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 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.