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,—

into French as follows:—

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!”

Each morning we were bound publicly to repeat a text out of certain little books, called Daily Bread, left in our bedrooms, and always scanned in frantic haste while “doing-up” our hair at the glass, or gabbled aloud by one damsel so occupied while her room-fellow (there were never more than two in each bed-chamber) was splashing about behind the screen in her bath. Down, when the prayer-bell rang, both were obliged to hurry and breathlessly to await the chance of being called on first to repeat the text of the day, the penalty for oblivion being the loss of a “card.” Then came a chapter of the Bible, read verse by verse amongst us, and then our books were shut and a solemn question was asked. On one occasion I remember it was: “What have you just been reading, Miss S——?” Miss S—— (now a lady of high rank and fashion, whose small wits had been woolgathering) peeped surreptitiously into her Bible again, and then responded with just confidence, “The First Epistle, Ma’am, of General Peter.”

It is almost needless to add, in concluding these reminiscences, that the heterogeneous studies pursued in this helter-skelter fashion were of the smallest possible utility in later life; each acquirement being of the shallowest and most imperfect kind, and all real education worthy of the name having to be begun on our return home, after we had been pronounced “finished.” Meanwhile the strain on our mental powers of getting through daily, for six months at a time, this mass of ill-arranged and miscellaneous lessons, was extremely great and trying.

One droll reminiscence must not be forgotten. The pupils at Miss Runciman’s and Miss Roberts’ were all supposed to have obtained the fullest instruction in Science by attending a course of Nine Lectures delivered by a gentleman named Walker in a public room in Brighton. The course comprised one Lecture on Electricity, another on Galvanism, another on Optics, others I think, on Hydrostatics, Mechanics, and Pneumatics, and finally three, which gave me infinite satisfaction, on Astronomy.

If true education be the instilling into the mind, not so much Knowledge, as the desire for Knowledge, mine at school certainly proved a notable failure. I was brought home (no girl could travel in those days alone) from Brighton by a coach called the Red Rover, which performed, as a species of miracle, in one day the journey to Bristol, from whence I embarked for Ireland. My convoy-brother naturally mounted the box, and left me to enjoy the interior all day by myself; and the reflections of those solitary hours of first emancipation remain with me as lively as if they had taken place yesterday. “What a delightful thing it is,” so ran my thoughts “to have done with study! Now I may really enjoy myself! I know as much as any girl in our school, and since it is the best school in England, I must know all that it can ever be necessary for a lady to know. I will not trouble my head ever again with learning anything; but read novels and amuse myself for the rest of my life.”

This noble resolve lasted I fancy a few months, and then, depth below depth of my ignorance revealed itself very unpleasantly! I tried to supply first one deficiency and then another, till after a year or two, I began to educate myself in earnest. The reader need not be troubled with a long story. I spent four years in the study of History—constructing while I did so some Tables of Royal Successions on a plan of my own which enabled me to see at a glance the descent, succession and date of each reigning sovereign of every country, ancient and modern, possessing any History of which I could find a trace. These Tables I still have by me, and they certainly testify to considerable industry. Then the parson of our parish, who had been a tutor in Dublin College, came up three times a week for several years, and taught me a little Greek (enough to read the Gospels and to stumble through Plato’s Krito), and rather more geometry, to which science I took an immense fancy, and in which he carried me over Euclid and Conic Sections, and through two most delightful books of Archimedes’ spherics. I tried Algebra, but had as much disinclination for that form of mental labour as I had enjoyment in the reasoning required by Geometry. My tutor told me he was able to teach me in one lesson as many propositions as he habitually taught the undergraduates of Dublin College in two. I have ever since strongly recommended this study to women as specially fitted to counteract our habits of hasty judgment and slovenly statement, and to impress upon us the nature of real demonstration.

I also read at this time, by myself, as many of the great books of the world as I could reach; making it a rule always (whether bored or not) to go on to the end of each, and also following generally Gibbon’s advice, viz., to rehearse in one’s mind in a walk before beginning a great book all that one knows of the subject, and then, having finished it, to take another walk, and register how much has been added to our store of ideas. In these ways I read all the Faery Queen, all Milton’s poetry, and the Divina Commedia and Gerusalemme Liberata in the originals. Also (in translations) I read through the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, Pharsalia, and all or nearly all, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Tacitus, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, &c. There was a fairly good library at Newbridge, and I could also go when I pleased, and read in Archbishop Marsh’s old library in Dublin, where there were splendid old books, though none I think more recent than a hundred and fifty years before my time. My mother possessed a small collection of classics—Dryden, Pope, Milton, Horace, &c., which she gave me, and I bought for myself such other books as I needed out of my liberal pin-money. Happily, I had at that time a really good memory for literature, being able to carry away almost the words of passages which much interested me in prose or verse, and to bring them into use when required, though I had, oddly enough, at the same period so imperfect a recollection of persons and daily events that, being very anxious to do justice to our servants, I was obliged to keep a book of memoranda of the characters and circumstances of all who left us, that I might give accurate and truthful recommendations.

By degrees these discursive studies—I took up various hobbies from time to time—Astronomy, Architecture, Heraldry, and many others—centred more and more on the answers which have been made through the ages by philosophers and prophets to the great questions of the human soul. I read such translations as were accessible in those pre-Müller days, of Eastern Sacred books; Anquetil du Perron’s Zend Avesta (twice); and Sir William Jones’s Institutes of Menu; and all I could learn about the Greek and Alexandrian philosophers from Diogenes Laertius and the old translators (Taylor, of Norwich, and others) and a large Biographical Dictionary which we had in our library. Having always a passion for Synopses, I constructed, somewhere about 1840, a Table, big enough to cover a sheet of double-elephant paper, wherein the principal Greek philosophers were ranged,—their lives, ethics, cosmogonies and special doctrines,—in separate columns. After this I made a similar Table of the early Gnostics and other heresiarchs, with the aid of Mosheim, Sozomen, and Eusebius.

Does the reader smile to find these studies recorded as the principal concern of the life of a young lady from 16 to 20, and in fact to 35 years of age? It was even so! They were (beside Religion, of which I shall speak elsewhere) my supreme interest. As I have said in the beginning, I had neither cares of love, or cares of money to occupy my mind or my heart. My parents wished me to go a little into society when I was about 18, and I was, for the moment, pleased and interested in the few balls and drawing-rooms (in Dublin) to which my father and afterwards my uncle, General George Cobbe, conducted me. But I was rather bored than amused by my dancing partners, and my dear mother, already in declining years and completely an invalid, could never accompany me, and I pined for her motherly presence and guidance, the loss of which was only half compensated for by her comments on the long reports of all I had seen and said and done, as I sat on her bed, on my return home. By degrees also, my thoughts came to be so gravely employed by efforts to find my way to religious truth, that the whole glamour of social pleasures disappeared and became a weariness; and by the time I was 19 I begged to be allowed to stay at home and only to receive our own guests, and attend the occasional dinners in our neighbourhood. With some regret my parents yielded the point, and except for a visit every two or three years to London for a few weeks of sightseeing, and one or two trips in Ireland to houses of our relations, my life, for a long time, was perfectly secluded. I have found some verses in which I described it.

In one of our summer excursions I remember my father and one of my brothers and I lionized Winchester, and came upon an exquisite chapel, which was at that time, and perhaps still is, a sort of sanctuary of books, in the midst of a lovely, silent cloister. To describe the longing I felt then, and long after, to spend all my life studying there in peace and undisturbed, “hiving learning with each studious year,”—would be impossible!

I think there is a great, and it must be said lamentable, difference between the genuine passion for study such as many men and women in my time and before it experienced, and the hurried anxious gobbling up of knowledge which has been introduced by competitive examinations, and the eternal necessity for getting something else beside knowledge; something to be represented by M.A. or B.Sch., or, perhaps, by £ s. d.! When I was young there were no honours, no rewards of any kind for a woman’s learning; and as there were no examinations, there was no hurry or anxiety. There was only healthy thirst for knowledge of one kind or another, and of one kind after another. When I came across a reference to a matter which I did not understand, it was not then necessary, as it seems to be to young students now, to hasten over it, leaving the unknown name, or event, or doctrine, like an enemy’s fortress on the road of an advancing army. I stopped and sat down before it, perhaps for days and weeks, but I conquered it at last, and then went on my way strengthened by the victory. Recently, I have actually heard of students at a college for ladies being advised by their “coach” to skip a number of propositions in Euclid, as it was certain they would not be examined in them! One might as well help a climber by taking rungs out of his ladder! I can make no sort of pretensions to have acquired, even in my best days, anything like the instruction which the young students of Girton and Newnham and Lady Margaret Hall are so fortunate as to possess; and much I envy their opportunities for obtaining accurate scholarship. But I know not whether the method they follow can, on the whole, convey as much of the pure delight in learning as did my solitary early studies. When the summer morning sun rose over the trees and shone as it often did into my bedroom finding me still over my books from the evening before, and when I then sauntered out to take a sleep on one of the garden seats in the shrubbery, the sense of having learned something, or cleared up some hitherto doubted point, or added a store of fresh ideas to my mental riches, was one of purest satisfaction.

As to writing as well as reading, I had very early a great love of the art and frequently wrote small essays and stories, working my way towards something of good style. Our English master at school on seeing my first exercise (on Roman History, I think it was), had asked Miss Runciman whether she were sure I had written it unaided, and observed that the turn of the sentences was not girl-like, and that he “thought I should grow up to be a fine writer.” My schoolmistress laughed, of course, at the suggestion, and I fancy she thought less of poor Mr. Turnbull for his absurd judgment. But as men and women who are to be good musicians love their pianos and violins as children, so I early began to love that noble instrument, the English Language, and in my small way to study how to play upon it. At one time when quite young I wrote several imitations of the style of Gibbon and other authors, just as an exercise. Eventually without of course copying anybody in particular, I fell into what I must suppose to be a style of my own, since those familiar with it easily detect passages of my writing wherever they come across them. I was at a later time much interested in seeing many of my articles translated into French (chiefly in the French Protestant periodicals) and to note how little it is possible to render the real feeling of such words as those with which our tongue supplies us by those of that language. At a still later date, when I edited the Zoophile, I was perpetually disappointed by the failures of the best translators I could engage, to render my meaning. Among the things for which to be thankful in life, I think we, English, ought to assign no small place to our inheritance of that grand legacy of our forefathers, the English Language.

While these studies were going on, from the time I left school in 1838 till I left Newbridge in 1857, it may be noted that I had the not inconsiderable charge of keeping house for my father. My mother at once put the whole responsibility of the matter in my hands, refusing even to be told beforehand what I had ordered for the rather formal dinner parties of those days, and I accepted the task with pleasure, both because I could thus relieve her, and also because then and ever since I have really liked housekeeping. I love a well-ordered house and table, rooms pleasantly arranged and lighted, and decorated with flowers, hospitable attentions to guests, and all the other pleasant cares of the mistress of a family. In the midst of my studies I always went every morning regularly to my housekeeper’s room and wrote out a careful menu for the upstairs and downstairs meals. I visited the larders and the fine old kitchen frequently, and paid the servants’ wages on every quarter day; and once a year went over my lists of everything in the charge of either the men or women servants. In particular I took very special care of the china, which happened to be magnificent; and hereby hangs the memory of a droll incident with which I may close this chapter.

A certain dignified old lady, the Hon. Mrs. X., had paid a visit to Newbridge with her daughters, and in return she invited one of my brothers and myself to spend some days at her “show” place in ——. While stopping there I talked with the enthusiasm of my age to her very charming young daughters of the pleasures of study, urging them strenuously to learn Greek and Mathematics. Mrs. X., overhearing me, intervened in the conversation, and said somewhat tartly, “I do not at all agree with you, Miss Cobbe! I think the duty of a lady is to attend to her house, and to her husband and children. I beg you will not incite my girls to take up your studies.”

Of course I bowed to the decree, and soon after began admiring some of the china about the room. “There is,” said Mrs. X., “some very fine old china belonging to this house. There is one dessert-service which is said to have cost £800 forty or fifty years ago. Would you like to see it?”

Having gratefully accepted the invitation, I followed my hostess to the basement of the house, and there, for the first time in my life, I recognised that condition of disorder and slatternliness which I had heard described as characteristic of Irish houses. At last we reached an underground china closet, and after some delay and reluctance on the part of the servant, a key was found and the door opened. There, on the shelves and the floor, lay piled, higgledy-piggledy, dishes and plates of exquisite china mixed up with the commonest earthenware jugs, basins, cups, and willow-pattern kitchen dishes; and the great dessert-service among the rest—with the dessert of the previous summer rotting on the plates! Yes! there was no mistake. Some of the superb plates handed to me by the servant for examination by the light of the window, had on them peach and plum-stones and grape-stalks, obviously left as they had been taken from the table in the dining-room many months before! Poor Mrs. X. muttered some expressions of dismay and reproach to her servants, which of course I did not seem to hear, but I had not the strength of mind to resist saying: “Indeed this is a splendid service; Style de l’Empire I should call it. We have nothing like it, but when next you do us the pleasure to come to Newbridge I shall like to show you our Indian and Worcester services. Do you know I always take up all the plates and dishes myself when they have been washed the day after a party, and put them on their proper shelves with my own hands,—though I do know a little Greek and geometry, Mrs. X.!”