to her servants and children, and talking to her friends of the prodigious sacrifice she was about to make for her brother and his family, as if it had been the cutting off of a hand or the plucking out of an eye.  To have heard her, anyone unaccustomed to the hyperbole of fashionable language would have deemed Botany Bay the nearest possible point of destination.  Parting from her fashionable acquaintances was tearing herself from all she loved; quitting London was bidding adieu to the world.  Of course there could be no society where she was going, but still she would do her duty; she would not desert dear Frederick and his poor children!  In short, no martyr was ever led to the stake with half the notions of heroism and self-devotion as those with which Lady Juliana stepped into the barouche that was to conduct her to Beech Park.  In the society of piping bullfinches, pink canaries, gray parrots, goldfish, green squirrels, Italian greyhounds, and French poodles, she sought a refuge from despair.  But even these varied charms, after a while, failed to please.  The bullfinches grew hoarse; the canaries turned brown; the parrots became stupid; the gold fish would not eat; the squirrels were cross; the dogs fought; even a shell grotto that was constructing fell down; and by the time the aviary and conservatory were filled, they had lost their interest.  The children were the next subjects for her Ladyship’s ennui to discharge itself upon.  Lord Courtland had a son some years older, and a daughter nearly of the same age as her own.  It suddenly occurred to her that they must be educated, and that she would educate the girls herself.  As the first step she engaged two governesses, French and Italian; modern treatises on the subject of education were ordered from London, looked at, admired, and arranged on gilded shelves and sofa tables; and could their contents have exhaled with the odours of their Russia leather bindings, Lady Juliana’s dressing-room would have been what Sir Joshua Reynolds says every seminary of learning is, “an atmosphere of floating knowledge.”  But amidst this splendid display of human lore, THE BOOK found no place.  She had heard of the Bible, however, and even knew it was a book appointed to be read in churches, and given to poor people, along with Rumford soup and flannel shirts; but as the rule of life, as the book that alone could make wise unto salvation, this Christian parent was ignorant as the Hottentot or Hindoo.

Three days beheld the rise, progress, and decline of Lady Juliana’s whole system of education; and it would have been well for the children had the trust been delegated to those better qualified to discharge it.  But neither of the preceptresses was better skilled in the only true knowledge.  Signora Cicianai was a bigoted Catholic, whose faith hung upon her beads, and Madame Grignon was an esprit forte, who had no faith in anything but le plaisir. But the Signora’s singing was heavenly, and Madame’s dancing was divine, and what lacked there more?