formed a decided phase in my tastes and habits of mind. I thus early learnt to abhor finery, and to consider it as contemptible; and whenever I saw a fine lady, I considered her in the light of a Mayday dancer who could afford to have better tinsel. One incident I will relate. A lady came one evening to drink tea with my mother; she wore feathers, and had on a very smart head-dress. After a time she kindly called me to her and spoke to me; on which I felt my heart warm to her, and I asked “what she had done," and "if she might not take off her fool's-cap!" If I recollect rightly, Mrs. Wakefield has alluded to this incident in one of her books for children. I held also in the greatest contempt all aristocratic distinctions. I loved Henry Sandford for contemning the rich and the fashionable at Mr. Merton's, and for helping the poor. I had the utmost enthusiasm for his refusing to denounce the poor hare to Squire Chase; and for Hamet, the generous Turk. I thought nothing on earth would give me more happiness than to be enabled to make such sacrifice, or do such a service to my mother; but, like Diogenes, I was ignorant that I was trampling on pride with still greater pride. I also remember the delight it was to me to hear my Swiss Bonne talk of the Jura, the Alps, and the Lake of Geneva. But what I liked still better was when M. Constanson, an aged Swiss minister, came to stay at our house, and took me on his knee, and told me long stories of his encounter with a bear on the Alps, and his visits to Herculaneum and Pompeii, with a whole history of their catastrophe. I still have a little piece of a vine he gave me, from Seneca's garden. Such were some of the very heterogeneous in

fluences which, about this period, impressed my character;

-the sense of the presence of God; the desire to know His will and do it; a great thirst for all sorts of desultory information; and, with all, an inordinate pride and selfesteem, which rather led me to abhor the humiliation in my own eyes and before others consequent upon yielding to temptation, than enabled me to resist it. Better children or worse children than I might have been more honest: I was too bad to resist temptation; I was too good to have an easy conscience under the feeling of having done wrong. A great love of stimulus and quick feeling, with a sensitiveness which made me shrink from having my feelings known, also became integral parts of my character. I remember hearing, about this time, a great deal of Madame de Genlis' work on education. It had been especially interesting to us from a proposal that Madame de Genlis should pay us a visit. She was well acquainted with Miss de Luc, daughter of the Christian philanthropist De Luc, who was reader to Queen Charlotte. Miss de Luc, freshly arrived from Switzerland, boarded in a family very near us, and, as we were the only persons who habitually spoke French and my parents were both literary and scientific, she found great pleasure in coming to our house. We were much interested in anecdotes she told us of Sabrina Sidney, the élève of Mr. Day, who was boarding at the same house with her. We heard how she stood unmoved when, every morning, he fired a pistol close to her ear, and how she bore melted sealing-wax being dropped on her back and arms; and we were told of her throwing a box of finery into the fire at his request.

Sometimes I wished I were such a philosopher; sometimes I felt it would be a "vocation assistée!"

When I was about six years old we left The Five Ways; previously to which, our party being increased, my father took a house belonging to an artist, a Mr. Miller, which immediately adjoined our own. A doorway of communication was opened through the offices. This addition gave my father two rooms below for his laboratory and philosophical apparatus, and the younger children and the bonne nurseries above. My health was weak, and I had great delight in the society of those older than myself, while I was overpowered by the noise and habits of children; and they, on the other hand, must have felt as little pleasure in the society of one but a few years older than themselves, who took so little part in their amusements. It thus happened that I was brought up with my parents and their friends; and the others, as children together, under their Swiss Bonne. The religious Society to which we nominally belonged-Friends- was at that period at the lowest ebb; and we never had the opportunity, which all may now enjoy, of hearing the truth in Christ luminously set forth. My dear and excellent mother's standard of excellence was then grand and exalted, but self-sufficing. She had the love of right and justice, and of generosity, fortitude, and beneficence; but she looked on the expression of human tenderness as weakness. Hence my childhood formed for itself a standard of right and wrong which excluded, as did, indeed, my circumstances at that time, the cultivation of many social ties; but my heart was as weak as my mother's was strong, and I was glad to find

a refuge for its affections and sympathies in love of animals. of every variety.

Before Mr. Miller the artist quitted his house, I had often watched him painting portraits; and had been much interested in his showing me a human skull, and teaching me the names of the various bones of which it is composed. When he went away he made me a present of this skull; it henceforth became part of my possessions; it ranked ostensibly with my saws, hammers, nails, maps, books, and other playthings. I often explained what I had learnt of its structure to a little maid of ten years old, the daughter of a cottager, named Polly King, who waited on us. Yet internally and really this skull caused me many musings. Often by firelight, in winter, when I was alone in my room, and the flickering light chanced to fall upon it, the thought would arise: "What is become of the soul that inhabited thee? Is it dead and ended; - or does it yet live; and if BO, where and how? Is it happy or unhappy? Is it with my Aunt Polly?" And as such questionings arose, my heart seemed to shrink before an unfathomable chaos over which I found no bridge to the unseen.. Sometimes again a different phase came over me, and I thought, as I looked upon the ghastly head and fleshless cheeks, "Hast thou, too, ever been the delight of a mother? Hast thou laughed, and talked, and played, and been merry, as we are? Hast thou been taught with care to fulfil some great hope in the world, and what has been the end of thy labours or thy parents' expectation? Do any yet live who perhaps have fondly loved thee, and nurtured thee? and how would those feel who watched thy death-bed, if they could see thee

the plaything of a child?" Then my heart smote me; and I remember saving up my allowance of sixpence a week to buy a nice box to put it in, and begging a piece of silk in which to wrap it carefully in my box; and I thought, "If there be a heaven, and if any of those who once loved thee look down, they will see one at least who tries to show kindness to the form they loved." I mention this as showing the deep melancholic tinge which formed a prominent trait in my character. These feelings I kept closely to myself, and they were wholly unsuspected by others; and here I finish that part of my history which relates to The Five Ways.

When I was about seven years old, I think in 1785, we moved from The Five Ways, for which our family was now too large, to Barr in Staffordshire, quite in the country, about seven or eight miles from Birmingham. Barr was a habitation altogether of a different kind from The Five Ways. The latter was a suburban villa, in a sort of straggling row, in which gentlemen's houses, cottages, trees and fields promiscuously found place. Before it passed the high road to Hagley and the Leasowes, the abodes of the celebrated Lord Lyttelton and the poet Shenstone. The place was called Five Ways because five ways actually met at the turnpike, which was then one mile from Birmingham. Some of these roads were picturesque, especially one winding in a deep bottom to Harborne. Behind the house we had a large shrubbery garden, a poultry-yard, pens for our pets, stables and coach-house, altogether occupying perhaps two acres.

Barr, on the other hand, was a comfortable mansion