The Unitarians of the United States have in my time possessed a number of preachers of most remarkable excellence; Dr. Channing, Dr. Dewey, Dr. Bellows, my own venerable and dear pastor, Dr. Furness, Dr. Follen, William and Henry Ware, being all men of extraordinary powers of eloquence.  At home I have heard Frederick Maurice and Dean Stanley, but the most impressive preaching I ever heard in England was still from a Unitarian pulpit; James Martineau, I think, surpassed all the very remarkable men I have named in the wonderful beauty and power, spirituality and solemnity, of his sacred teaching.  Frederick Robertson, to my infinite loss and sorrow, I never heard, having been deterred from going to hear him by his reputation of a “fashionable preacher;” he, better than any one, would have understood my repugnance to that species of religious instructor.

Better, in my judgment, than these occasional appeals to our feelings and imaginations under Mrs. Rowden’s influence, was the constant use of the Bible among us.  I cannot call the reading and committing to memory of the Scriptures, as we performed those duties, by the serious name of study.  But the Bible was learnt by heart in certain portions and recited before breakfast every morning, and read aloud before bedtime every evening by us; and though the practice may be open to some objections, I think they hardly outweigh the benefit bestowed upon young minds by early familiar acquaintance with the highest themes, the holiest thoughts, and the noblest words the world possesses or ever will possess.  To me my intimate knowledge of the Bible has always seemed the greatest benefit I derived from my school training.

Of the secular portion of the education we received, the French lady who was Mrs. Rowden’s partner directed the principal part.  Our lessons of geography, grammar, history, arithmetic, and mythology (of which latter subject I suspect we had a much more thorough knowledge than is at all usual with young English girls) were conducted by her.

These studies were all pursued in French, already familiar to me as the vehicle of my elementary acquirements at Boulogne; and this soon became the language in which I habitually wrote, spoke, and thought, to the almost entire neglect of my native tongue, of which I never thoroughly studied the grammar till I was between fifteen and sixteen, when, on my presenting, in a glow of vanity, some verses of mine to my father, he said, with his blandest smile, after reading them, “Very well, very pretty indeed!  My dear, don’t you think, before you write poetry, you had better learn grammar?” a suggestion which sent me crestfallen to a diligent study of Lindley Murray.  But grammar is perfectly uncongenial matter to me, which my mind absolutely refuses to assimilate.  I have learned Latin, English, French, Italian, and German grammar, and do not know a single rule of the construction of any language whatever.  More over, to the present day, my early familiar use of French produces uncertainty in my mind as to the spelling of all words that take a double consonant in French and only one in English, as apartment, enemy, etc.