Records of a Girlhood | Page 7

the broadest
buffoonery, the stately dignity of his own natural countenance, voice,
and manner.
He was a cultivated musician, and sang French and Italian with taste
and expression, and English ballads with a pathos and feeling only
inferior to that of Moore and Mrs. Arkwright, with both which great
masters of musical declamation he was on terms of friendly intimacy.
Mr. Young was a universal favorite in the best London society, and an
eagerly sought guest in pleasant country-houses, where his zeal for
country sports, his knowledge of and fondness for horses, his capital
equestrianism, and inexhaustible fund of humor, made him as popular
with the men as his sweet, genial temper, good breeding, musical
accomplishments, and infinite drollery did with the women.
Mr. Young once told Lord Dacre that he made about four thousand
pounds sterling per annum by his profession; and as he was prudent and
moderate in his mode of life, and, though elegant, not extravagant in
his tastes, he had realized a handsome fortune when he left the stage.
Mr. Young passed the last years of his life at Brighton, and I never
visited that place without going to see him, confined as he latterly was

to his sofa with a complication of painful diseases and the weight of
more than seventy years. The last time I saw him in his drawing-room
he made me sit on a little stool by his sofa--it was not long after my
father, his life-long friend and contemporary's death--and he kept
stroking my hair, and saying to me, "You look so like a child--a good
child." I saw him but once more after this; he was then confined to his
bed. It was on Sunday; he lay propped with pillows in an ample flannel
dressing-gown, with a dark-blue velvet skull-cap on his head, and I
thought I had never seen his face look more strikingly noble and
handsome; he was reading the church service and his Bible, and kept
me by him for some time. I never saw him again.
As a proof of the little poetical imagination which Mr. Young brought
to some of his tragic performances, I remember his saying of his dress
in Cardinal Wolsey, "Well, I never could associate any ideas of
grandeur with this old woman's red petticoat." It would be difficult to
say what his best performances were, for he had never either fire,
passion, or tenderness; but never wanted propriety, dignity, and a
certain stately grace. Sir Pertinax McSycophant and Iago were the best
things I ever saw him act, probably because the sardonic element in
both of them gave partial scope to his humorous vein.
Not long after this we moved to another residence, still in the same
neighborhood, but near the churchyard of Paddington church, which
was a thoroughfare of gravel walks, cutting in various directions the
green turf, where the flat tombstones formed frequent "play-tables" for
us; upon these our nursery-maid, apparently not given to melancholy
meditations among the tombs, used to allow us to manufacture whole
delightful dinner sets of clay plates and dishes (I think I could make
such now), out of which we used to have feasts, as we called them, of
morsels of cake and fruit.
At this time I was about five years old, and it was determined that I
should be sent to the care of my father's sister, Mrs. Twiss, who kept a
school at Bath, and who was my godmother. On the occasion of my
setting forth on my travels, my brother John presented me with a whole
collection of children's books, which he had read and carefully

preserved, and now commended to my use. There were at least a round
dozen, and, having finished reading them, it occurred to me that to
make a bonfire of them would be an additional pleasure to be derived
from them; and so I added to the intellectual recreation they afforded
me the more sensational excitement of what I called "a blaze;" a
proceeding of which the dangerous sinfulness was severely
demonstrated to me by my new care-takers.
Camden Place, Bath, was one of the lofty terraces built on the charming
slopes that surround the site of the Aquæ Solis of the Romans, and here
my aunt Twiss kept a girls' school, which participated in the favor
which every thing belonging to, or even remotely associated with, Mrs.
Siddons received from the public. It was a decidedly "fashionable
establishment for the education of young ladies," managed by my aunt,
her husband, and her three daughters. Mrs. Twiss was, like every
member of my father's family, at one time on the stage, but left it very
soon, to marry the grim-visaged, gaunt-figured, kind-hearted gentleman
and profound scholar whose name she at this time bore, and who, I
have