Chapter III: Introduction (3)

“Joney” was indulgence itself, and under her mild sway, and with my mother for instructress in my little lessons of spelling and geography, Mrs. Barbauld, Dr. Watts and Jane Taylor, I was as happy a little animal as well might be. One day being allowed as usual to play on the grass before the drawing-room windows I took it into my head that I should dearly like to go and pay a visit to my nurse at her cottage at the end of the shrubbery. “Joney” had taken me there more than once, but still the mile-long shrubbery, some of it very dark with fir trees and great laurels, complicated with crossing walks, and containing two or three alarming shelter-huts and _tonnelles_ (which I long after regarded with awe), was a tremendous pilgrimage to encounter alone. After some hesitation I set off; ran as long as I could, and then with panting chest and beating heart, went on, daring not to look to right or left, till (after ages as it seemed to me) I reached the little window of my nurse’s house in the ivy wall; and set up—loud enough no doubt—a call for “Nanno!” The good soul could not believe her eyes when she found me alone but, hugging me in her arms, brought me back as fast as she could to my distracted mother who had, of course, discovered my evasion. Two years later, when I was seven years old, I was naughty enough to run away again, this time in the streets of Bath, in company with a hoop, and the Town Crier was engaged to “cry” me, but I found my way home at last alone. How curiously vividly silly little incidents like these stand out in the misty memory of childhood, like objects suddenly perceived close to us in a fog! I seem now, after sixty years, to see my nurse’s little brown figure and white kerchief, as she rushed out and caught her stray “darlint” in her arms; and also I see a dignified, gouty gentleman leaning on his stick, parading the broad pavement of Bath Crescent, up whose whole person my misguided and muddy hoop went bounding in my second escapade. I ought to apologise perhaps to the reader for narrating such trivial incidents, but they have left a charm in my memory.

At seven I was provided with a nursery governess, and my dear mother’s lessons came to an end. So gentle and sweet had they been that I have loved ever since everything she taught me, and have a vivid recollection of the old map book from whence she had herself learned Geography, and of Mrs. Trimmer’s Histories, “_Sacred_” and “_Profane_”; not forgetting the almost incredibly bad accompanying volumes of woodcuts with poor Eli a complete smudge and Sesostris driving the nine kings (with their crowns, of course) harnessed to his chariot. Who would have dreamed we should now possess photos of the mummy of the real Sesostris (Rameses II.), who seemed then quite as mythical a personage as Polyphemus? To remember the hideous aberrations of Art which then illustrated books for children, and compare them to the exquisite pictures in “_Little Folks_,” is to realise one of the many changes the world has seen since my childhood. Mrs. Trimmer’s books cost, I remember being told, _ten shillings_ apiece! My governess Miss Kinnear’s lessons, though not very severe (our old doctor, bless him for it! solemnly advised that I should never be called on to study after twelve o’clock), were far from being as attractive as those of my mother, and as soon as I learned to write, I drew on the gravel walk this, as I conceived, deeply touching and impressive sentence: “_Lessons! Thou tyrant of the mind!_” I could not at all understand my mother’s hilarity over this inscription, which proved so convincingly my need, at all events of those particular lessons of which Lindley Murray was the author. I envied the peacock who could sit all day in the sun, and who ate bowls-full of the griddle-bread of which I was so fond; and never was expected to learn anything? Poor bird, he came to a sad end. A dog terrified him one day and he took a great flight and was observed to go into one of the tall limes near the house but was never seen alive again. When the leaves fell in the autumn the rain-washed feathers and skeleton of poor Pe-ho were found wedged in a fork of the tree. He had met the fate of “Lost Sir Massingberd.”

Some years later, my antipathy to lessons having not at all diminished, I read a book which had just appeared, and of which all the elders of the house were talking, Keith’s _Signs of the Times_. In this work, as I remember, it was set forth that a “Vial” was shortly to be emptied into or near the Euphrates, after which the end of the world was to follow immediately. The writer accordingly warned his readers that they would soon hear startling news from the Euphrates. From that time I persistently inquired of anybody whom I saw reading the newspaper (a small sheet which in the Thirties only came three times a week) or who seemed well-informed about public affairs, “What news was there from the Euphrates?” The singular question at last called forth the inquiry, “Why I wanted to know?” and I was obliged to confess that I was hoping for the emptying of the “Vial” which would put an end to my sums and spelling lessons.

My seventh year was spent with my parents at Bath, where we had a house for the winter in James’ Square, where brothers and cousins came for the holidays, and in London, where I well remember going with my mother to see the Diorama in the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, of St. Peter’s, and a Swiss Cottage, and the statues of Tam o’ Shanter and his wife (which I had implored her to be allowed to see, having imagined them to be living ogres) and vainly entreating to be taken to see the Siamese Twins. This last longing, however, was gratified just thirty years afterwards. We travelled back to Ireland, posting all the way to Holyhead by the then new high road through Wales and over the Menai Bridge. My chief recollection of the long journey is humiliating. A box of Shrewsbury cakes, exactly like those now sold in the town, was bought for me _in situ_, and I was told to bring it over to Ireland to give to my little cousin Charley. I was pleased to give the cakes to Charley, but then Charley was at the moment far away, and the cakes were always at hand in the carriage; and the road was tedious and the cakes delicious; and so it came to pass somehow that I broke off first a little bit, and then another day a larger bit, till cake after cake vanished, and with sorrow and shame I was obliged to present the empty box to Charley on my arrival. Greediness alas! has been a besetting sin of mine all my life.

This Charley was a dear little boy, and about this date was occasionally my companion. His father, my uncle, was Captain William Cobbe, R.N., who had fought under Nelson, and at the end of the war, married and took a house near Newbridge, where he acted as my father’s agent. He was a fine, brave fellow, and much beloved by every one. One day, long after his sudden, untimely death, we heard from a coastguardsman who had been a sailor in his ship, that he had probably caught the disease of which he died in the performance of a gallant action, of which he had never told any one, even his wife. A man had fallen overboard from his ship one bitterly cold night in the northern seas near Copenhagen. My uncle, on hearing what had happened, jumped from his warm berth and plunged into the sea, where he succeeded in rescuing the sailor, but in doing so caught a chill which eventually shortened his days. He had five children, the eldest being Charley, some months younger than I. When my uncle came over to see his brother and do business, Charley, as he grew old enough to take the walk, was often allowed to come with him; and great was my enjoyment of the unwonted pleasure of a young companion. Considerably greater, I believe, than that of my mother and governess, who justly dreaded the escapades which our fertile little brains rarely failed to devise. We climbed over everything climbable by aid of the arrangement that Charley always mounted on my strong shoulders and then helped me up. One day my father said to us: “Children, there is a savage bull come, you must take care not to go near him.” Charley and I looked at each other and mutually understood. The next moment we were alone we whispered, “We must get some hairs of his tail!” and away we scampered till we found the new bull in a shed in the cow-yard. Valiantly we seized the tail, and as the bull fortunately paid no attention to his Lilliputian foes, we escaped in triumph with the hairs. Another time, a lovely April evening, I remember we were told it was damp, and that we must not go out of the house. We had discovered, however, a door leading out upon the roof,—and we agreed that “_on_” the house could not properly be considered “_out_” of the house; and very soon we were clambering up the slates, and walking along the parapet at a height of fifty or sixty feet from the ground. My mother, passing through one of the halls, observed a group of servants looking up in evident alarm and making signs to us to come down. As quickly as her feebleness permitted she climbed to our door of exit, and called to us over the roofs. Charley and I felt like Adam and Eve on the fatal evening after they had eaten the apple! After dreadful moments of hesitation we came down and received the solemn rebuke and condemnation we deserved. It was not a very severe chastisement allotted to us, though we considered it such. We were told that the game of Pope Joan, promised for the evening, should not be played. That was the severest, if not the only punishment, my mother ever inflicted on me.

On rainy days when Charley and I were driven to amuse ourselves in the great empty rooms and corridors upstairs, we were wont to discuss profound problems of theology. I remember one conclusion relating thereto at which we unanimously arrived. Both of us bore the name of “Power” as a second name, in honour of our grandmother Anne Trench’s mother, Fanny Power of Coreen. On this circumstance we founded the certainty that we should both go to Heaven, because we heard it said in church, “The Heavens and _all the Powers_ therein.”

Alas poor “Little Charley” as everybody called him, after growing to be a fine six-foot fellow, and a very popular officer, died sadly while still young, at the Cape.

In those early days, let us say about my tenth year, and for long afterwards, it was my father’s habit to fill his house with all the offshoots of the family at Christmas, and with a good many of them for the Midsummer holidays, when my two eldest brothers and the youngest came home from Charterhouse and Oxford, and the third from Sandhurst. These brothers of mine were kind, dear lads, always gentle and petting to their little sister, who was a mere baby when they were schoolboys, and of course never really a companion to them. I recollect they once tried to teach me Cricket, and straightway knocked me over with a ball; and then carried me, all four in tears and despair, to our mother thinking they had broken my ribs. I was very fond of them, and thought a great deal about their holidays, but naturally in early years saw very little of them.

Beside my brothers, and generally coming to Newbridge at the same holiday seasons, there was a regiment of young cousins, male and female. My mother’s only brother, Adjutant General Conway, had five children, all of whom were practically my father’s wards during the years of their education at Haileybury and in a ladies’ boarding-school in London. Then, beside my father’s youngest brother William’s family of five, of whom I have already spoken, his next eldest brother, George, of the Horse Artillery (Lieut. General Cobbe in his later years), had five more, and finally the third brother, Thomas, went out to India in his youth as aide-de-camp to his cousin, the Marquis of Hastings, held several good appointments (at Moorshedabad and elsewhere), married and had ten children, (all of whom passed into my father’s charge) and finally died, poor fellow! on his voyage home from India, after thirty years’ absence. Thus there were, in fact, including his own children, thirty young people more or less my father’s wards, and all of them looking to Newbridge as the place where holidays were naturally spent, and to my father’s not very long purse as the resource for everybody in emergencies. One of them, indeed, carried this view of the case rather unfortunately far. A gentleman visiting us, happening to mention that he had lately been to Malta, we naturally asked him if he had met a young officer of our name quartered there? “Oh dear, yes! a delightful fellow! All the ladies adore him. He gives charming picnics, and gets nosegays for them all from Naples.” “I am afraid he can scarcely afford that sort of thing,” someone timidly observed. “Oh, he says,” replied the visitor, “that he has an old uncle somewhere who——Good Lord! I am afraid I have put my foot in it,” abruptly concluded our friend, noticing the looks exchanged round the circle.

My father’s brother Henry, my god-father, died early and unmarried. He was Rector of Templeton, and was very intimate with his neighbours there, the Edgeworths and Granards. The greater part of the library at Newbridge, as it was in my time, had been collected by him, and included an alarming proportion of divinity. The story of his life might serve for such a novel as his friend, Miss Edgeworth, would have written and entitled “_Procrastination_.” He was much attached for a long time to a charming Miss Lindsay, who was quite willing to accept his hand, had he offered it. My poor uncle, however, continued to flirt and dangle and to postpone any definite declaration, till at last the girl’s mother—who, I rather believe, was a Lady Charlotte Lindsay, well known in her generation—told her that a conclusion must be put to this sort of thing. She would invite Mr. Cobbe to their house for a fortnight, and during that time every opportunity should be afforded him of making a proposal in form, if he should be so minded. If, however, at the end of this probation, he had said nothing, Miss Lindsay was to give him up, and he was to be allowed no more chances of addressing her. The visit was paid, and nothing could be more agreeable or devoted than my uncle; but he did not propose to Miss Lindsay! The days passed, and as the end of the allotted time drew near, the lady innocently arranged a few walks _en tête-à-tête_, and talked in a manner which afforded him every opportunity of saying the words which seemed always on the tip of his tongue. At last the final day arrived. “My dear,” said Lady Charlotte (if such was the mother’s name) to her daughter, “I shall go out with the rest of the party for the whole day and leave you and Mr. Cobbe together. When I return, it must be decided one way or the other.”

The hours flew in pleasant and confidential talk—still no proposal! Miss Lindsay, who knew that the final minutes of grace were passing for her unconscious lover, once more despairingly tried, being really attached to him, to make him say something which she could report to her mother. As he afterwards averred he was on the very brink of asking her to marry him when he caught the sound of her mother’s carriage returning to the door, and said to himself, “I’ll wait for another opportunity.”

The opportunity was never granted to him. Lady Charlotte gave him his _congé_ very peremptorily next morning. My uncle was furious, and in despair; but it was too late! Like other disappointed men he went off rashly, and almost immediately engaged himself (with no delay this time) to Miss Flora Long of Rood Ashton, Wiltshire, a lady of considerable fortune and attractions and of excellent connections, but of such exceedingly rigid piety of the Calvinistic type of the period, that I believe my uncle was soon fairly afraid of his promised bride. At all events his procrastinations began afresh. He remained at Templeton on one excuse after another, till Miss Long wrote to ask; “Whether he wished to keep their engagement?” My poor uncle was nearly driven now to the wall, but his health was bad and might prove his apology for fresh delays. Before replying to his Flora, he went to Dublin and consulted Sir Philip Crampton. After detailing his ailments, he asked what he ought to do, hoping (I am afraid) that the great surgeon would say, “O you must keep quiet!” Instead of this verdict Crampton said, “Go and get married by all means!” No further excuse was possible, and my poor uncle wrote to say he was on his way to claim his bride. Ere he reached her, however, while stopping at his mother’s house in Bath, he was found dead in his bed on the morning on which he should have gone to Rood Ashton. He must have expired suddenly while reading a good little book. All this happened somewhere about 1823.

To return to our old life at Newbridge, about 1833 and for many years afterwards, the assembling of my father’s brothers, and brothers’ wives and children at Christmas was the great event of the year in my almost solitary childhood. Often a party of twenty or more sat down every day for three or four weeks together in the dining-room, and we younger ones naturally spent the short days and long evenings in boyish and girlish sports and play. Certain very noisy and romping games—Blindman’s buff, Prisoner’s Bass, Giant, and Puss in the Corner and Hunt the Hare—as we played them through the halls below stairs, and the long corridors and rooms above, still appear to me as among the most delightful things in a world which was then all delight. As we grew a little older and my dear, clever brother Tom came home from Oxford and Germany, charades and plays and masquerading and dancing came into fashion. In short ours was, for the time, like other large country houses, full of happy young people, with the high spirits common in those old days. The rest of the year, except during the summer vacation, when brothers and cousins mustered again, the place was singularly quiet, and my life strangely solitary for a child. Very early I made a _concordat_ with each of my four successive governesses, that when lessons were ended, precisely at twelve, I was free to wander where I pleased about the park and woods, to row the boat on the pond or ride my pony on the sands of the sea-shore two miles from the house. I was not to be expected to have any concern with my instructress outside the doors. The arrangement suited them, of course, perfectly; and my childhood was thus mainly a lonely one. I was so uniformly happy that I was (what I suppose few children are) quite conscious of my own happiness. I remember often thinking whether other children were all as happy as I, and sometimes, especially on a spring morning of the 18th March,—my mother’s birthday, when I had a holiday, and used to make coronets of primroses and violets for her,—I can recall walking along the grass walks of that beautiful old garden and feeling as if everything in the world was perfect, and my life complete bliss for which I could never thank God enough.

When the weather was too bad to spend my leisure hours out of doors I plunged into the library at haphazard, often making “discovery” of books of which I had never been told, but which, thus found for myself, were doubly precious. Never shall I forget thus falling by chance on _Kubla Khan_ in its first pamphlet-shape. I also gloated over Southey’s _Curse of Kehama_, and _The Cid_ and Scott’s earlier works. My mother did very wisely, I think, to allow me thus to rove over the shelves at my own will. By degrees a genuine appetite for reading awoke in me, and I became a studious girl, as I shall presently describe. Beside the library, however, I had a play-house of my own for wet days. There were, at that time, two garrets only in the house (the bedrooms having all lofty coved ceilings), and these two garrets, over the lobbies, were altogether disused. I took possession of them, and kept the keys lest anybody should pry into them, and truly they must have been a remarkable sight! On the sloping roofs I pinned the eyes of my peacock’s feathers in the relative positions of the stars of the chief constellations; one of my hobbies being Astronomy. On another wall I fastened a rack full of carpenter’s tools, which I could use pretty deftly on the bench beneath. The principal wall was an armoury of old court-swords, and home-made pikes, decorated with green and white flags (I was an Irish patriot at that epoch), sundry javelins, bows and arrows, and a magnificently painted shield with the family arms. On the floor of one room was a collection of shells from the neighbouring shore, and lastly there was a table with pens, ink and paper; implements wherewith I perpetrated, _inter alia_, several poems of which I can just recall one. The _motif_ of the story was obviously borrowed from a stanza in Moore’s Irish Melodies. Even now I do not think the verses very bad for 12 or 13 years old.

THE FISHERMAN OF LOUGH NEAGH.

The autumn wind was roaring high
And the tempest raved in the midnight sky,
When the fisherman’s father sank to rest
And left O’Nial the last and best
Of a race of kings who once held sway
From far Fingal to dark Lough Neagh.[7]

The morning shone and the fisherman’s bark
Was wafted o’er those waters dark.
And he thought as he sailed of his father’s name
Of the kings of Erin’s ancient fame,
Of days when ‘neath those waters green
The banners of Nial were ever seen,
And where the Knights of the Blood-Red-Tree
Had held of old their revelry;
And where O’Nial’s race alone
Had sat upon the regal throne.

While the fisherman thought of the days of old
The sun had left the western sky
And the moon had risen a lamp of gold,
Ere O’Nial deemed that the eve was nigh,
He turned his boat to the mountain side
And it darted away o’er the rippling tide;
Like arrow from an Indian bow
Shot o’er the waves the glancing prow.

The fisherman saw not the point beneath
Which beckoned him on to instant death.
It struck—yet he shrieked not, although his blood
Ran chill at the thought of that fatal flood;
And the voice of O’Nial was silent that day
As he sank ‘neath the waters of dark Lough Neagh;

Like when Adam rose from the dust of earth
And felt the joy of his glorious birth,
And where’er he gazed, and where’er he trod,
He felt the presence and smile of God,—
Like the breath of morning to him who long
Has ceased to hear the warblers’ song,
And who, in the chamber of death hath lain
With a sickening heart and a burning brain;
So rushed the joy through O’Nial’s mind
When the waters dark above him joined,
And he felt that Heaven had made him be
A spirit of light and eternity.

He gazed around, but his dazzled sight
Saw not the spot from whence he fell,
For beside him rose a spire so bright
No mortal tongue could its splendours tell
Nor human eye endure its light.
And he looked and saw that pillars of gold
The crystal column did proudly hold;
And he turned and walked in the light blue sea
Upon a silver balcony,
Which rolled around the spire of light
And laid on the golden pillars bright.

Descending from the pillars high,
He passed through portals of ivory
E’en to the hall of living gold
The palace of the kings of old.
The harp of Erin sounded high
And the crotal joined the melody,
And the voice of happy spirits round
Prolonged and harmonized the sound.

“All hail, O’Nial!”—

and so on, and so on! I wrote a great deal of this sort of thing then and for a few years afterwards; and of course, like everyone else who has ever been given to waste paper and ink, I tried my hand on a tragedy. I had no real power or originality, only a little Fancy perhaps, and a dangerous facility for flowing versification. After a time my early ambition to become a Poet died out under the terrible hard mental strain and very serious study through which I passed in seeking religious faith. But I have always passionately loved poetry of a certain kind, specially that of Shelley; and perhaps some of my prose writings have been the better for my early efforts to cultivate harmony and for my delight in good similes. This last propensity is even now very strong in me, and whenever I write _con amore_, comparisons and metaphors come tumbling out of my head, till my difficulty is to exclude mixed ones!

My education at this time was of a simple kind. After Miss Kinnear left us to marry, I had another nursery governess, a good creature properly entitled “Miss Daly,” but called by my profane brothers, “the Daily Nuisance.” After her came a real governess, the daughter of a bankrupt Liverpool merchant who made my life a burden with her strict discipline and her “I-have-seen-better-days” airs; and who, at last, I detected in a trick which to me appeared one of unparalleled turpitude! She had asked me to let her read something which I had written in a copy-book and I had peremptorily declined to obey her request, and had locked up my papers in my beloved little writing-desk which my dear brother Tom had bought for me out of his school-boy’s pocket-money. The keys of this desk I kept with other things in one of the old-fashioned pockets which everybody then wore, and which formed a separate article of under clothing. This pocket my maid naturally placed at night on the chair beside my little bed, and the curtains of the bed being drawn, Miss W. no doubt after a time concluded I was asleep and cautiously approached the chair on tiptoe. As it happened I was wide awake, having at that time the habit of repeating certain hymns and other religious things to myself before I went to sleep; and when I perceived through the white curtain the shadow of my governess close outside, and then heard the slight jingle made by my keys as she abstracted them from my pocket, I felt as if I were witness of a crime! Anything so base I had never dreamed as existing outside story books of wicked children. Drawing the curtain I could see that Miss W. had gone with her candle into the inner room (one of the old “powdering closets” attached to all the rooms in Newbridge) and was busy with the desk which lay on the table therein. Very shortly I heard the desk close again with an angry click,—and no wonder! Poor Miss W., who no doubt fancied she was going to detect her strange pupil in some particular naughtiness, found the MS. in the desk, to consist of solemn religious “Reflections,” in the style of Mrs. Trimmer; and of a poetical description (in round hand) of the _Last Judgment_! My governess replaced the bunch of keys in my pocket and noiselessly withdrew, but it was long before I could sleep for sheer horror; and next day I, of course, confided to my mother the terrible incident. Nothing, I think, was said to Miss W. about it, but she was very shortly afterwards allowed to return to her beloved Liverpool, where, for all I know, she may be living still.

My fourth and last governess was a remarkable woman, a Mdlle. Montriou, a person of considerable force of character, and in many respects an admirable teacher. With her I read a good deal of solid history, beginning with Rollin and going on to Plutarch and Gibbon; also some modern historians. She further taught me systematically a scheme of chronology and royal successions, till I had an amount of knowledge of such things which I afterwards found was not shared by any of my schoolfellows. She had the excellent sense also to allow me to use a considerable part of my lesson hours with a map book before me, asking her endless questions on all things connected with the various countries; and as she was extremely well and widely informed, this was almost the best part of my instruction. I became really interested in these studies, and also in the great poets, French and English, to whom she introduced me. Of course my governess taught me music, including what was then called _Thorough Bass_, and now _Harmony_; but very little of the practical part of performance could I learn then or at any time. Independently of her, I read every book on Astronomy which I could lay hold of, and I well remember the excitement wherewith I waited for years for the appearance of the Comet of 1835, which one of these books had foretold. At last a report reached me that the village tailor had seen the comet the previous night. Of course I scanned the sky with renewed ardour, and thought I had discovered the desired object in a misty-looking star of which my planisphere gave no notice. My father however pooh-poohed this bold hypothesis, and I was fain to wait till the next night. Then, as soon as it was dark, I ran up to a window whence I could command the constellation wherein the comet was bound to show itself. A small hazy star—and a _long train of light from it_—greeted my enchanted eyes! My limbs could hardly bear me as I tore downstairs into the drawing-room, nor my voice publish the triumphant intelligence, “It _is_ the comet!” “It _has_ a tail!” Everybody (in far too leisurely a way as I considered) went up and saw it, and confessed that the comet it certainly must be, with that appendage of the tail! Few events in my long life have caused me such delightful excitement. This was in 1835.

_Newbridge, Co. Dublin._
]

CHAPTER
III.
_SCHOOL AND AFTER._

When my father, in 1836, had decided, by my governess’s advice, to send me to school, my dear mother, though already old and feeble, made the journey, long as it was in those days, from Ireland to Brighton to see for herself where I was to be placed, and to invoke the kindness of my schoolmistresses for me. We sailed to Bristol—a 30 hours’ passage usually, but sometimes longer,—and then travelled by postchaises to Brighton, taking, I think, three days on the road and visiting Stonehenge by the way, to my mother’s great delight. My eldest brother, then at Oxford, attended her and acted courier. When we came in sight of Brighton the lamps were lighted along the long perspective of the shore. Gas was still sufficiently a novelty to cause this sight to be immensely impressive to us all.

Next day my mother took me to my future tyrants, and fondly bargained (as she was paying enormously) that I should have sundry indulgences, and principally a bedroom to myself. A room was shown to her with only one small bed in it, and this she was told would be mine. When I went to it next night, heart broken after her departure, I found that another bed had been put up, and a schoolfellow was already asleep in it. I flung myself down on my knees by my own and cried my heart out, and was accordingly reprimanded next morning before the whole school for having been seen to cry at my prayers.[8]

The education of women was probably at its lowest ebb about half-a-century ago. It was at that period more pretentious than it had ever been before, and infinitely more costly than it is now; and it was likewise more shallow and senseless than can easily be believed. To inspire young women with due gratitude for their present privileges, won for them by my contemporaries, I can think of nothing better than to acquaint them with some of the features of school life in England in the days of their mothers. I say advisedly the days of their mothers, for in those of their grandmothers, things were by no means equally bad. There was much less pretence and more genuine instruction, so far as it extended.

For a moment let us, however, go back to these earlier grandmothers’ schools, say those of the year 1790 or thereabouts. From the reports of my own mother, and of a friend whose mother was educated in the same place, I can accurately describe a school which flourished at that date in the fashionable region of Queen Square, Bloomsbury. The mistress was a certain Mrs. Devis, who must have been a woman of ability for she published a very good little English Grammar for the express use of her pupils; also a Geography, and a capital book of maps, which possessed the inestimable advantage of recording only those towns, cities, rivers, and mountains which were mentioned in the Geography, and not confusing the mind (as maps are too apt to do) with extraneous and superfluous towns and hills. I speak with personal gratitude of those venerable books, for out of them chiefly I obtained such inklings of Geography as have sufficed generally for my wants through life; the only disadvantage they entailed being a firm impression, still rooted in my mind, that there is a “Kingdom of Poland” somewhere about the middle of Europe.

Beside Grammar and Geography and a very fair share of history (“Ancient” derived from Rollin, and “Sacred” from Mrs. Trimmer), the young ladies at Mrs. Devis’ school learned to speak and read French with a very good accent, and to play the harpsichord with taste, if not with a very learned appreciation of “severe” music. The “Battle of Prague” and Hook’s Sonatas were, I believe, their culminating achievements. But it was not considered in those times that packing the brains of girls with facts, or even teaching their fingers to run over the keys of instruments, or to handle pen and pencil, was the Alpha and Omega of education. William of Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth Manne,” was understood to hold good emphatically concerning the making of Woman. The abrupt speaking, courtesy-neglecting, slouching, slangy young damsel who may now perhaps carry off the glories of a University degree, would have seemed to Mrs. Devis still needing to be taught the very rudiments of feminine knowledge. “Decorum” (delightful word! the very sound of which brings back the smell of Maréchale powder) was the imperative law of a lady’s inner life as well as of her outward habits; and in Queen Square nothing that was not decorous was for a moment admitted. Every movement of the body in entering and quitting a room, in taking a seat and rising from it, was duly criticised. There was kept, in the back premises, a carriage taken off the wheels, and propped up _en permanence_, for the purpose of enabling the young ladies to practise ascending and descending with calmness and grace, and without any unnecessary display of their ankles. Every girl was dressed in the full fashion of the day. My mother, like all her companions, wore hair-powder and rouge on her cheeks when she entered the school a blooming girl of fifteen; that excellent rouge at five guineas a pot, which (as she explained to me in later years) did not spoil the complexion like ordinary compounds, and which I can witness really left a beautiful, clear skin when disused thirty years afterwards.

Beyond these matters of fashion, however,—so droll now to remember,—there must have been at Mrs. Devis’ seminary a great deal of careful training in what may be called the great Art of Society; the art of properly paying and receiving visits, of saluting acquaintances in the street and drawing-room; and of writing letters of compliment. When I recall the type of perfect womanly gentleness and high breeding which then and there was formed, it seems to me as if, in comparison, modern manners are all rough and brusque. We have graceful women in abundance still, but the peculiar old-fashioned suavity, the tact which made everybody in a company happy and at ease,—most of all the humblest individual present,—and which at the same time effectually prevented the most audacious from transgressing _les bienséances_ by a hair; of that suavity and tact we seem to have lost the tradition.

The great Bloomsbury school, however, passed away at length, good Mrs. Devis having departed to the land where I trust the Rivers of Paradise formed part of her new study of Geography. Nearly half-a-century later, when it came to my turn to receive education, it was not in London but in Brighton that the ladies’ schools most in estimation were to be found. There were even then (about 1836) not less than a hundred such establishments in the town, but that at No. 32, Brunswick Terrace, of which Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts were mistresses, and which had been founded some time before by a celebrated Miss Poggi, was supposed to be _nec pluribus impar_. It was, at all events, the most outrageously expensive, the nominal tariff of £120 or £130 per annum representing scarcely a fourth of the charges for “extras” which actually appeared in the bills of many of the pupils. My own, I know, amounted to £1,000 for two years’ schooling.

I shall write of this school quite frankly, since the two poor ladies, well-meaning but very unwise, to whom it belonged have been dead for nearly thirty years, and it can hurt nobody to record my conviction that a better system than theirs could scarcely have been devised had it been designed to attain the maximum of cost and labour and the minimum of solid results. It was the typical Higher Education of the period, carried out to the extreme of expenditure and high pressure.

Profane persons were apt to describe our school as a Convent, and to refer to the back door of our garden, whence we issued on our dismal diurnal walks, as the “postern.” If we in any degree resembled nuns, however, it was assuredly not those of either a Contemplative or Silent Order. The din of our large double schoolrooms was something frightful. Sitting in either of them, four pianos might be heard going at once in rooms above and around us, while at numerous tables scattered about the rooms there were girls reading aloud to the governesses and reciting lessons in English, French, German, and Italian. This hideous clatter continued the entire day till we went to bed at night, there being no time whatever allowed for recreation, unless the dreary hour of walking with our teachers (when we recited our verbs), could so be described by a fantastic imagination. In the midst of the uproar we were obliged to write our exercises, to compose our themes, and to commit to memory whole pages of prose. On Saturday afternoons, instead of play, there was a terrible ordeal generally known as the “Judgment Day.” The two schoolmistresses sat side by side, solemn and stern, at the head of the long table. Behind them sat all the governesses as Assessors. On the table were the books wherein our evil deeds of the week were recorded; and round the room against the wall, seated on stools of penitential discomfort, we sat, five-and-twenty “damosels,” anything but “Blessed,” expecting our sentences according to our ill-deserts. It must be explained that the fiendish ingenuity of some teacher had invented for our torment a system of imaginary “cards,” which we were supposed to “lose” (though we never gained any) whenever we had not finished all our various lessons and practisings every night before bed-time, or whenever we had been given the mark for “stooping,” or had been impertinent, or had been “turned” in our lessons, or had been marked “P” by the music master, or had been convicted of “disorder” (_e.g._, having our long shoe-strings untied), or, lastly, had told lies! Any one crime in this heterogeneous list entailed the same penalty, namely, the sentence, “You have lost your card, Miss So and so, for such and such a thing;” and when Saturday came round, if three cards had been lost in the week, the law wreaked its justice on the unhappy sinner’s head! Her confession having been wrung from her at the awful judgment-seat above described, and the books having been consulted, she was solemnly scolded and told to sit in the corner for the rest of the evening! Anything more ridiculous than the scene which followed can hardly be conceived. I have seen (after a week in which a sort of feminine barring-out had taken place) no less than nine young ladies obliged to sit for hours in the angles of the three rooms, like naughty babies, with their faces to the wall; half of them being quite of marriageable age, and all dressed, as was _de rigueur_ with us every day, in full evening attire of silk or muslin, with gloves and kid slippers. Naturally, Saturday evenings, instead of affording some relief to the incessant overstrain of the week, were looked upon with terror as the worst time of all. Those who escaped the fell destiny of the corner were allowed, if they chose to write to their parents, but our letters were perforce committed at night to the schoolmistress to seal, and were not as may be imagined, exactly the natural outpouring of our sentiments as regarded those ladies and their school.

Our household was a large one. It consisted of the two schoolmistresses and joint proprietors, of the sister of one of them and another English governess; of a French, an Italian, and a German lady teacher; of a considerable staff of respectable servants; and finally of twenty-five or twenty-six pupils, varying in age from nine to nineteen. All the pupils were daughters of men of some standing, mostly country gentlemen, members of Parliament, and offshoots of the peerage. There were several heiresses amongst us, and one girl whom we all liked and recognised as the beauty of the school, the daughter of Horace Smith, author of _Rejected Addresses_. On the whole, looking back after the long interval, it seems to me that the young creatures there assembled were full of capabilities for widely extended usefulness and influence. Many were decidedly clever and nearly all were well disposed. There was very little malice or any other vicious ideas or feelings, and no worldliness at all amongst us. I make this last remark because the novel of _Rose, Blanche and Violet_, by the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, is evidently intended in sundry details to describe this particular school, and yet most falsely represents the girls as thinking a great deal of each other’s wealth or comparative poverty. Nothing was further from the fact. One of our heiresses, I well remember, and another damsel of high degree, the granddaughter of a duke, were our constant butts for their ignorance and stupidity, rather than the objects of any preferential flattery. Of vulgarity of feeling of the kind imagined by Mr. Lewes, I cannot recall a trace.

But all this fine human material was deplorably wasted. Nobody dreamed that any one of us could in later life be more or less than an “Ornament of Society.” That a pupil in that school should ever become an artist, or authoress, would have been looked upon by both Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts as a deplorable dereliction. Not that which was good in itself or useful to the community, or even that which would be delightful to ourselves, but that which would make us admired in society, was the _raison d’être_ of each acquirement. Everything was taught us in the inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were Morals and Religion, and at the top were Music and Dancing; miserably poor music, too, of the Italian school then in vogue, and generally performed in a showy and tasteless manner on harp or piano. I can recall an amusing instance in which the order of precedence above described was naïvely betrayed by one of our schoolmistresses when she was admonishing one of the girls who had been detected in a lie. “Don’t you know, you naughty girl,” said Miss R. impressively, before the whole school: “don’t you know we had _almost_ rather find you have a P——” (the mark of Pretty Well) “in your music, than tell such falsehoods?”

It mattered nothing whether we had any “music in our souls” or any voices in our throats, equally we were driven through the dreary course of practising daily for a couple of hours under a German teacher, and then receiving lessons twice or three times a week from a music master (Griesbach by name) and a singing master. Many of us, myself in particular, in addition to these had a harp master, a Frenchman named Labarre, who gave us lessons at a guinea apiece, while we could only play with one hand at a time. Lastly there were a few young ladies who took instructions in the new instruments, the concertina and the accordion!

The waste of money involved in all this, the piles of useless music, and songs never to be sung, for which our parents had to pay, and the loss of priceless time for ourselves, were truly deplorable; and the result of course in many cases (as in my own) complete failure. One day I said to the good little German teacher, who nourished a hopeless attachment for Schiller’s Marquis Posa, and was altogether a sympathetic person, “My dear Fraulein, I mean to practise this piece of Beethoven’s till I conquer it.” “My dear,” responded the honest Fraulein, “you do practice that piece for seex hours a day, and you do live till you are seexty, at the end you will _not_ play it!” Yet so hopeless a pupil was compelled to learn for years, not only the piano, but the harp and singing!

Next to music in importance in our curriculum came dancing. The famous old Madame Michaud and her husband both attended us constantly, and we danced to their direction in our large play-room (_lucus a non lucendo_), till we had learned not only all the dances in use in England in that ante-polka epoch, but almost every national dance in Europe, the Minuet, the Gavotte, the Cachucha, the Bolero, the Mazurka, and the Tarantella. To see the stout old lady in her heavy green velvet dress, with furbelow a foot deep of sable, going through the latter cheerful performance for our ensample, was a sight not to be forgotten. Beside the dancing we had “calisthenic” lessons every week from a “Capitaine” Somebody, who put us through manifold exercises with poles and dumbbells. How much better a few good country scrambles would have been than all these calisthenics it is needless to say, but our dismal walks were confined to parading the esplanade and neighbouring terraces. Our parties never exceeded six, a governess being one of the number, and we looked down from an immeasurable height of superiority on the processions of twenty and thirty girls belonging to other schools. The governess who accompanied us had enough to do with her small party, for it was her duty to utilise these brief hours of bodily exercise by hearing us repeat our French, Italian or German verbs, according to her own nationality.

Next to Music and Dancing and Deportment, came Drawing, but that was not a sufficiently _voyant_ accomplishment, and no great attention was paid to it; the instruction also being of a second-rate kind, except that it included lessons in perspective which have been useful to me ever since. Then followed Modern Languages. No Greek or Latin were heard of at the school, but French, Italian and German were chattered all day long, our tongues being only set at liberty at six o’clock to speak English. _Such_ French, such Italian, and such German as we actually spoke may be more easily imagined than described. We had bad “Marks” for speaking wrong languages, _e.g._, French when we bound to speak Italian or German, and a dreadful mark for bad French, which was transferred from one to another all day long, and was a fertile source of tears and quarrels, involving as it did a heavy lesson out of Noel et Chapsal’s Grammar on the last holder at night. We also read in each language every day to the French, Italian and German ladies, recited lessons to them, and wrote exercises for the respective masters who attended every week. One of these foreign masters, by the way, was the patriot Berchet; a sad, grim-looking man of whom I am afraid we rather made fun; and on one occasion, when he had gone back to Italy, a compatriot, whom we were told was a very great personage indeed, took his classes to prevent them from being transferred to any other of the Brighton teachers of Italian. If my memory have not played me a trick, this illustrious substitute for Berchet was Manzoni, the author of the _Promessi Sposi_; a distinguished-looking middle-aged man, who won all our hearts by pronouncing everything we did admirable, even, I think, on the occasion when one young lady freely translated Tasso,—

“Fama e terre acquistasse,”

into French as follows:—

“Il acquit la femme et la terre!”

Naturally after (a very long way after) foreign languages came the study of English. We had a writing and arithmetic master (whom we unanimously abhorred and despised, though one and all of us grievously needed his instructions) and an “English master,” who taught us to write “themes,” and to whom I, for one, feel that I owe, perhaps, more than to any other teacher in that school, few as were the hours which we were permitted to waste on so insignificant an art as composition in our native tongue!

Beyond all this, our English studies embraced one long, awful lesson each week to be repeated to the schoolmistress herself by a class, in history one week, in geography the week following. Our first class, I remember, had once to commit to memory—Heaven alone knows how—no less than thirteen pages of Woodhouselee’s _Universal History_!

Lastly, as I have said, in point of importance, came our religious instruction. Our well-meaning schoolmistresses thought it was obligatory on them to teach us something of the kind, but, being very obviously altogether worldly women themselves, they were puzzled how to carry out their intentions. They marched us to church every Sunday when it did not rain, and they made us on Sunday mornings repeat the Collect and Catechism; but beyond these exercises of body and mind, it was hard for them to see what to do for our spiritual welfare. One Ash Wednesday, I remember, they provided us with a dish of salt-fish, and when this was removed to make room for the roast mutton, they addressed us in a short discourse, setting forth the merits of fasting, and ending by the remark that they left us free to take meat or not as we pleased, but that they hoped we should fast; “it would be good for our souls AND OUR FIGURES!”