I was born on the morning of the 4th December, 1822; at sunrise. There had been a memorable storm during the night, and Dublin, where my father had taken a house that my mother might be near her doctor, was strewn with the wrecks of trees and chimney pots. My parents had already four sons, and after the interval of five years since the birth of the youngest, a girl was by no means welcome. I have never had reason, however, to complain of being less cared for or less well treated in every way than my brothers. If I have become in mature years a “Woman’s Rights’ Woman” it has not been because in my own person I have been made to feel a Woman’s Wrongs. On the contrary, my brothers’ kindness and tenderness to me have been unfailing from my infancy. I was their “little Fà’,” their pet and plaything when they came home for their holidays; and rough words not to speak of knocks,—never reached me from any of them or from my many masculine cousins, some of whom, as my father’s wards, I hardly distinguished in childhood from brothers.

A few months after my birth my parents moved to a house named Bower Hill Lodge in Melksham, which my father hired, I believe, to be near his boys at school, and I have some dim recollections of the verandah of the house, and also of certain raisins which I appropriated, and of suffering direful punishment at my father’s hands for the crime! Before I was four years old we returned to Newbridge, and I was duly installed with my good old Irish nurse, Mary Malone, in the large nursery at the end of the north corridor—the most charming room for a child’s abode I have ever seen. It was so distant from the regions inhabited by my parents that I was at full liberty to make any amount of noise I pleased; and from the three windows I possessed a commanding view of the stable yard, wherein there was always visible an enchanting spectacle of dogs, cats, horses, grooms, gardeners, and milkmaids. A grand old courtyard it is; a quadrangle about a rood in size surrounded by stables, coach-houses, kennels, a laundry, a beautiful dairy, a labourer’s room, a paint shop, a carpenter’s shop, a range of granaries and fruitlofts with a great clock in the pediment in the centre; and a well in the midst of all. Behind the stables and the kennels appear the tops of walnut and chestnut trees and over the coach-houses on the other side can be seen the beautiful old kitchen garden of six acres with its lichen-covered red brick walls, backed again by trees; and its formal straight terraces and broad grass walks.

In this healthful, delightful nursery, and in walks with my nurse about the lawns and shrubberies, the first years of my happy childhood went by; fed in body with the freshest milk and eggs and fruit, everything best for a child; and in mind supplied only with the simple, sweet lessons of my gentle mother. No unwholesome food, physical or moral, was ever allowed to come in my way till body and soul had almost grown to their full stature. When I compare such a lot as this (the common lot, of course, of English girls of the richer classes, blessed with good fathers and mothers) with the case of the hapless young creatures who are fed from infancy with insufficient and unwholesome food, perhaps dosed with gin and opium from the cradle, and who, even as they acquire language, learn foul words, curses and blasphemies,—when I compare, I say, my happy lot with the miserable one of tens of thousands of my brother men and sister women, I feel appalled to reflect, by how different a standard must they and I be judged by eternal Justice!

In such an infancy the events were few, but I can remember with amusement the great exercise of my little mind concerning a certain mythical being known as “Peter.” The story affords a droll example of the way in which fetishes are created among child-minded savages. One day, (as my mother long afterwards explained to me), I had been hungrily eating a piece of bread and butter out of doors, when one of the greyhounds, of which my father kept several couples, bounded past me and snatched the bread and butter from my little hands. The outcry which I was preparing to raise on my loss was suddenly stopped by the bystanders judiciously awakening my sympathy in Peter’s enjoyment, and I was led up to stroke the big dog and make friends with him. Seeing how successful was this diversion, my nurse thenceforward adopted the practice of seizing everything in the way of food, knives, &c., which it was undesirable I should handle, and also of shutting objectionably open doors and windows, exclaiming “O! Peter! Peter has got it! Peter has shut it!”—as the case might be. Accustomed to succumb to this unseen Fate under the name of Peter, and soon forgetting the dog, I came to think there was an all-powerful, invisible Being constantly behind the scenes, and had so far pictured him as distinct from the real original Peter that on one occasion when I was taken to visit at some house where there was an odd looking end of a beam jutting out under the ceiling, I asked in awe-struck tones: “Mama! is that Peter’s head?”

My childhood, though a singularly happy, was an unusually lonely one. My dear mother very soon after I was born became lame from a trifling accident to her ankle (ill-treated, unhappily, by the doctors) and she was never once able in all her life to take a walk with me. Of course I was brought to her continually; first to be nursed,—for she fulfilled that sacred duty of motherhood to all her children, believing that she could never be so sure of the healthfulness of any other woman’s constitution as of her own. Later, I seem to my own memory to have been often cuddled up close to her on her sofa, or learning my little lessons, mounted on my high chair beside her, or repeating the Lord’s Prayer at her knee. All these memories are infinitely sweet to me. Her low, gentle voice, her smile, her soft breast and arms, the atmosphere of dignity which always surrounded her,—the very odour of her clothes and lace, redolent of dried roses, come back to me after three-score years with nothing to mar their sweetness. She never once spoke angrily or harshly to me in all her life, much less struck or punished me; and I—it is a comfort to think it—never, so far as I can recall, disobeyed or seriously vexed her. She had regretted my birth, thinking that she could not live to see me grow to womanhood, and shrinking from a renewal of the cares of motherhood with the additional anxiety of a daughter’s education. But I believe she soon reconciled herself to my existence, and made me, first her pet, and then her companion and even her counsellor. She told me, laughingly, how, when I was four years old, my father happening to be away from home she made me dine with her, and as I sat in great state beside her on my little chair I solemnly remarked: “Mama, is it not a very comflin thing to have a little girl?” an observation which she justly thought went to prove that she had betrayed sufficiently to my infantine perspicacity that she enjoyed my company at least as much as hers was enjoyed by me.

My nurse who had attended all my brothers, was already an elderly woman when recalled to Newbridge to take charge of me; and though a dear, kind old soul and an excellent nurse, she was naturally not much of a playfellow for a little child, and it was very rarely indeed that I had any young visitor in my nursery or was taken to see any of my small neighbours. Thus I was from infancy much thrown on my own resources for play and amusement; and from that time to this I have been rather a solitary mortal, enjoying above all things lonely walks and studies; and always finding my spirits rise in hours and days of isolation. I think I may say I have never felt depressed when living alone. As a child I have been told I was a very merry little chick, with a round, fair face and abundance of golden hair; a typical sort of Saxon child. I was subject then and for many years after, to furious fits of anger, and on such occasions I misbehaved myself exceedingly. “Nanno” was then wont peremptorily to push me out into the long corridor and bolt the nursery door in my face, saying in her vernacular, “Ah, then! you bould Puckhawn (audacious child of Puck)! I’ll get shut of you!” I think I feel now the hardness of that door against my little toes, as I kicked at it in frenzy. Sometimes, when things were very bad indeed, Nanno conducted me to the end of the corridor at the top of a very long winding stone stair, near the bottom of which my father occasionally passed on his way to the stables. “Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! She’ll be good immadiently, Sir, you needn’t come upstairs, Sir!” Then, sotto voce, to me, “Don’t ye hear the Masther? Be quiet now, my darlint, or he’ll come up the stairs!” Of course, “the Masther” seldom or never was really within earshot on these occasions. Had he been so Nanno would have been the last person seriously to invoke his dreaded interference in my discipline. But the alarm usually sufficed to reduce me to submission. I had plenty of toddling about out of doors and sitting in the sweet grass making daisy and dandelion chains, and at home playing with the remnants of my brother’s Noah’s Ark, and a magnificent old baby-house which stood in one of the bedrooms, and was so large that I can dimly remember climbing up and getting into the doll’s drawing-room.

My fifth birthday was the first milestone on Life’s road which I can recall. I recollect being brought in the morning into my mother’s darkened bedroom (she was already then a confirmed invalid), and how she kissed and blessed me, and gave me childish presents, and also a beautiful emerald ring which I still possess, and pearl bracelets which she fastened on my little arms. No doubt she wished to make sure that whenever she might die these trinkets should be known to be mine. She and my father also gave me a Bible and Prayer Book, which I could read quite well, and proudly took next Sunday to church for my first attendance, when the solemn occasion was much disturbed by a little girl in a pew below howling for envy of my white beaver bonnet, displayed in the fore-front of the gallery which formed our family seat. “Why did little Miss Robinson cry?” I was deeply inquisitive on the subject, having then and always during my childhood regarded “best clothes” with abhorrence.

Two years later my grandmother, having bestowed on me, at Bath, a sky-blue silk pelisse, I managed nefariously to tumble down on purpose into a gutter full of melted snow the first day it was put on, so as to be permitted to resume my little cloth coat.

Now, aged five, I was emancipated from the nursery and allowed to dine thenceforward at my parents’ late dinner, while my good nurse was settled for the rest of her days in a pretty ivy-covered cottage with large garden, at the end of the shrubbery. She lived there for several years with an old woman for servant, who I can well remember, but who must have been of great age, for she had been under-dairymaid to my great great-grandfather, the Archbishop, and used to tell us stories of “old times.” This “old Ally’s” great grandchildren were still living, recently, in the family service in the same cottage which poor “Nanno” occupied. Ally was the last wearer of the real old Irish scarlet cloak in our part of the country; and I can remember admiring it greatly when I used to run by her side and help her to carry her bundle of sticks. Since those days, even the long blue frieze cloak which succeeded universally to the scarlet—a most comfortable, decent, and withal graceful peasant garment, very like the blue cotton one of the Arab fellah-women—has itself nearly or totally disappeared in Fingal.

On the retirement of my nurse, the charge of my little person was committed to my mother’s maid and housekeeper, Martha Jones. She came to my mother a blooming girl of eighteen, and she died of old age and sorrow when I left Newbridge at my father’s death half-a-century afterwards. She was a fine, fair, broad-shouldered woman, with a certain refinement above her class. Her father had been an officer in the army, and she was educated (not very extensively) at some little school in Dublin where her particular friend was Moore’s (the poet’s) sister. She used to tell us how Moore as a lad was always contriving to get into the school and romping with the girls. The legend has sufficient verisimilitude to need no confirmation!

“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.

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.