Of course the pleasure-and-beauty-loving, artistic temperament, which is the one most likely to be exposed to such an ordeal as that of my mother’s childhood, is also the one liable to be most injured by it, and to communicate through its influence peculiar mischief to the moral nature.  It is the price of peril, paid for all that brilliant order of gifts that have for their scope the exercise of the imagination through the senses, no less than for that crown of gifts, the poet’s passionate inspiration, speaking to the senses through the imagination.

How far my mother was hurt by the combination of circumstances that influenced her childhood I know not.  As I remember her, she was a frank, fearless, generous, and unworldly woman, and had probably found in the subsequent independent exercise of her abilities the shield for these virtues.  How much the passionate, vehement, susceptible, and most suffering nature was banefully fostered at the same time, I can better judge from the sad vantage-ground of my own experience.

After six years spent in a bitter struggle with disease and difficulties of every kind, my grandfather, still a young man, died of consumption, leaving a widow and five little children, of whom the eldest, my mother, not yet in her teens, became from that time the bread-winner and sole support.

Nor was it many years before she established her claim to the approbation of the general public, fulfilling the promise of her childhood by performances of such singular originality as to deserve the name of genuine artistic creations, and which have hardly ever been successfully attempted since her time:  such as “The Blind Boy” and “Deaf and Dumb;” the latter, particularly, in its speechless power and pathos of expression, resembling the celebrated exhibitions of Parisot and Bigottini, in the great tragic ballets in which dancing was a subordinate element to the highest dramatic effects of passion and emotion expressed by pantomime.  After her marriage, my mother remained but a few years on the stage, to which she bequeathed, as specimens of her ability as a dramatic writer, the charming English version of “La jeune Femme colere,” called “The Day after the Wedding;” the little burlesque of “Personation,” of which her own exquisitely humorous performance, aided by her admirably pure French accent, has never been equaled; and a play in five acts called “Smiles and Tears,” taken from Mrs. Opie’s tale of “Father and Daughter.”

She had a fine and powerful voice and a rarely accurate musical ear; she moved so gracefully that I have known persons who went to certain provincial promenades frequented by her, only to see her walk; she was a capital horsewoman; her figure was beautiful, and her face very handsome and strikingly expressive; and she talked better, with more originality and vivacity, than any English woman I have ever known:  to all which good gifts she added that of being a first-rate cook.  And oh, how often and how bitterly,