Old Woman's Gossip

III.

A QUITF. 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 needle - work 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 offense 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 clare - obscure that reigned in my prison admitting of none 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 traveled 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 great 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 threatened an appeal to the authorities at the bureau de poste, and finally we got rid of our pestiferous load. Whether M. le Due’s chef suicided himself, àla Vatel, for the non-arrival of the precious marée I know not, but we must have died of it, if not for it, if we had persevered in conveying it a league farther.

I was now placed at 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 production on the stage of her tragedy of the Foscari. Of the merits of this drama I have but a faint recollection. I remember much better a volume of Dramatic Scenes by Miss Mitford, which made a very powerful and striking impression upon me. One in particular I was greatly fascinated by, on the subject of the German legend of the lady who compelled her lovers to ride round the top of her castle wall above a deep precipice, as the qualification for pretending to her hand, and is scornfully rejected by the only knight who succeeds in captivating her affections, and achieves the perilous ordeal of the ride, in attempting which his younger brother has been dashed to pieces before him. This story was also made the subject of a pretty ballad by M. Planché, called the Lady of Kienast, and set to a popular melody from Weigl’s Schweitzer Familie. Miss Mitford’s gallant hero, caressing and praising and thanking his horse for having borne him successfully round the terrible summit, while the humbled lady, trembling with love and agony at his feet, in vain implores a look or word from him, was a very spirited and striking picture that remains vividly in my mind, though it must be upwards of forty years since I read the poem. 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 fulfill 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 pairtli 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 believe it was on the occasion of that same ball that she asked Lord Byron to waltz with her, when, probably irritated by her impertinent disregard of the infirmity which was always so bitter a mortification to him, he not only refused, saying, “ You know I cannot.” but added, “ and you or any other woman ought not.” (His poetical vituperation of the dance, then first coming into vogue, will be remembered.) Upon this rebuff the lady went to a dressing-room, and throwing open a window rushed out upon the balcony, and exclaiming in the words of St. Preux under the rocks of La Meilleraie: “ La roche est escarpée! l’eau est profonde!” prepared to precipitate herself, not into the blue waters of Lake Leman, but on to the hard - hearted pavement of a London street, which travesty of Rousseau’s tragedy being timely averted by a friendly and firm clutch at her ladyship’s skirts behind, she desired to have a glass of water, which being brought to her, she set her teeth in the glass and broke it, and proceeded to cut her throat with the jagged edge ; but this being also interfered with, as injudicious, she was finally persuaded to postpone her despair to a more convenient season, and go home to bed. I have heard another version of the above attempted suicide, which made a pair of scissors snatched from the dressing-table and about to be plunged into her bosom the remedy of the lady for her outraged feelings. She might have equally illustrated her self-murder by a French quotation from Scribe’s funny little piece of Les premières Amours: “ L’arme fatale était déjà levée sur son sein! e’était une paire de ciseaux.” 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 courtyard, 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 upon 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 door 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. Poor Lady Caroline’s worship seems to have been of as little avail with her spoilt poet as her husband’s patient forbearance was with her. Indeed, Mr. Lamb’s entire subjugation to her influence very long survived the period at which society judged that he ought to have withstood it in the interest of his dignity and her decorum, of which fact his very affectionate and admiring old friend, Lord Dacre, gave me a comical illustration in the following anecdote.

Her flighty and eccentric conduct with regard to Lord Byron, and the many unaccountable vagaries in which she indulged, at length brought her husband’s family and friends to the unanimous resolution of using all possible influence to induce him to part from her. Much urgent persuasion was brought to bear upon the kindly, amiable gentleman, and a promise at length extorted from him by his irritated relations to separate himself from his crazy consort.

His firmness, however, was not supposed of a nature to be intrusted with the management of the parting, and he went off to Brocket Hall, leaving his sister to break his determination to Lady Caroline, and afterwards to follow him with the news of how she had received the expression of his resolution never to see her again. The interview between the wife and sister-in-law took place, and the offending lady was emphatically apprised of her husband’s stern determination with regard to her; after which several members of Mr. Lamb’s family left town for Hertfordshire, to tell him how the matter had gone, to strengthen him in his resolution, and comfort him in his desolation. Arrived at Brocket, they sought the disconsolate husband in vain in the house and grounds till in a remote summer - house in the park he was discovered with Lady Caroline, en Amazone, sitting in his lap and feeding him with dainty slices of bread and butter, which she was literally putting into his mouth: the countenances of the relations must have been curious to see.

Among Lady Caroline’s accomplishments was that of being a first-rate horsewoman. On parting from her sister-in-law she had mounted her horse and ridden as hard as she could ride straight to Brocket, to tell her husband herself how she had taken his sentence against her, 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, Mademoiselle 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 idéal 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 curantes had taken the pains to make himself a profound Hebrew scholar. My dear old friend, Lord Dacre, often enlarged upon Lord Melbourne’s amiable qualities; he was much attached to him, and spoke enthusiastically of his fine temper towards his political antagonists. Of this I recollect Charles Greville giving me an instance. When the Tories under Sir Robert Peel succeeded to the Melbourne ministry, Lord Melbourne ended a conversation upon the subject of his being “turned out,” by saying, “ Well, Charles, if those fellows [the ones new in office] want any help or information about business, you know you may come to me for it, for them.” Mr. Greville was clerk of the council and an intimate friend of Lord Melbourne’s.

He told me the queen was personally much attached to the pleasant premier under whose ministry she began her reign. He was always agreeable to her in his business relations with her, and she exhibited decided pleasure in his society; he used to amuse and make her laugh, and I believe his great successor, Sir Robert Peel, was at an immense disadvantage in his intercourse with his royal mistress, from the contrast between the easy, high - bred grace of Lord Melbourne’s manner, and the rather awkward stiffness of his own.

Charles Greville thought Lord Melbourne’s feeling for his young girl queen was a mixture of fatherly and lover-like tenderness and interest; and she may well have felt severely the change from his affectionate and chivalrous devotion and solicitude, to the formal service, however dutiful, of his successor. She is said to have shed tears when Lord Melbourne went out of office, and certainly delayed by the mere exercise of her will Sir Robert’s full assumption of his position, as long as it was possible to do so.

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, crimsoncovered 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 distinctions 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: —

and a pathetic, though rather prosaic episode about two young Scotch girls, a certain Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, who, retiring together from some town infected with small-pox or other contagious disease, less fortunate than the fair Decameronians of Boccaccio, were followed to the rural retreat where they had taken refuge, by a young man, the lover of one of them, who brought the infection to them, of which they both died.

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 Methodistieal, 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 could n’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 Händel’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 school-mate 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 everybody 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. Moreover, 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 case 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 traveling, 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 goodtempered, 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 school-room, and very generally her easy figure and pleasant, bright eyes were to be discovered in some corner of the play - ground, where from a semiretirement, seated in her fauteuil with book or needle-work 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 needle-work 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, oldfashioned 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.

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.

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. Among the rest none were in any way peculiar except a Scotch girl, of the name of Sybilla M-, a perfect typical ugly she Scot — tall, thin, raw-boned, whey-faced, sandy-haired, gooseberry - eyed, shambling, angular, awkward, speaking with the broadest Scotch twang, and sleeping with eyes and mouth wide open.

This curious image is made more ludicrous in my memory by an incident of school discipline, which illustrated her imperturbable Scotch phlegm and peculiar, rigid Scotch conscientiousness. For some offense, I know not what, Mademoiselle Descuillés desired her to kneel down in the middle of the schoolroom — a favorite foreign punishment for recalcitrant subjects, borrowed undoubtedly, like the loud-reading at meal-times, from monastic discipline. The mandate having been repeated with increasing sternness several times without effect, received at last the deliberate reply in the broadest North British: “ Nong, rnadame, jè nè pouee—paw.” (Sybilla certainly never bowed her knees except to Heaven, and then, I imagine, not without their creaking.) The irate French lady then rejoining, “Eh bien, allez mettre votre bonnet de nuit, si vous pouvez,” was as deliberately obeyed, with a “ Wee, madame, jè pou-ee,” and out shambled the Sybilla, to return with her head and face arrayed in such a hideous night-gear as produced an uproar among the class, and constrained Mademoiselle Descuillès to stoop very suddenly and very low over her desk, while the unperturbed performer of this grotesque penance resumed her place among us, and, with as perfect unconcern as if she had been in one of her wide-eyed slumbers, went through a lesson with one of the masters, whose galvanized start on entering was followed by repeated apparent fascinations, during which he remained for several seconds absorbed in the contemplation of the “bonnet de nuit of Mees Sibillena.” She was a girl of fifteen or sixteen, and certainly had a supernatural contempt for personal appearance. That bonnet de nuil penance would hardly serve, nowadays, any serious purpose of humiliation, what with the dandy nightcaps, all ribbon and Valenciennes, and the still prettier white nets, with the bright braids glistening through them, of the American and English girls of

the present day; but Sybilla M-’s night-cap was a grim skull-cap of thick linen, tied under her chin with tape, and hideous was the only word appropriate to it.

Besides pupils Mrs. Bowden received a small number of parlor boarders, who joined only in some of the lessons; indeed, some of them appeared to fulfill no purpose of education whatever by their residence with her. There were a Madame and Mademoiselle de L–, 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 H–, 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 drawingroom, 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 G-, whose father, a fanatical Anglomane, wrote a ridiculous book about England. His daughter was, I think, a little cracked, and left her education in a state of deplorable incompleteness behind her, when she quitted the Rue d’Angoulême to contract a marriage of the very usual French construction then, and still, I believe: it surely can hardly have been one of inclination or have begun very auspiciously, to judge by her own mode of speaking of it.

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 that made a very lugubrious impression upon me. 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 modern 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 indulgences 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 francaise 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 perturbed slumbers loudly proclaiming, —

Familiarity breeds contempt, I went on committing to memory the tiresome rhymed history of Le Béarnais, and by and by slept sound in spite of Henri Quatre and Voltaire.

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 selfsacrifice. 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 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 suppose 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. Excellent genius! second but to one in England, fortunate above all other countries in having given to the world Shakespeare and Scott : kindred in kind though not in degree of gift, alike sweet of heart and sound of head, in whose conceptions beauty was never divided from truth; the fabric of whose soaring, wide-spread fancy rose from the firmest, broadest base of moral integrity and sober judgment, genuine human sympathy and robust common-sense; like the great marble minster of Lombardy, whose foundations strike their roots deep down among the homes of the fair city, clustering at its feet, whose wide portals stand forever open to the busy populace that throngs its streets, and whose splendid roof, soaring into the air, with its countless spires and pinnacles of matchless workmanship, commands at once the Alps and the great Italian plain, and carries into the neighborhood of the stars a whole world of saints and martyrs, heroes, kings, and winged angelic presences, the glorified types of the human nature flowing in ceaseless currents around its base.

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 the same time one of the latest of the long tribe of commentators on Dante’s Divina Commedia. I do not believe his com mentary 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.

I have said that I thought my brother John’s early predilection for grammatical study had probably been the result of his master’s kindred pursuit in the compilation of his dictionary. And I have no doubt that Biagioli’s own passionate devotion to the great work of Dante induced him to abridge with very little ceremony my preparatory exercises in Goldoni, Metastasio, and Tasso, and place (perhaps prematurely) the weird opening of the Divina Commedia in my hands.

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 forever Paradise Lost to her. I do not know why or how I escaped a similar misfortune in ray 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 everincreasing 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 equal 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., with pleasant recollection of their agreeable melody and easy accompaniment: how different from the amateur struggles of the present day, with the perilous modulations of Mendelssohn and Schubert!

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 failure 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 dormono!” Besides his many graceful Italian songs and charming French romances for one or two voices, he published some more ambitious works: an Italian opera or two, out of which I learnt some scenes of no particular musical merit; and a French one called Le jeune Oncle (a musical version of the pretty piece of that name), which contained some pleasant and cleverly constructed concerted pieces.

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 Cœur de Lion — I presume an English version of Gratry’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 pianoforte player, could no longer see very well or 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 pianoforte 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. A person who has mastered so thoroughly the mechanical difficulties of piano-forte playing as to be able to go through Bach’s exercises quite correctly by heart, may be trusted with a violin accompaniment to lighter compositions. The lights and shades of expression, the effects of execution, the precision of time and general spirit of style may be improved by playing with the violin, or better still by taking a part in quartette and concerto playing with good performers. As for me, I derived but one benefit from my old violin accompanier, that of becoming a good timeist; 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. I made acquaintance with all the overtures that ever were composed — Mozart’s, Cimarosa’s, Paesiello’s, Rossini’s, Boeldieu’s, Méhul’s, Kreutzner’s, the whole theatrical répertoire of the day ; only occasionally varied with one of Cramer’s or Herz’s showy arrangements or variations on popular airs, a symphony or two of Haydn’s, some pretty rondos by Dussek, and Steibelt’s Storm, the ne plus ultra of brilliant and difficult pianoforte amateurship, in Mr. Shaw’s estimation.

We had another master for French and Latin, — a clever, ugly, impudent, snuffy, dirty little man, who wrote vaudevilles for the minor theatres 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 vaudevilleist 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.”

Nobodybut Miss Pand 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, beaknosed 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 blueblack 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 agility 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 L-, 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, and which under the auspices of the female potentate who has given the laws of dress to Paris, and therefore to the world, in these latter days has amounted as nearly as possible to the absolute nudity of the whole bust.

Frances Anne Kemble.