iving, like many another genius, with relatives who could not
comprehend her. Neither her mother nor her stepfather were persons of
a literary turn. Bell's Life and the Racing Calendar were the extent of
the Baronet's reading, and Lady Clavering still wrote like a schoolgirl
of thirteen, and with an extraordinary disregard to grammar and
spelling. And as Miss Amory felt very keenly that she was not
appreciated, and that she lived with persons who were not her equals in
intellect or conversational power, she lost no opportunity to acquaint
her family circle with their inferiority to herself, and not only was
a martyr, but took care to let everybody know that she was so. If she
suffered, as she said and thought she did, severely, are we to wonder
that a young creature of such delicate sensibilities should shriek and
cry out a good deal? Without sympathy life is nothing; and would it not
have been a want of candour on her part to affect a cheerfulness which
she did not feel, or pretend a respect for those towards whom it was
quite impossible she should entertain any reverence? If a poetess may
not bemoan her lot, of what earthly use is her lyre? Blanche struck
hers only to the saddest of tunes; and sang elegies over her dead hopes,
dirges over her early frost-nipt buds of affection, as became such a
melancholy fate and Muse.

Her actual distresses, as we have said, had not been up to the present
time very considerable: but her griefs lay; like those of most of us,
in her own soul--that being sad and habitually dissatisfied, what wonder
that she should weep? So Mes Larmes dribbled out of her eyes any day at
command: she could furnish an unlimited supply of tears, and her faculty
of shedding them increased by practice. For sentiment is like another
complaint mentioned by Horace, as increasing by self-indulgence (I
am sorry to say, ladies, that the complaint in question is called the
dropsy), and the more you cry, the more you will be able and desirous to
do so.

Missy had begun to gush at a very early age. Lamartine was her favourite
bard from the period when she first could feel: and she had subsequently
improved her mind by a sedulous study of novels of the great modern
authors of the French language. There was not a romance of Balzac and
George Sand which the indefatigable little creature had not devoured--by
the time she was sixteen: and, however little she sympathised with her
relatives at home, she had friends, as she