Records of a Girlhood | Page 8

heard it said, once nourished a hopeless passion for Mrs. Siddons.
Mrs. Twiss bore a soft and mitigated likeness to her celebrated sister;
she had great sweetness of voice and countenance, and a graceful,
refined, feminine manner, that gave her great advantages in her
intercourse with and influence over the young women whose training
she undertook. Mr. Twiss was a very learned man, whose literary
labors were, I believe, various, but whose "Concordance of
Shakespeare" is the only one with which I am acquainted. He devoted
himself, with extreme assiduity, to the education of his daughters,
giving them the unusual advantage of a thorough classic training, and
making of two of them learned women in the more restricted, as well as
the more general, sense of the term. These ladies were what so few of
their sex ever are, _really well informed_; they knew much, and they
knew it all thoroughly; they were excellent Latin scholars and
mathematicians, had read immensely and at the same time
systematically, had prodigious memories stored with various and
well-classed knowledge, and, above all, were mistresses of the English
language, and spoke and wrote it with perfect purity--an
accomplishment out of fashion now, it appears to me, but of the

advantage of which I retain a delightful impression in my memory of
subsequent intercourse with those excellent and capitally educated
women. My relations with them, all but totally interrupted for upward
of thirty years, were renewed late in the middle of my life and toward
the end of theirs, when I visited them repeatedly at their pretty rural
dwelling near Hereford, where they enjoyed in tranquil repose the easy
independence they had earned by honorable toil. There, the lovely
garden, every flower of which looked fit to take the first prize at a
horticultural show, the incomparable white strawberries, famous
throughout the neighborhood, and a magnificent Angola cat, were the
delights of my out-of-door life; and perfect kindness and various
conversation, fed by an inexhaustible fund of anecdote, an immense
knowledge of books, and a long and interesting acquaintance with
society, made the indoor hours passed with these quiet old lady
governesses some of the most delightful I have ever known. The two
younger sisters died first; the eldest, surviving them, felt the sad
solitude of their once pleasant home at "The Laurels" intolerable, and
removed her residence to Brighton, where, till the period of her death, I
used to go and stay with her, and found her to the last one of the most
agreeable companions I have ever known.
At the time of my first acquaintance with my cousins, however, neither
their own studies nor those of their pupils so far engrossed them as to
seclude them from society. Bath was then, at certain seasons, the gayest
place of fashionable resort in England; and, little consonant as such a
thing would appear at the present day with the prevailing ideas of the
life of a teacher, balls, routs, plays, assemblies, the Pump Room, and all
the fashionable dissipations of the place, were habitually resorted to by
these very "stylish" school-mistresses, whose position at one time,
oddly enough, was that of leaders of "the ton" in the pretty provincial
capital of Somersetshire. It was, moreover, understood, as part of the
system of the establishment, that such of the pupils as were of an age to
be introduced into society could enjoy the advantage of the
chaperonage of these ladies, and several did avail themselves of it.
What profit I made under these kind and affectionate kinsfolk I know
not; little, I rather think, ostensibly; perhaps some beneath the surface,

not very manifest either to them or myself at the time; but painstaking
love sows more harvests than it wots of, wherever or whenever (or if
never) it reaps them.
I did not become versed in any of my cousins' learned lore, or
accomplished in the lighter labors of their leisure hours--to wit, the
shoemaking, bread-seal manufacturing, and black and white Japan,
table and screen painting, which produced such an indescribable
medley of materials in their rooms, and were fashionable female idle
industries of that day.
Remote from the theatre, and all details of theatrical life, as my
existence in my aunt's school was, there still were occasional
infiltrations of that element which found their way into my small
sphere. My cousin John Twiss, who died not very long ago, an elderly
general in her Majesty's service, was at this time a young giant,
studying to become an engineer officer, whose visits to his home were
seasons of great delight to the family in general, not unmixed on my
part with dread; for a favorite diversion of his was enacting my uncle
John's famous rescue of Cora's child, in "Pizarro," with me clutched in
one hand, and