Records of a Girlhood | Page 9

exalted to perilous proximity with the chandelier, while
he rushed across the drawing-rooms, to my exquisite terror and
triumph.
I remember, too, his sisters, all three remarkably tall women (the eldest
nearly six feet high, a portentous petticoat stature), amusing themselves
with putting on, and sweeping about the rooms in, certain regal mantles
and Grecian draperies of my aunt Mrs. Whitelock's, an actress, like the
rest of the Kembles, who sought and found across the Atlantic a fortune
and celebrity which it would have been difficult for her to have
achieved under the disadvantage of proximity to, and comparison with,
her sister, Mrs. Siddons. But I suppose the dramatic impression which
then affected me with the greatest and most vivid pleasure was an
experience which I have often remembered, when reading Goethe's
"Dichtung und Wahrheit," and the opening chapters of "Wilhelm
Meister." Within a pleasant summer afternoon's walk from Bath,
through green meadows and by the river's side, lay a place called

Claverton Park, the residence of a family of the name of A----. I
remember nothing of the house but the stately and spacious hall, in the
middle of which stood a portable theatre, or puppet-show, such as
Punch inhabits, where the small figures, animated with voice and
movement by George A----, the eldest son of the family, were tragic
instead of grotesque, and where, instead of the squeaking "Don
Giovanni" of the London pavement, "Macbeth" and similar solemnities
appeared before my enchanted eyes. The troupe might have been the
very identical puppet performers of Harry Rowe, the famous Yorkshire
trumpeter. These, I suppose, were the first plays I ever saw. Those were
pleasant walks to Claverton, and pleasant days at Claverton Hall! I
wish Hans Breitmann and his "Avay in die Ewigkeit" did not come in,
like a ludicrous, lugubrious burden, to all one's reminiscences of places
and people one knew upward of fifty years ago.
I have been accused of having acquired a bad habit of _punning from
Shakespeare!_--a delightful idea, that made me laugh till I cried the
first time it was suggested to me. If so, I certainly began early to exhibit
a result, of which the cause was, in some mysterious way, long
subsequent to the effect; unless the Puppet Plays of Claverton inspired
my wit. However that may be, I developed at this period a decided
faculty for punning, and that is an unusual thing at that age. Children
have considerable enjoyment of humor, as many of their favorite fairy
and other stories attest; they are often themselves extremely droll and
humorous in their assumed play characters and the stories they invent
to divert their companions; but punning is a not very noble species of
wit; it partakes of mental dexterity, requires neither fancy, humor, nor
imagination, and deals in words with double meanings, a subtlety very
little congenial to the simple and earnest intelligence of childhood.
Les enfans terribles say such things daily, and make their
grandmothers' caps stand on end with their precocious astuteness; but
the clever sayings of most clever children, repeated and reported by
admiring friends and relations, are, for the most part, simply the result
of unused faculties, exercising themselves in, to them, an unused world;
only therefore surprising to worn-out faculties, which have almost
ceased to exercise themselves in, to them, an almost worn-out world.

To Miss B---- I was indebted for the first doll I remember possessing--a
gorgeous wax personage, in white muslin and cherry-colored ribbons,
who, by desire of the donor, was to be called Philippa, in honor of my
uncle. I never loved or liked dolls, though I remember taking some
pride in the splendor of this, my first-born. They always affected me
with a grim sense of being a mockery of the humanity they were
supposed to represent; there was something uncanny, not to say ghastly,
in the doll existence and its mimicry of babyhood to me, and I had a
nervous dislike, not unmixed with fear, of the smiling simulacra that
girls are all supposed to love with a species of prophetic maternal
instinct.
The only member of my aunt Twiss's family of whom I remember at
this time little or nothing was the eldest son, Horace, who in subsequent
years was one of the most intimate and familiar friends of my father
and mother, and who became well known as a clever and successful
public man, and a brilliant and agreeable member of the London
society of his day.
My stay of a little more than a year at Bath had but one memorable
event, in its course, to me. I was looking one evening, at bedtime, over
the banisters, from the upper story into the hall below, with tiptoe
eagerness that caused me to overbalance myself and turn over the rail,
to