I had always admired the
reticent dignity of her silence with reference to her short and
disastrous union with Lord Byron, and I felt sorry, therefore, that she
contemplated departing from the course she had thus far steadfastly
pursued, though I appreciated the motive by which she was actuated. I
could not but think, however, that she overestimated the mischief
Byron's poetry was likely to do the young men of 1850, highly
prejudicial as it undoubtedly was to those of his day, illustrated, so
to speak, by the bad notoriety of his own character and career. But the
generation of English youth who had grown up with Thackeray, Dickens,
and Tennyson as their intellectual nourishment, seemed to me little
likely to be infected with Byronism, and might read his poetry with a
degree of impunity which the young people of his own time did not enjoy.
I urged this my conviction upon her, as rendering less necessary than
she imagined the antidote she was anxious to append to the poison of the
new edition of her husband's works. But to this she replied that she had
derived her impression of the probable mischief to a class peculiarly
interesting to him, from Frederick Robertson, and of course his opinion
was more than an overweight for mine.

Lady Byron did not, however, fulfill her purpose of prefacing the
contemplated edition of Byron's poems with a notice of him by herself,
which I think very likely to have been a suggestion of Mr. Robertson's
to her.

My happy year in Edinburgh ended, I returned to London, to our house in
James Street, Buckingham Gate, where I found my parents much burdened
with care and anxiety about the affairs of the theater, which were
rapidly falling into irretrievable embarrassment. My father toiled
incessantly, but the tide of ill-success and losing fortune had set
steadily against him, and the attempt to stem it became daily harder and
more hopeless. I used sometimes to hear some of the sorrowful details of
this dreary struggle, and I well remember the indignation and terror I
experienced when one day my father said at dinner, "I have had a new
experience to-day: I have been arrested for the first time in my life."
I believe my father was never personally in debt during all his life; he
said he never had been up to that day, and I am very sure he never was
afterward. Through all the severe labor of his professional life, and
his strenuous exertions to maintain his family and educate my brothers
like gentlemen, and my sister and myself with every advantage, he never
incurred the misery of falling into debt, but paid his way as he went
along, with difficulty, no doubt, but still steadily and successfully,
"owing no man any thing." But the suit in question was brought against
him as one of the proprietors of the theater, for a debt which the
theater owed; and, moreover, was that of a person whom he had befriended
and helped forward, and who had always professed the most sincere
gratitude and attachment to him. The constantly darkening prospects of
that unlucky theater threw a gloom over us all; sometimes my father used
to speak of selling his share in it for any thing he could get for it
(and Heaven knows it was not likely to be much!), and going to live
abroad; or sending my mother, with us, to live cheaply in the south of
France, while he continued to work in London. Neither alternative was
cheerful for him or my poor mother, and I felt very sorrowful for them,
though I thought I should like living in the south of France better than
in London. I was working with a good deal of enthusiasm at a tragedy on
the subject of Fiesco, the Genoese noble's conspiracy against the
Dorias--a subject which had made a great impression upon me when I first
read Schiller's noble play upon it. My own former fancy about going on
the stage, and passionate desire for a lonely, independent life in which
it had originated, had died away with the sort of moral and mental
effervescence which had subsided during my year's residence in
Edinburgh. Although all my sympathy with the anxieties of my parents
tended to make the theater an object of painful interest to me, and
though my own attempts at poetical composition were constantly cast in a
dramatic form, in spite of my enthusiastic admiration of Goethe's and
Schiller's plays (which, however, I could only read in French or English
translations, for I then knew no German) and my earnest desire to write
a good play myself, the idea of making the stage my profession had
entirely passed from my mind, which was absorbed with the wish and
endeavor to produce a good dramatic composition. The turn I had
exhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated, and Covent
Garden itself never occurred to me as a great institution for purposes
of art or enlightened public recreation, but only as my father's
disastrous property, to which his life was being sacrificed; and every
thought connected with it gradually became more and more distasteful to
me. It appears to me curious, that up to this time, I literally knew
nothing of Shakespeare, beyond having seen one or two of his plays
acted; I had certainly never read one of them through, nor did I do so
until some time later, when I began to have to learn parts in them by
heart.

I think the rather serious bias which my mind had developed while I was
still in Scotland tended probably to my greater contentment in my home,
and to the total disinclination which I should certainly now have felt
for a life of public exhibition. My dramatic reading and writing was
curiously blended with a very considerable interest in literature of a
very different sort, and with the perusal of such works as Mason on
"Self-Knowledge," Newton's "Cardiphonia," and a great variety of sermons
and religious essays. My mother, observing my tendency to reading on
religious subjects, proposed to me to take my first communion. She was a
member of the Swiss Protestant Church, the excellent pastor of which,
the Rev. Mr. S----, was our near neighbor, and we were upon terms of the
friendliest intimacy with him and his family. In his church I received
the sacrament for the first time, but I do not think with the most
desirable effect. The only immediate result that I can remember of this
increase of my Christian profession and privileges was, I am sorry to
say, a rigid pharisaical formalism, which I carried so far as to decline
accompanying my father and mother to our worthy clergyman's house, one
Sunday, when we were invited to spend the evening with him and his
family. This sort of acrid fruit is no uncommon first harvest of
youthful religious zeal; and I suppose my parents and my worthy pastor
thought it a piece of unripe, childish, impertinent conscientiousness,
hardly deserving a serious rebuke.

Another of my recollections which belong to this time is seeing several
times at our house that exceedingly coarse, disagreeable, clever, and
witty man, Theodore Hook. I always had a dread of his loud voice, and
blazing red face, and staring black eyes; especially as on more than one
occasion his after-dinner wit seemed to me fitter for the table he had
left than the more refined atmosphere of the drawing-room. One day he
dined with us to meet my cousin Horace Twiss and his handsome new wife.
Horace had in a lesser degree some of Hook's wonderful sense of humor
and quickness of repartee, and the two men brought each other out with
great effect. Of course I had heard of Mr. Hook's famous reply when,
after having returned from the colonies, where he was in an official
position, under suspicion of peculation, a friend meeting him said,
"Why, hallo, Hook! I did not know you were in England! What has brought
you back again?" "Something wrong about the _chest_," replied the
imperturbable wit. He was at this time the editor of the John Bull, a
paper of considerable ability, and only less scurrility than the _Age_;
and in spite of his _chest difficulty_ he was much sought in society for
his extraordinary quickness and happiness in conversation. His
outrageous hoax of the poor London citizen, from whom he extorted an
agonized invitation to dinner by making him believe that he and Charles
Mathews were public surveyors, sent to make observations for a new road,
which was to go straight through the poor shopkeeper's lawn,
flower-garden, and bedroom, he has, I believe, introduced into his novel
of "Gilbert Gurney." But not, of course, with the audacious
extemporaneous song with which he wound up the joke, when, having eaten
and drank the poor citizen's dinner, prepared for a small party of
citizen friends (all the time assuring him that he and his friend would
use their very best endeavors to avert the threatened invasion of his
property by the new line of road), he proposed singing a song, to the
great delight of the unsophisticated society, the concluding verse of
which was--

    "And now I am bound to declare
       That your wine is as good as your cook,
     And that this is Charles Mathews, the player,
       And I, sir, am Theodore Hook."

He always demanded, when asked for a specimen of his extemporizing
power, that a subject should be given to him. I do not remember, on one
occasion, what was suggested in the first instance, but after some
discussion Horace Twiss cried out, "The Jews." It was the time of the
first mooting of the question of the Jews being admitted to stand for
Parliament and having seats in the House, and party spirit ran extremely
high upon the subject. Theodore Hook shrugged his shoulders and made a
discontented grimace, as if baffled by his theme, the Jews. However, he
went to the piano, threw back his head, and began strumming a galloping
country-dance tune, to which he presently poured forth the most
inconceivable string of witty, comical, humorous, absurd allusions to
everybody present as well as to the subject imposed upon him. Horace
Twiss was at that time under-secretary either for foreign affairs or the
colonies, and Hook took occasion to say, or rather sing, that the
foreign department could have little charms for a man who had so many
more in the home, with an indication to Annie Twiss; the final verse of
this real firework of wit was this--

    "I dare say you think there's little wit
       In this, but you've all forgot
     That, instead of being a jeu d'esprit,
       'Tis only a jeu de mot,"

pronouncing the French words as broadly as possible, "a _Jew d'esprit_,
and 'tis only a _Jew de motte_," for the sake of the rhyme, and his
subject, the Jews. It certainly was all through a capital specimen of
ready humor. I remember on another occasion hearing him exercise his
singular gift in a manner that seemed to me as unjustifiable as it was
disagreeable. I met him at dinner at Sir John McDonald's, then
adjutant-general, a very kind and excellent friend of mine. Mrs. Norton
and Lord C----, who were among the guests, both came late, and after we
had gone into the dining-room, where they were received with a discreet
quantity of mild chaff, Mrs. Norton being much too formidable an
adversary to be challenged lightly. After dinner, however, when the men
came up into the drawing-room, Theodore Hook was requested to
extemporize, and having sung one song, was about to leave the piano in
the midst of the general entreaty that he would not do so, when Mrs.
Norton, seating herself close to the instrument so that he could not
leave it, said, in her most peculiar, deep, soft, contralto voice, which
was like her beautiful dark face set to music, "I am going to sit down
here, and you shall not come away, for I will keep you in like an iron
crow." There was nothing about her manner or look that could suggest any
thing but a flattering desire to enjoy Hook's remarkable talent in some
further specimen of his power of extemporizing, and therefore I suppose
there must have been some previous ill-will or heart-burning on his part
toward her--she was reckless enough in her use of her wonderful wit and
power of saying the most intolerable stinging things, to have left a
smart on some occasion in Hook's memory, for which he certainly did his
best to pay her then. Every verse of the song he now sang ended with his
turning with a bow to her, and the words, "my charming iron crow;" but
it was from beginning to end a covert satire of her and her social
triumphs; even the late arrival at dinner and its supposed causes were
duly brought in, still with the same mock-respectful inclination to his
"charming iron crow." Everybody was glad when the song was over, and
applauded it quite as much from a sense of relief as from admiration of
its extraordinary cleverness; and Mrs. Norton smilingly thanked Hook,
and this time made way for him to leave the piano.

We lived near each other at this time, we in James Street, Buckingham
Gate, and the Nortons at Storey's Gate, at the opposite end of the
Birdcage Walk. We both of us frequented the same place of worship--a
tiny chapel wedged in among the buildings at the back of Downing Street,
the entrance to which was from the park; it has been improved away by
the new government offices. Our dinner at the McDonalds' was on a
Saturday, and the next day, as we were walking part of the way home
together from church, Mrs. Norton broke out about Theodore Hook and his
odious ill-nature and abominable coarseness, saying that it was a
disgrace and a shame that for the sake of his paper, the _John Bull_,
and its influence, the Tories should receive such a man in society. I,
who but for her outburst upon the subject should have carefully avoided
mentioning Hook's name, presuming that after his previous evening's
performance it could not be very agreeable to Mrs. Norton, now, not
knowing very well what to say, but thinking the Sheridan blood
(especially in her veins) might have some sympathy with and find some
excuse for him, suggested the temptation that the possession of such wit
must always be, more or less, to the abuse of it. "Witty!" exclaimed the
indignant beauty, with her lip and nostril quivering, "witty! One may
well be witty when one fears neither God nor devil!" I was heartily glad
Hook was not there; he was not particular about the truth, and would
infallibly, in some shape or other, have translated for her benefit, "Je
crains Dieu, cher Abner, et n'ai point d'autre crainte."

The Nortons' house was close to the issue from St. James's Park into
Great George Street. I remember passing an evening with them there, when
a host of distinguished public and literary men were crowded into their
small drawing-room, which was literally resplendent with the light of
Sheridan beauty, male and female: Mrs. Sheridan (Miss Callender, of
whom, when she published a novel, the hero of which commits forgery,
that wicked wit, Sidney Smith, said he knew she was a Callender, but did
not know till then that she was a Newgate calendar), the mother of the
Graces, more beautiful than anybody but her daughters; Lady Grahame,
their beautiful aunt; Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (Lady Dufferin),
Georgiana Sheridan (Duchess of Somerset and queen of beauty by universal
consent), and Charles Sheridan, their younger brother, a sort of younger
brother of the Apollo Belvedere. Certainly I never saw such a bunch of
beautiful creatures all growing on one stem. I remarked it to Mrs.
Norton, who looked complacently round her tiny drawing-room and said,
"Yes, we are rather good-looking people." I remember this evening
because of the impression made on me by the sight of these wonderfully
"good-looking people" all together, and also because of my having had to
sing with Moore--an honor and glory hardly compensating the distress of
semi-strangulation, in order to avoid drowning his feeble thread of a
voice with the heavy, robust contralto which I found it very difficult
to swallow half of, while singing second to him, in his own melodies,
with the other half. My acquaintance with Mrs. Norton lasted through a
period of many years, and, though never very intimate, was renewed with
cordiality each time I returned to England. It began just after I came
out on the stage, when I was about twenty, and she a few years older. My
father and mother had known her parents and grandparents, Richard
Brinsley Sheridan and Miss Lindley, from whom their descendants derived
the remarkable beauty and brilliant wit which distinguished them.

My mother was at Drury Lane when Mr. Sheridan was at the head of its
administration, and has often described to me the extraordinary
proceedings of that famous first night of "Pizarro," when, at last
keeping the faith he had so often broken with the public, Mr. Sheridan
produced that most effective of melodramas, with my aunt and uncle's
parts still unfinished, and, depending upon their extraordinary rapidity
of study, kept them learning the last scenes of the last act, which he
was still writing, while the beginning of the piece was being performed.
By the by, I do not know what became of the theories about the dramatic
art, and the careful and elaborate study necessary for its perfection.
In this particular instance John Kemble's Rolla and Mrs. Siddons's
Elvira must have been what may be called extemporaneous acting. Not
impossibly, however, these performances may have gained in vivid power
and effect what they lost in smoothness and finish, from the very
nervous strain and excitement of such a mental effort as the actors were
thus called upon to make. My mother remembered well, too, the dismal
Saturdays when, after prolonged periods of non-payment of their
salaries, the poorer members of the company, and all the unfortunate
work-people, carpenters, painters, scene-shifters, understrappers of all
sorts, and plebs in general of the great dramatic concern, thronging the
passages and staircases, would assail Sheridan on his way to the
treasury with pitiful invocations: "For God's sake, Mr. Sheridan, pay us
our salaries!" "For Heaven's sake, Mr. Sheridan, let us have something
this week!" and his plausible reply of, "Certainly, certainly, my good
people, you shall be attended to directly." Then he would go into the
treasury, sweep it clean of the whole week's receipts (the salaries of
the principal actors, whom he dared not offend and could not dispense
with, being, if not wholly, partially paid), and, going out of the
building another way, leave the poor people who had cried to him for
their arrears of wages baffled and cheated of the price of their labor
for another week. The picture was not a pleasant one.

When I first knew Caroline Sheridan, she had not long been married to
the Hon. George Norton. She was splendidly handsome, of an un-English
character of beauty, her rather large and heavy head and features
recalling the grandest Grecian and Italian models, to the latter of whom
her rich coloring and blue-black braids of hair gave her an additional
resemblance. Though neither as perfectly lovely as the Duchess of
Somerset, nor as perfectly charming as Lady Dufferin, she produced a far
more striking impression than either of them, by the combination of the
poetical genius with which she alone, of the three, was gifted, with the
brilliant wit and power of repartee which they (especially Lady
Dufferin) possessed in common with her, united to the exceptional beauty
with which they were all three endowed. Mrs. Norton was extremely
epigrammatic in her talk, and comically dramatic in her manner of
narrating things. I do not know whether she had any theatrical talent,
though she sang pathetic and humorous songs admirably, and I remember
shaking in my shoes when, soon after I came out, she told me she envied
me, and would give anything to try the stage herself. I thought, as I
looked at her wonderful, beautiful face, "Oh, if you should, what would
become of me!" She was no musician, but had a deep, sweet contralto
voice, precisely the same in which she always spoke, and which, combined
with her always lowered eyelids ("downy eyelids" with sweeping silken
fringes), gave such incomparably comic effect to her sharp retorts and
ludicrous stories; and she sang with great effect her own and Lady
Dufferin's social satires, "Fanny Grey," and "Miss Myrtle," etc., and
sentimental songs like "Would I were with Thee," "I dreamt 'twas but a
Dream," etc., of which the words were her own, and the music, which only
amounted to a few chords with the simplest modulations, her own also. I
remember she used occasionally to convulse her friends _en petit comité_
with a certain absurd song called "The Widow," to all intents and
purposes a piece of broad comedy, the whole story of which (the wooing
of a disconsolate widow by a rich lover, whom she first rejects and then
accepts) was comprised in a few words, rather spoken than sung, eked out
by a ludicrous burden of "rum-ti-iddy-iddy-iddy-ido," which, by dint of
her countenance and voice, conveyed all the alternations of the widow's
first despair, her lover's fiery declaration, her virtuous indignation
and wrathful rejection of him, his cool acquiescence and intimation that
his full purse assured him an easy acceptance in various other quarters,
her rage and disappointment at his departure, and final relenting and
consent on his return; all of which with her "iddy-iddy-ido" she sang,
or rather acted, with incomparable humor and effect. I admired her
extremely.

In 1841 I began a visit of two years and a half in England. During this
time I constantly met Mrs. Norton in society. She was living with her
uncle, Charles Sheridan, and still maintained her glorious supremacy of
beauty and wit in the great London world. She came often to parties at
our house, and I remember her asking us to dine at her uncle's, when
among the people we met were Lord Lansdowne and Lord Normanby, both then
in the ministry, whose good-will and influence she was exerting herself
to _captivate_ in behalf of a certain shy, silent, rather rustic
gentleman from the far-away province of New Brunswick, Mr. Samuel Cunard,
afterwards Sir Samuel Cunard of the great mail-packet line of steamers
between England and America. He had come to London an obscure and humble
individual, endeavoring to procure from the government the sole privilege
of carrying the transatlantic mails for his line of steamers. Fortunately
for him he had some acquaintance with Mrs. Norton, and the powerful
beauty, who was kind-hearted and good-natured to all but her natural
enemies (i.e. the members of her own London society), exerted all her
interest with her admirers in high place in favor of Cunard, and had made
this very dinner for the express purpose of bringing her provincial
_protégé_ into pleasant personal relations with Lord Lansdowne and Lord
Normanby, who were likely to be of great service to him in the special
object which had brought him to England. The only other individual I
remember at the dinner was that most beautiful person, Lady Harriet
d'Orsay. Years after, when the Halifax projector had become Sir Samuel
Cunard, a man of fame in the worlds of commerce and business of New York
and London, a baronet of large fortune, and a sort of proprietor of the
Atlantic Ocean between England and the United States, he reminded me of
this charming dinner in which Mrs. Norton had so successfully found the
means of forwarding his interests, and spoke with enthusiasm of her
kind-heartedness as well as her beauty and talents; he, of course, passed
under the Caudine Forks, beneath which all men encountering her had to
bow and throw down their arms. She was very fond of inventing devices for
seals, and other such ingenious exercises of her brains, and she gave
---- a star with the motto, "Procul sed non extincta," which she civilly
said bore reference to me in my transatlantic home. She also told me,
when we were talking of mottoes for seals and rings, that she had had
engraved on a ring she always wore the name of that miserable bayou of
the Mississippi--Atchafalaya--where Gabriel passes near one side of an
island, while Evangeline, in her woe-begone search, is lying asleep on
the other; and that, to her surprise, she found that the King of the
Belgians wore a ring on which he had had the same word engraved, as an
expression of the bitterest and most hopeless disappointment.

In 1845 I passed through London, and spent a few days there with my
father, on my way to Italy. Mrs. Norton, hearing of my being in town,
came to see me, and urged me extremely to go and dine with her before I
left London, which I did. The event of the day in her society was the
death of Lady Holland, about which there were a good many lamentations,
of which Lady T---- gave the real significance, with considerable
_naïveté_: "Ah, poore deare Ladi Ollande! It is a grate pittie; it was
suche a _pleasant 'ouse!_" As I had always avoided Lady Holland's
acquaintance, I could merely say that the regrets I heard expressed
about her seemed to me only to prove a well-known fact--how soon the
dead were forgotten. The _real_ sorrow was indeed for the loss of her
house, that pleasantest of all London rendezvouses, and not for its
mistress, though those whom I then heard speak were probably among the
few who did regret her. Lady Holland had one good quality (perhaps more
than one, which I might have found out if I had known her): she was a
constant and exceedingly warm friend, and extended her regard and
remembrance to all whom Lord Holland or herself had ever received with
kindness or on a cordial footing. My brother John had always been
treated with great friendliness by Lord Holland, and in her will Lady
Holland, who had not seen him for years, left him as a memento a copy,
in thirty-two volumes, of the English essayists, which had belonged to
her husband.

Almost immediately after this transient renewal of my intercourse with
Mrs. Norton, I left England for Italy, and did not see her again for
several years. The next time I did so was at an evening party at my
sister's house, where her appearance struck me more than it had ever
done. Her dress had something to do with this effect, no doubt. She had
a rich gold-colored silk on, shaded and softened all over with black
lace draperies, and her splendid head, neck, and arms were adorned with
magnificently simple Etruscan gold ornaments, which she had brought from
Rome, whence she had just returned, and where the fashion of that famous
antique jewelry had lately been revived. She was still "une beauté
triomphante à faire voir aux ambassadeurs."

During one of my last sojourns in London I met Mrs. Norton at Lansdowne
House. There was a great assembly there, and she was wandering through
the rooms leaning on the arm of her youngest son, her glorious head
still crowned with its splendid braids of hair, and wreathed with grapes
and ivy leaves, and this was my last vision of her; but, in the autumn
of 1870, Lady C---- told me of meeting her in London society, now indeed
quite old, but indomitably handsome and witty.

I think it only humane to state, for the benefit of all mothers anxious
for their daughters', and all daughters anxious for their own, future
welfare in this world, that in the matter of what the lady's-maid in the
play calls "the first of earthly blessings--personal appearance,"
Caroline Sheridan as a girl was so little distinguished by the
exceptional beauty she subsequently developed, that her lovely mother,
who had a right to be exacting in the matter, entertained occasionally
desponding misgivings as to the future comeliness of one of the most
celebrated beauties of her day.

At the time of my earliest acquaintance with the Nortons, our friends
the Basil Montagus had left their house in Bedford Square, and were also
living at Storey's Gate. Among the remarkable people I met at their
house was the Indian rajah, Ramohun Roy, philosopher, scholar, reformer,
Quaker, theist, I know not what and what not, who was introduced to me,
and was kind enough to take some notice of me. He talked to me of the
literature of his own country, especially its drama, and, finding that I
was already acquainted with the Hindoo theatre through the medium of my
friend Mr. Horace Wilson's translations of its finest compositions, but
that I had never read "Sakuntalà," the most remarkable of them all,
which Mr. Wilson had not included in his collection (I suppose because
of its translation by Sir William Jones), Ramohun Roy sent me a copy of
it, which I value extremely as a memento of so remarkable a man, but in
which I confess I am utterly unable to find the extraordinary beauty and
sublimity which he attributed to it, and of which I remember Goethe also
speaks enthusiastically (if I am not mistaken, in his conversations with
Eckermann), calling it the most wonderful production of human genius.
Goethe had not, any more than myself, the advantage of reading
"Sakuntalà" in Sanskrit, and I am quite at a loss to account for the
extreme and almost exaggerated admiration he expresses for it.

                       JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, August 23, ----.
     MY DEAREST H----,

     I received your last on my return from the country, where I had
     been staying a fortnight, and I assure you that after an
     uncomfortable and rainy drive into town I found it of more service
     in warming me than even the blazing fire with which we are obliged
     to shame the month of August.

     I have a great deal to tell you about our affairs, and the effect
     that their unhappy posture seems likely to produce upon my future
     plans and prospects. Do you remember a letter I wrote to you a long
     time ago about going on the stage? and another, some time before
     that, about my becoming a governess? The urgent necessity which I
     think now exists for exertion, in all those who are capable of it
     among us, has again turned my thoughts to these two considerations.
     My father's property, and all that we might ever have hoped to
     derive from it, being utterly destroyed in the unfortunate issue of
     our affairs, his personal exertions are all that remain to him and
     us to look to. There are circumstances in which reflections that
     our minds would not admit at other times of necessity force
     themselves upon our consideration. Those talents and
     qualifications, both mental and physical, which have been so
     mercifully preserved to my dear father hitherto, cannot, in the
     natural course of things, all remain unimpaired for many more
     years. It is right, then, that those of us who have the power to do
     so should at once lighten his arms of all unnecessary burden, and
     acquire the habit of independent exertion before the moment comes
     when utter inexperience would add to the difficulty of adopting any
     settled mode of proceeding; it is right and wise to prepare for the
     evil day before it is upon us. These reflections have led me to the
     resolution of entering upon some occupation or profession which may
     enable me to turn the advantages my father has so liberally
     bestowed upon me to some account, so as not to be a useless
     incumbrance to him at present, or a helpless one in future time. My
     brother John, you know, has now determined, to go into the Church.
     Henry we have good although remote hopes of providing well for,
     and, were I to make use of my own capabilities, dear little A----
     would be the only one about whom there need be any anxiety. I
     propose writing to my father before he returns home (he is at
     present acting in the provinces) on this subject. Some step I am
     determined to take; the nature of it will, of course, remain with
     him and my mother. I trust that whatever course they resolve upon I
     shall be enabled to pursue steadily, and I am sure that, be it what
     it may, I shall find it comparatively easy, as the motive is
     neither my own profit nor reputation, but the desire of bringing
     into their right use whatever talents I may possess, which have not
     been given for useless purposes. I hope and trust that I am better
     fitted for either of the occupations I have mentioned than I was
     when I before entertained an idea of them. You asked me what
     inclined John's thoughts to the Church. It would be hard to say; or
     rather, I ought to say, that Providence which in its own good time
     makes choice of its instruments, and which I ever firmly trusted
     would not suffer my brother's fine powers to be wasted on unworthy
     aims. I am not able to say how the change which has taken place in
     his opinions and sentiments was effected; but you know one has not
     done _all_ one's thinking at two and twenty. I have been by
     circumstances much separated from my brother, and when with him
     have had but little communication upon such subjects. It was at a
     time when, I think, his religious principles were somewhat
     unsettled, that his mind was so passionately absorbed by politics.
     The nobler instincts of his nature, diverted for a while from due
     direct intercourse with their divine source, turned themselves with
     enthusiastic, earnest hope to the desire of benefiting his
     fellow-creatures; and to these aims--the reformation of abuses, the
     establishment of a better system of government, the gradual
     elevation and improvement of the people, and the general progress
     of the country towards enlightened liberty and consequent
     prosperity--he devoted all his thoughts. This was the period of his
     fanatical admiration for Jeremy Bentham and Mill, who, you know,
     are our near neighbors here, and whose houses we never pass without
     John being inclined to salute them, I think, as the shrines of some
     beneficent powers of renovation. And here comes the break in our
     intercourse and in my knowledge of his mental and moral progress. I
     went to Scotland, and was amazed, after I had been there some time,
     to hear from my mother that John had not got his scholarship, and
     had renounced his intention of going to the bar and determined to
     study for the Church. I returned home, and found him much changed.
     His high sense of the duties attending it makes me rejoice most
     sincerely that he has chosen that career, which may not be the
     surest path to worldly advancement, but if conscientiously followed
     must lead, I should think, to the purest happiness this life can
     offer. I think much of this change may be attributed to the example
     and influence of some deservedly dear friends of his; probably
     something to the sobering effect of the disappointment and
     mortification of his failure at college, where such sanguine hopes
     and expectations of his success had been entertained. Above all, I
     refer his present purpose to that higher influence which has
     followed him through all his mental wanderings, suggesting the
     eager inquiries of his restless and dissatisfied spirit, and
     finally leading it to this, its appointed goal. He writes to us in
     high spirits from Germany, and his letters are very delightful.

     Mrs. Siddons and Cecy are with Mrs. Kemble at Leamington. Mrs.
     Harry Siddons is, I fear, but little better; she has had another
     attack of erysipelas, and I am very anxious to get to her, but the
     distance, and the dependence of all interesting young females in
     London on the legs and leisure of chaperons, prevents me from
     seeing her as often as I wish.

     German is an arduous undertaking, and I have once more abandoned
     it, not only on account of its difficulty, but because I do not at
     present wish to enter upon the study of a foreign language, when I
     am but just awakened to my radical ignorance of my own. God bless
     you, dear H----.

                             Yours ever,
                                                                FANNY.

As long as I retained a home of my own, I resisted my friend's
half-expressed wish that I should destroy her letters; but when I ceased
to have any settled place of habitation, it became impossible to provide
for the safe-keeping of a mass of papers the accumulation of which
received additions every few days, and by degrees (for my courage failed
me very often in the task) my friend's letters were destroyed. Few
things that I have had to relinquish have cost me a greater pang or
sense of loss, and few of the conditions of my wandering life have
seemed to me more grievous than the necessity it imposed upon me of
destroying these letters. My friend did not act upon her own theory with
regard to my correspondence, and indeed it seems to me that no general
rule can be given with regard to the preservation or destruction of
correspondence. What revelations of misery and guilt may lie in the
forgotten folds of hoarded letters, that have been preserved only to
blast the memory of the dead! What precious words, again, have been
destroyed, that might have lightened for a whole heavy lifetime the
doubt and anguish of the living! In this, as in all we do, we grope
about in darkness, and the one and the other course must often enough
have been bitterly lamented by those who "did for the best" in keeping
or destroying these chronicles of human existence.

Madame Pasta's daughter once said to Charles Young, who enthusiastically
admired her great genius, "Vous trouvez qu'elle chante et joue bien,
n'est-ce pas?" "Je crois bien," replied he, puzzled to understand her
drift. "Well," replied the daughter of the great lyrical artist, "to us,
to whom she belongs, and who know and love her, her great talent is the
least admirable thing about her; but no one but us knows that."

Doubtless if letters of Shakespeare's could be found, letters developing
the mystery of those sorrowful sonnets, or even letters describing his
daily dealings with his children, and Mistress Anne Hathaway, his wife;
nay, even the fashion, color, and texture of the hangings of "the
second-best bed," her special inheritance, a frenzy of curiosity would
be aroused by them. All his glorious plays would not be worth
(bookseller's value) some scraps of thought and feeling, or mere
personal detail, or even commonplace (he must have been sovereignly
commonplace) impartment of theatrical business news and gossip to his
fellow-players, or Scotch Drummond, or my Lord Southampton, or the Dark
Woman of the sonnets. But we know little about him, thank Heaven! and I
am glad that little is not more.

I know he must have sinned and suffered, mortal man since he was, but I
do not wish to know how. From his plays, in spite of the necessarily
impersonal character of dramatic composition, we gather a vivid and
distinct impression of serene sweetness, wisdom, and power. In the
fragment of personal history which he gives us in his sonnets, the
reverse is the case; we have a painful impression of mournful struggling
with adverse circumstances and moral evil elements, and of the labor and
the love of his life alike bestowed on objects deemed by himself
unworthy; and in spite of his triumphant promise of immortality to the
false mistress or friend, or both, to whom (as far as he has revealed
them to us) he has kept his promise, we fall to pitying Shakespeare, the
bestower of immortality. In the great temple raised by his genius to his
own undying glory, one narrow door opens into a secret, silent crypt,
where his image, blurred and indistinct, is hardly discernible through
the gloomy atmosphere, heavy and dim as if with sighs and tears. Here is
no clew, no issue, and we return to the shrine filled with light and
life and warmth and melody; with knowledge and love of man, and worship
of God and nature. There is our benefactor and friend, simplest and most
lovable, though most wonderful of his kind; other image of him than that
bright one may the world never know!

The extraordinary development of the taste for petty details of personal
gossip which our present literature bears witness to makes it almost a
duty to destroy all letters not written for publication; and yet there
is no denying that life is essentially interesting--every life, any
life, all lives, if their detailed history could be given with truth and
simplicity. For my own part, I confess that the family correspondence,
even of people utterly unknown to me, always seems to me full of
interest. The vivid interest the writers took in themselves makes their
letters better worth reading than many books we read; they are life, as
compared with imitations of it--life, that mystery and beauty surpassing
every other; they are morsels of that profoundest of all secrets, which
baffles alike the man of science, the metaphysician, artist, and poet.
And yet it would be hard if A, B, and C's letters should therefore be
published, especially as, had they contemplated my reading them, they
would doubtless never have written them, or written them quite other
than they did.

To resume my chronicle. My brother John was at this time traveling in
Germany; the close of his career at Cambridge had proved a bitter
disappointment to my father, and had certainly not fulfilled the
expectations of any of his friends or the promise of his own very
considerable abilities. He left the university without taking his
degree, and went to Heidelberg, where he laid the foundation of his
subsequent thorough knowledge of German, and developed the taste for the
especial philological studies to which he eventually devoted himself,
but his eminence in which brought him little emolument and but tardy
fame, and never in the least consoled my father for the failure of all
the brilliant hopes he had formed of the future distinction and fortune
of his eldest son. When a man has made up his mind that his son is to be
Lord Chancellor of England, he finds it hardly an equivalent that he
should be one of the first Anglo-Saxon scholars in Europe.

In my last letter to Miss S---- I have referred to some of my brother's
friends and their possible influence in determining his choice of the
clerical profession in preference to that of the law, which my father
had wished him to adopt, and for which, indeed, he had so far shown his
own inclination as to have himself entered at the Inner Temple.

Among my brother's contemporaries, his school and college mates who
frequented my father's house at this time, were Arthur Hallam, Alfred
Tennyson and his brothers, Frederick Maurice, John Sterling, Richard
Trench, William Donne, the Romillys, the Malkins, Edward Fitzgerald,
James Spedding, William Thackeray, and Richard Monckton Milnes.

These names were those of "promising young men," our friends and
companions, whose various remarkable abilities we learned to estimate
through my brother's enthusiastic appreciation of them. How bright has
been, in many instances, the full performance of that early promise,
England has gratefully acknowledged; they have been among the jewels of
their time, and some of their names will be famous and blessed for
generations to come. It is not for me to praise those whom all
English-speaking folk delight to honor; but in thinking of that bright
band of very noble young spirits, of my brother's love and admiration
for them, of their affection for him, of our pleasant intercourse in
those far-off early days,--in spite of the faithful, life-long regard
which still subsists between myself and the few survivors of that goodly
company, my heart sinks with a heavy sense of loss, and the world from
which so much light has departed seems dark and dismal enough.




CHAPTER XI.


Alfred Tennyson had only just gathered his earliest laurels. My brother
John gave me the first copy of his poems I ever possessed, with a
prophecy of his future fame and excellence written on the fly-leaf of
it. I have never ceased to exult in my possession of that copy of the
first edition of those poems, which became the songs of our every day
and every hour, almost; we delighted in them and knew them by heart, and
read and said them over and over again incessantly; they were our
pictures, our music, and infinite was the scorn and indignation with
which we received the slightest word of adverse criticism upon them. I
remember Mrs. Milman, one evening at my father's house, challenging me
laughingly about my enthusiasm for Tennyson, and asking me if I had read
a certain severely caustic and condemnatory article in the _Quarterly_
upon his poems. "Have you read it?" said she; "it is so amusing! Shall I
send it to you?" "No, thank you," said I; "have you read the poems, may
I ask?" "I cannot say that I have," said she, laughing. "Oh, then," said
I (not laughing), "perhaps it would be better that I should send you
those?"

It has always been incomprehensible to me how the author of those poems
ever brought himself to alter them, as he did, in so many instances--all
(as it seemed to me) for the worse rather than the better. I certainly
could hardly love his verses better than he did himself, but the various
changes he made in them have always appeared to me cruel disfigurements
of the original thoughts and expressions, which were to me treasures not
to be touched even by his hand; and his changing lines which I thought
perfect, omitting beautiful stanzas that I loved, and interpolating
others that I hated, and disfiguring and maiming his own exquisite
creations with second thoughts (none of which were best to me), has
caused me to rejoice, while I mourn, over my copy of the first version
of "The May Queen," "OEnone," "The Miller's Daughter," and all the
subsequent _improved_ poems, of which the improvements were to me
desecrations. In justice to Tennyson, I must add that the present
generation of his readers swear by _their_ version of his poems as we
did by ours, for the same reason,--they knew it first.

The early death of Arthur Hallam, and the imperishable monument of love
raised by Tennyson's genius to his memory, have tended to give him a
pre-eminence among the companions of his youth which I do not think his
abilities would have won for him had he lived; though they were
undoubtedly of a high order. There was a gentleness and purity almost
virginal in his voice, manner, and countenance; and the upper part of
his face, his forehead and eyes (perhaps in readiness for his early
translation), wore the angelic radiance that they still must wear in
heaven. Some time or other, at some rare moments of the divine spirit's
supremacy in our souls, we all put on the heavenly face that will be
ours hereafter, and for a brief lightning space our friends behold us as
we shall look when this mortal has put on immortality. On Arthur
Hallam's brow and eyes this heavenly light, so fugitive on other human
faces, rested habitually, as if he was thinking and seeing in heaven.

Of all those very remarkable young men, John Sterling was by far the
most brilliant and striking in his conversation, and the one of whose
future eminence we should all of us have augured most confidently. But
though his life was cut off prematurely, it was sufficiently prolonged
to disprove this estimate of his powers. The extreme vividness of his
look, manner, and speech gave a wonderful impression of latent vitality
and power; perhaps some of this lambent, flashing brightness may have
been but the result of the morbid physical conditions of his existence,
like the flush on his cheek and the fire in his eye; the over stimulated
and excited intellectual activity, the offspring of disease, mistaken by
us for morning instead of sunset splendor, promise of future light and
heat instead of prognostication of approaching darkness and decay. It
certainly has always struck me as singular that Sterling, who in his
life accomplished so little and left so little of the work by which men
are generally pronounced to be gifted with exceptional ability, should
have been the subject of two such interesting biographies as those
written of him by Julius Hare and Carlyle. I think he must have been one
of those persons in whom genius makes itself felt and acknowledged
chiefly through the medium of personal intercourse; a not infrequent
thing, I think, with women, and perhaps men, wanting the full vigor of
normal health. I suppose it is some failure not so much in the power
possessed as in the power of producing it in a less evanescent form than
that of spoken words, and the looks that with such organizations are
more than the words themselves. Sterling's genius was his _Wesen_,
himself, and he could detach no portion of it that retained anything
like the power and beauty one would have expected. After all, the world
has twice been moved (once intellectually and once morally), as never
before or since, by those whose spoken words, gathered up by others, are
all that remain of them. Personal influence is the strongest and the
most subtle of powers, and Sterling impressed all who knew him as a man
of undoubted genius; those who never knew him will perhaps always wonder
why.

My life was rather sad at this time: my brother's failure at college was
a source of disappointment and distress to my parents; and I, who
admired him extremely, and believed in him implicitly, was grieved at
his miscarriage and his absence from England; while the darkening
prospects of the theater threw a gloom over us all. My hitherto frequent
interchange of letters with my dear friend H---- S---- had become
interrupted and almost suspended by the prolonged and dangerous illness
of her brother; and I was thrown almost entirely upon myself, and was
finding my life monotonously dreary, when events occurred that changed
its whole tenor almost suddenly, and determined my future career with
less of deliberation than would probably have satisfied either my
parents or myself under less stringent circumstances.

It was in the autumn of 1829, my father being then absent on a
professional tour in Ireland, that my mother, coming in from walking one
day, threw herself into a chair and burst into tears. She had been
evidently much depressed for some time past, and I was alarmed at her
distress, of which I begged her to tell me the cause. "Oh, it has come
at last," she answered; "our property is to be sold. I have seen that
fine building all covered with placards and bills of sale; the theater
must be closed, and I know not how many hundred poor people will be
turned adrift without employment!" I believed the theater employed
regularly seven hundred persons in all its different departments,
without reckoning the great number of what were called supernumeraries,
who were hired by the night at Christmas, Easter, and on all occasions
of any specially showy spectacle. Seized with a sort of terror, like the
Lady of Shallott, that "the curse had come upon me," I comforted my
mother with expressions of pity and affection, and, as soon as I left
her, wrote a most urgent entreaty to my father that he would allow me to
act for myself, and seek employment as a governess, so as to relieve him
at once at least of the burden of my maintenance. I brought this letter
to my mother, and begged her permission to send it, to which she
consented; but, as I afterward learned, she wrote by the same post to my
father, requesting him not to give a positive answer to my letter until
his return to town. The next day she asked me whether I seriously
thought I had any real talent for the stage. My school-day triumphs in
Racine's "Andromaque" were far enough behind me, and I could only
answer, with as much perplexity as good faith, that I had not the
slightest idea whether I had or not. She begged me to learn some part
and say it to her, that she might form some opinion of my power, and I
chose Shakespeare's Portia, then, as now, my ideal of a perfect
woman--the wise, witty woman, loving with all her soul and submitting
with all her heart to a man whom everybody but herself (who was the best
judge) would have judged her inferior; the laughter-loving,
light-hearted, true-hearted, deep-hearted woman, full of keen
perception, of active efficiency, of wisdom prompted by love, of
tenderest unselfishness, of generous magnanimity; noble, simple, humble,
pure; true, dutiful, religious, and full of fun; delightful above all
others, the woman of women. Having learned it by heart, I recited Portia
to my mother, whose only comment was, "There is hardly passion enough in
this part to test any tragic power. I wish you would study Juliet for
me." Study to me then, as unfortunately long afterward, simply meant to
learn by heart, which I did again, and repeated my lesson to my mother,
who again heard me without any observation whatever. Meantime my father
returned to town and my letter remained unanswered, and I was wondering
in my mind what reply I should receive to my urgent entreaty, when one
morning my mother told me she wished me to recite Juliet to my father;
and so in the evening I stood up before them both, and with
indescribable trepidation repeated my first lesson in tragedy.

They neither of them said anything beyond "Very well,--very nice, my
dear," with many kisses and caresses, from which I escaped to sit down
on the stairs half-way between the drawing-room and my bedroom, and get
rid of the repressed nervous fear I had struggled with while reciting,
in floods of tears. A few days after this my father told me he wished to
take me to the theater with him to try whether my voice was of
sufficient strength to fill the building; so thither I went. That
strange-looking place, the stage, with its racks of pasteboard and
canvas--streets, forests, banqueting-halls, and dungeons--drawn apart on
either side, was empty and silent; not a soul was stirring in the
indistinct recesses of its mysterious depths, which seemed to stretch
indefinitely behind me. In front, the great amphitheater, equally empty
and silent, wrapped in its gray holland covers, would have been
absolutely dark but for a long, sharp, thin shaft of light that darted
here and there from some height and distance far above me, and alighted
in a sudden, vivid spot of brightness on the stage. Set down in the
midst of twilight space, as it were, with only my father's voice coming
to me from where he stood hardly distinguishable in the gloom, in those
poetical utterances of pathetic passion I was seized with the spirit of
the thing; my voice resounded through the great vault above and before
me, and, completely carried away by the inspiration of the wonderful
play, I acted Juliet as I do not believe I ever acted it again, for I
had no visible Romeo, and no audience to thwart my imagination; at
least, I had no consciousness of any, though in truth I had one. In the
back of one of the private boxes, commanding the stage but perfectly
invisible to me, sat an old and warmly attached friend of my father's,
Major D----, a man of the world--of London society,--a passionate lover
of the stage, an amateur actor of no mean merit, one of the members of
the famous Cheltenham dramatic company, a first-rate critic in all
things connected with art and literature, a refined and courtly,
courteous gentleman; the best judge, in many respects, that my father
could have selected, of my capacity for my profession and my chance of
success in it. Not till after the event had justified my kind old
friend's prophecy did I know that he had witnessed that morning's
performance, and joining my father at the end of it had said, "Bring her
out at once; it will be a great success." And so three weeks from that
time I was brought out, and it was a "great success." Three weeks was
not much time for preparation of any sort for such an experiment, but I
had no more, to become acquainted with my fellow actors and actresses,
not one of whom I had ever spoken with or seen--off the stage--before;
to learn all the technical _business_, as it is called, of the stage;
how to carry myself toward the audience, which was not--but was to
be--before me; how to concert my movements with the movements of those I
was acting with, so as not to impede or intercept their efforts, while
giving the greatest effect of which I was capable to my own.

I do not wonder, when I remember this brief apprenticeship to my
profession, that Mr. Macready once said that I did not know the elements
of it. Three weeks of morning rehearsals of the play at the theater, and
evening consultations at home as to colors and forms of costume, what I
should wear, how my hair should be dressed, etc., etc.,--in all which I
remained absolutely passive in the hands of others, taking no part and
not much interest in the matter,--ended in my mother's putting aside all
suggestions of innovation like the adoption of the real picturesque
costume of mediæval Verona (which was, of course, Juliet's proper
dress), and determining in favor of the traditional stage costume for
the part, which was simply a dress of plain white satin with a long
train, with short sleeves and a low body; my hair was dressed in the
fashion in which I usually wore it; a girdle of fine paste brilliants,
and a small comb of the same, which held up my hair, were the only
theatrical parts of the dress, which was as perfectly simple and as
absolutely unlike anything Juliet ever wore as possible.

Poor Mrs. Jameson made infinite protests against this decision of my
mother's, her fine artistic taste and sense of fitness being intolerably
shocked by the violation of every propriety in a Juliet attired in a
modern white satin ball dress amid scenery representing the streets and
palaces of Verona in the fourteenth century, and all the other
characters dressed with some reference to the supposed place and period
of the tragedy. Visions too, no doubt, of sundry portraits of Raphael,
Titian, Giorgione, Bronzino,--beautiful alike in color and
fashion,--vexed her with suggestions, with which she plied my mother;
who, however, determined as I have said, thinking the body more than
raiment, and arguing that the unincumbered use of the person, and the
natural grace of young arms, neck, and head, and unimpeded movement of
the limbs (all which she thought more compatible with the simple white
satin dress than the picturesque mediæval costume) were points of
paramount importance. My mother, though undoubtedly very anxious that I
should look well, was of course far more desirous that I should act
well, and judged that whatever rendered my dress most entirely
subservient to my acting, and least an object of preoccupation and
strange embarrassment to myself, was, under the circumstances of my
total inexperience and brief period of preparation, the thing to be
chosen, and I am sure that in the main she judged wisely. The mere
appendage of a train--three yards of white satin--following me wherever
I went, was to me a new, and would have been a difficult experience to
most girls. As it was, I never knew, after the first scene of the play,
what became of my train, and was greatly amused when Lady Dacre told me,
the next morning, that as soon as my troubles began I had snatched it up
and carried it on my arm, which I did quite unconsciously, because I
found something in the way of _Juliet's feet_.

I have often admired the consummate good sense with which, confronting a
whole array of authorities, historical, artistical, æsthetical, my
mother stoutly maintained in their despite that nothing was to be
adopted on the stage that was in itself ugly, ungraceful, or even
curiously antiquated and singular, however correct it might be with
reference to the particular period, or even to authoritative portraits
of individual characters of the play. The passions, sentiments, actions,
and sufferings of human beings, she argued, were the main concern of a
fine drama, not the clothes they wore. I think she even preferred an
unobtrusive indifference to a pedantic accuracy, which, she said, few
people appreciated, and which, if anything, rather took the attention
from the acting than added to its effect, when it was really fine.

She always said, when pictures and engravings were consulted, "Remember,
this presents but one view of the person, and does not change its
position: how will this dress look when it walks, runs, rushes, kneels,
sits down, falls, and turns its back?" I think an edge was added to my
mother's keen, rational, and highly artistic sense of this matter of
costume because it was the special hobby of her "favorite aversion," Mr.
E----, who had studied with great zeal and industry antiquarian
questions connected with the subject of stage representations, and was
perpetually suggesting to my father improvements on the old ignorant
careless system which prevailed under former managements.

It is very true that, as she said, Garrick acted Macbeth in a full court
suit of scarlet,--knee-breeches, powdered wig, pigtail, and all; and
Mrs. Siddons acted the Grecian Daughter in piles of powdered curls, with
a forest of feathers on the top of them, high-heeled shoes, and a
portentous hoop; and both made the audience believe that they looked
just as they should do. But for all that, actors and actresses who were
neither Garrick nor Mrs. Siddons were not less like the parts they
represented by being at least dressed as they should be; and the fine
accuracy of the Shakespearean revivals of Mr. Macready and Charles Kean
was in itself a great enjoyment; nobody was ever told to _omit_ the
tithing of mint and cummin, though other matters were more important;
and Kean's Othello would have been the grand performance it was, even
with the advantage of Mr. Fechter's clever and picturesque "getting up"
of the play, as a frame to it; as Mademoiselle Rachel's wonderful
fainting exclamation of "Oh, mon cher Curiace!" lost none of its
poignant pathos, though she knew how every fold of her drapery fell and
rested on the chair on which she sank in apparent unconsciousness.
Criticising a portrait of herself in that scene, she said to the
painter, "Ma robe ne fait pas ce pli la; elle fait, au contraire,
celui-ci." The artist, inclined to defend his picture, asked her how,
while she was lying with her eyes shut and feigning utter insensibility,
she could possibly tell anything about the plaits of her dress.
"Allez-y-voir," replied Rachel; and the next time she played Camille,
the artist was able to convince himself by more careful observation that
she was right, and that there was probably no moment of the piece at
which this consummate artist was not aware of the effect produced by
every line and fold of the exquisite costume, of which she had studied
and prepared every detail as carefully as the wonderful movements of her
graceful limbs, the intonations of her awful voice, and the changing
expressions of her terribly beautiful countenance.

In later years, after I became the directress of my own stage costumes,
I adopted one for Juliet, made after a beautiful design of my friend,
Mrs. Jameson, which combined my mother's _sine qua non_ of simplicity
with a form and fashion in keeping with the supposed period of the play.

My frame of mind under the preparations that were going forward for my
_début_ appears to me now curious enough. Though I had found out that I
could act, and had acted with a sort of frenzy of passion and entire
self-forgetfulness the first time I ever uttered the wonderful
conception I had undertaken to represent, my going on the stage was
absolutely an act of duty and conformity to the will of my parents,
strengthened by my own conviction that I was bound to help them by every
means in my power. The theatrical profession was, however, utterly
distasteful to me, though _acting_ itself, that is to say, dramatic
personation, was not; and every detail of my future vocation, from the
preparations behind the scenes to the representations before the
curtain, was more or less repugnant to me. Nor did custom ever render
this aversion less; and liking my work so little, and being so devoid of
enthusiasm, respect, or love for it, it is wonderful to me that I ever
achieved _any_ success in it at all. The dramatic element inherent in my
organization must have been very powerful, to have enabled me without
either study of or love for my profession to do anything worth anything
in it.

But this is the reason why, with an unusual gift and many unusual
advantages for it, I did really so little; why my performances were
always uneven in themselves and perfectly unequal with each other, never
complete as a whole, however striking in occasional parts, and never at
the same level two nights together; depending for their effect upon the
state of my nerves and spirits, instead of being the result of
deliberate thought and consideration,--study, in short, carefully and
conscientiously applied to my work; the permanent element which
preserves the artist, however inevitably he must feel the influence of
moods of mind and body, from ever being at their mercy.

I brought but one half the necessary material to the exercise of my
profession, that which nature gave me; and never added the cultivation
and labor requisite to produce any fine performance in the right sense
of the word; and, coming of a family of _real_ artists, have never felt
that I deserved that honorable name.

A letter written at this time to Miss S---- shows how comparatively
small a part my approaching ordeal engrossed my thoughts.

                                     JAMES STREET, September 24, 1829,
     MY DEAREST H----,

     Your letter grieved me very much, but it did not surprise me; of
     your brother's serious illness I had heard from my cousin, Horace
     Twiss. But is there indeed cause for the terrible anxiety you
     express? I know how impossible it is to argue with the
     apprehensions of affection, and should have forborne this letter
     altogether, but that I felt very deeply your kindness in writing to
     me at such a time, and that I would fain assure you of my
     heart-felt sympathy, however unavailing it may be. To you who have
     a steadfast anchor for your hopes, I ought not, perhaps, to say,
     "Do not despond." Yet, dearest H----, do not despond: is there
     _any_ occasion when despair is justified? I know how lightly all
     soothing counsel must be held, in a case of such sorrow as yours,
     but among fellow-Christians such words still have some
     significance; for the most unworthy of that holy profession may
     point unfalteringly to the only consolations adequate to the need
     of those far above them in every endowment of mind and heart and
     religious attainment. Dear H----, I hardly know how to tell you how
     much I feel for you, how sincerely I hope your fears may prove
     groundless, and how earnestly I pray that, should they prove
     prophetic, you may be enabled to bear the affliction, to meet which
     I doubt not strength will be given you. This is all I dare say;
     those who love you best will hardly venture to say more. To put
     away entirely the idea of an evil which one may be called upon at
     any moment to encounter would hardly be wise, even if it were
     possible, in this world where every happiness one enjoys is but a
     loan, the repayment of which may be exacted at the very moment,
     perhaps, when we are forgetting in its possession the precarious
     tenure by which alone it is ours.

     My dear father and mother have both been very unwell; the former is
     a little recovered, but the latter is still in a sad state of
     bodily suffering and mental anxiety. Our two boys are well and
     happy, and I am very well and not otherwise than happy. I regret to
     say Mrs. Henry Siddons will leave London in a very short time; this
     is a great loss to me. I owe more to her than I can ever repay; for
     though abundant pains had been bestowed upon me previously to my
     going to her, it was she who caused to spring whatever scattered
     seeds of good were in me, which almost seemed as if they had been
     cast into the soil in vain.

     My dear H----, I am going on the stage: the nearest period talked
     of for my _début_ is the first of October, at the opening of the
     theater; the furthest, November; but I almost think I should prefer
     the nearest, for it is a very serious trial to look forward to, and
     I wish it were over. Juliet is to be my opening part, but not to my
     father's Romeo; there would be many objections to that; he will do
     Mercutio for me. I do not enter more fully upon this, because I
     know how few things can be of interest to you in your present state
     of feeling, but I wished you not to find the first notice of my
     entrance on the stage of life in a newspaper. God bless you,
     dearest H----, and grant you better hopes.

                        Your most affectionate
                                                                FANNY.

My father not acting Romeo with me deprived me of the most poetical and
graceful stage lover of his day; but the public, who had long been
familiar with his rendering of the part of Romeo, gained as much as I
lost, by his taking that of Mercutio, which has never since been so
admirably represented, and I dare affirm will never be given more
perfectly. The graceful ease, and airy sparkling brilliancy of his
delivery of the witty fancies of that merry gentleman, the gallant
defiance of his bearing toward the enemies of his house, and his
heroically pathetic and humorous death-scene, were beyond description
charming. He was one of the best Romeos, and incomparably _the_ best
Mercutio, that ever trod the English stage.

My father was Miss O'Neill's Romeo throughout her whole theatrical
career, during which no other Juliet was tolerated by the English
public. This amiable and excellent woman was always an attached friend
of our family, and one day, when she was about to take leave of me, at
the end of a morning visit, I begged her to let my father have the
pleasure of seeing her, and ran to his study to tell him whom I had with
me. He followed me hastily to the drawing-room, and stopping at the
door, extended his arms towards her, exclaiming, "Ah, Juliet!" Lady
Becher ran to him and embraced him with a pretty, affectionate grace,
and the scene was pathetical as well as comical, for they were both
white-haired, she being considerably upward of sixty and he of seventy
years old; but she still retained the slender elegance of her exquisite
figure, and he some traces of his pre-eminent personal beauty.

My mother had a great admiration and personal regard for Lady Becher,
and told me an anecdote of her early life which transmitted those
feelings of hers to me. Lord F----, eldest son of the Earl of E----, a
personally and mentally attractive young man, fell desperately in love
with Miss O'Neill, who was (what the popular theatrical heroine of the
day always is) the realization of their ideal to the youth, male and
female, of her time, the stage star of her contemporaries. Lord F----'s
family had nothing to say against the character, conduct, or personal
endowments of the beautiful, actress who had enchanted, to such serious
purpose as marriage, the heir of their house; but much, reasonably and
rightly enough, against marriages disproportionate to such a degree as
that, and the objectionable nature of the young woman's peculiar
circumstances and public calling. Both Miss O'Neill, however, and Lord
F---- were enough in earnest in their mutual regard to accept the test
of a year's separation and suspension of all intercourse. She remained
to utter herself in Juliet to the English public, and her lover went and
travelled abroad, both believing in themselves and each other. No
letters or communication passed between them; but toward the end of
their year of probation vague rumors came flying to England of the life
of dissipation led by the young man, and of the unworthy companions with
whom he entertained the most intimate relations. After this came more
explicit tales of positive entanglement with one particular person, and
reports of an entire devotion to one object quite incompatible with the
constancy professed and promised to his English mistress.

Probably aware that every effort would, till the last, be made by Lord
F----'s family to detach them from each other, bound by her promise to
hold no intercourse with him, but determined to take the verdict of her
fate from no one but himself, Miss O'Neill obtained a brief leave of
absence from her theatrical duties, went with her brother and sister to
Calais, whence she travelled alone to Paris (poor, fair Juliet! when I
think of her, not as I ever knew her, but such as I know she must then
have been, no more pathetic image presents itself to my mind), and took
effectual measures to ascertain beyond all shadow of doubt the bitter
truth of the evil reports of her fickle lover's mode of life. His
devotion to one lady, the more respectable form of infidelity which must
inevitably have canceled their contract of love, was not indeed true,
and probably the story had been fabricated because the mere general
accusation of profligacy might easily have been turned into an appeal to
her mercy, as the result of reckless despondency and of his utter
separation from her; and a woman in her circumstances might not have
been hard to find who would have persuaded herself that she might
overlook "all that," reclaim her lover, and be an Earl's wife. Miss
O'Neill rejoined her family at Calais, wrote to Lord F----'s father, the
Earl of E----, her final and irrevocable rejection of his son's suit,
fell ill of love and sorrow, and lay for some space between life and
death for the sake of her unworthy lover; rallied bravely, recovered,
resumed her work,--her sway over thousands of human hearts,--and, after
lapse of healing and forgiving and forgetting time, married Sir William
Wrixon Becher.

The peculiar excellence of her acting lay in the expression of pathos,
sorrow, anguish,--the sentimental and suffering element of tragedy. She
was expressly devised for a representative victim; she had, too, a rare
endowment for her special range of characters, in an easily excited,
superficial sensibility, which caused her to cry, as she once said to
me, "buckets full," and enabled her to exercise the (to most men)
irresistible influence of a beautiful woman in tears. The power (or
weakness) of abundant weeping without disfigurement is an attribute of
deficient rather than excessive feeling. In such persons the tears are
poured from their crystal cups without muscular distortion of the rest
of the face. In proportion to the violence or depth of emotion, and the
acute or profound sensibility of the temperament, is the disturbance of
the countenance. In sensitive organizations, the muscles round the
nostrils and lips quiver and are distorted, the throat and temples
swell, and a grimace, which but for its miserable significance would be
grotesque, convulses the whole face. Men's tears always seem to me as if
they were pumped up from their heels, and strained through every drop of
blood in their veins; women's, to start as under a knife stroke, direct
with a gush from their heart, abundant and beneficent; but again, women
of the temperament I have alluded to above have fountains of lovely
tears behind their lovely eyes, and their weeping, which is
indescribably beautiful, is comparatively painless, and yet pathetic
enough to challenge tender compassion. I have twice seen such tears
shed, and never forgotten them: once from heaven-blue eyes, and the face
looked like a flower with pearly dewdrops sliding over it; and again,
once from magnificent, dark, uplifted orbs, from which the falling tears
looked like diamond rain-drops by moonlight.

Miss O'Neill was a supremely touching, but neither a powerful nor a
passionate actress. Personally, she was the very beau ideal of feminine
weakness in its most attractive form--delicacy. She was tall, slender,
elegantly formed, and extremely graceful; her features were regular and
finely chiseled, and her hair beautiful; her eyes were too light, and
her eyebrows and eyelashes too pale for expression; her voice wanted
variety and brilliancy for comic intonation, but was deep and sonorous,
and of a fine pathetic and tragic quality.

It was not an easy matter to find a Romeo for me, and in the emergency
my father and mother even thought of my brother Henry's trying the part.
He was in the first bloom of youth, and really might be called
beautiful; and certainly, a few years later, might have been the very
ideal of a Romeo. But he looked too young for the part, as indeed he
was, being three years my junior. The overwhelming objection, however,
was his own insuperable dislike to the idea of acting, and his ludicrous
incapacity for assuming the faintest appearance of any sentiment.
However, he learned the words, and never shall I forget the explosion of
laughter which shook my father, my mother, and myself, when, after
hearing him recite the balcony scene with the most indescribable mixture
of shy terror and nervous convulsions of suppressed giggling, my father
threw down the book, and Henry gave vent to his feelings by clapping his
elbows against his sides and bursting into a series of triumphant
cock-crows--an expression of mental relief so ludicrously in contrast
with his sweet, sentimental face, and the part he had just been
pretending to assume, that I thought we never should have recovered from
the fits it sent us into. We were literally all crying with laughter,
and a more farcical scene cannot be imagined. This, of course, ended all
idea of that young chanticleer being my Romeo; and yet the young rascal
was, or fancied he was, over head and ears in love at this very time,
and an exquisite sketch Hayter had just made of him might with the
utmost propriety have been sent to the exhibition with no other title
than "Portrait of a Lover."

The part of Romeo was given to Mr. Abbot, an old-established favorite
with the public, a very amiable and worthy man, old enough to have been
my father, whose performance, not certainly of the highest order, was
nevertheless not below inoffensive mediocrity. But the public, who were
bent upon doing more than justice to me, were less than just to him; and
the abuse showered upon his Romeo, especially by my more enthusiastic
admirers of the male sex, might, I should think, have embittered his
stage relations with me to the point of making me an object of
detestation to him, all through our theatrical lives. A tragicomic
incident was related to me by one of the parties concerned in it, which
certainly proved that poor Mr. Abbot was quite aware of the little favor
his Romeo found with my particular friends. One of them, the son of our
kind and valued friends the G----s, an excellent, good-hearted, but not
very wise young fellow, invariably occupied a certain favorite and
favorable position in the midst of the third row of the pit every night
that I acted. There were no stalls or reserved seats then, though not
long after I came out the majority of the seats in the orchestra were
let to spectators, and generally occupied by a set of young gentlemen
whom Sir Thomas Lawrence always designated as my "body guard." This,
however, had not yet been instituted, and my friend G---- had often to
wait long hours, and even to fight for the privilege of his peculiar
seat, where he rendered himself, I am sorry to say, not a little
ludicrous, and not seldom rather obnoxious to everybody in his vicinity,
by the vehement demonstrations of his enthusiasm--his frantic cries of
"bravo," his furious applause, and his irrepressible exclamations of
ecstasy and agony during the whole play. He became as familiar to the
public as the stage lamps themselves, and some of his immediate
neighbors complained rather bitterly of the incessant din and clatter of
his approbation, and the bruises, thumps, contusions, and constant fears
which his lively sentiments inflicted upon them. This _fanatico_ of
mine, walking home from the theater one night with two other like-minded
individuals, indulged himself in obstreperous abuse of poor Mr. Abbot,
in which he was heartily joined by his companions. Toward Cavendish
Square the broad, quiet streets rang with the uproarious mirth with
which they recapitulated his "damnable faces," "strange postures,"
uncouth gestures, and ungainly deportment; imitation followed imitation
of the poor actor's peculiar declamation, and the night became noisy
with the shouts of mingled derision and execration of his critics; when
suddenly, as they came to a gas-light at the corner of a crossing, a
solitary figure which had been preceding them, without possibility of
escape, down the long avenue of Harley Street, where G---- lived, turned
abruptly round, and confronted them with Mr. Abbot's unimpressive
countenance. "Gentlemen," he said, "no one can be more aware than myself
of the defects of my performance of Romeo, no one more conscious of its
entire unworthiness of Miss Kemble's Juliet; but all I can say is, that
I do not act the part by my own choice, and shall be delighted to resign
it to either of you who may feel more capable than I am of doing it
justice." The young gentlemen, though admiring me "not wisely, but too
well," were good-hearted fellows, and were struck with the manly and
moderate tone of Mr. Abbot's rebuke, and shocked at having
unintentionally wounded the feelings of a person who (except as Romeo),
was every way deserving of their respect. Of course they could not
swallow all their foolish words, and Abbot bowed and was gone before
they could stutter an apology. I have no doubt that his next appearance
as Romeo was hailed with some very cordial, remorseful applause,
addressed to him personally as some relief to their feelings, by my
indiscreet partisans. My friend G----, not very long after this
theatrical passion of his, became what is sometimes called "religious,"
and had thoughts of going into the Church, and giving up the play-house.
He confided to my mother, who was his mother's intimate friend, and of
whom he was very fond, his conscientious scruples, which she in no wise
combated; though she probably thought more moderation in going to the
theater, and a little more self-control when there, might not, in any
event, be undesirable changes in his practice, whether his taking holy
orders cut him off entirely from what was then his principal pleasure,
or not. One night, when the venerable Prebend of St. Paul's, her old
friend, Dr. Hughes, was in her box with her, witnessing my performance
(which my mother never failed to attend), she pointed out G----,
_scrimmaging_ about, as usual, in his wonted place in the pit, and said,
"There is a poor lad who is terribly disturbed in his own mind about the
very thing he is doing at this moment. He is thinking of going into the
Church, and more than half believes that he ought to give up coming to
the play." "That depends, I should say," replied dear old Dr. Hughes,
"upon his own conviction in the matter, and nothing else; meantime, pray
give him my compliments, and tell him _I_ have enjoyed the performance
to-night extremely."

Mr. Abbot was in truth not a bad actor, though a perfectly uninteresting
one in tragedy; he had a good figure, face, and voice, the carriage and
appearance of a well-bred person, and, in what is called genteel comedy,