ss bred of insecure means and
obscure position would run miserable riot; a tremendous power of
omnipotent compression, repression, and oppression, no doubt, quite
consistent with the stern liberty whose severe beauty the people of
these islands love, but absolutely incompatible with license, or even
lightness of life, controlling a thousand disorders rampant in societies
where it does not exist; a power which, tyrannical as it is, and
ludicrously tragical as are the sacrifices sometimes exacted by it,
saves especially the artist class of England from those worst forms of
irregularity which characterize the Bohemianism of foreign literary,
artistic, and dramatic life.

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 celebrate