test of mortal and
immortal bards. His "Marmion" and "Lay of the Last Minstrel" were
already familiar to me. Of Shakespeare at this time, and for many
subsequent years, I knew not a single line.

While our lodging in town was principally inhabited by my father and
resorted to by my mother as a convenience, my aunt Dall, and we
children, had our home at my mother's _rus in urbe_, Craven Hill, where
we remained until I went again to school in France.

Our next door neighbors were, on one side, a handsome, dashing Mrs.
Blackshaw, sister of George the Fourth's favorite, Beau Brummel, whose
daughters were good friends of ours; and on the other Belzoni, the
Egyptian traveller, and his wife, with whom we were well acquainted. The
wall that separated our gardens was upwards of six feet high,--it
reached above my father's head, who was full six feet tall,--but our
colossal friend, the Italian, looked down upon us over it quite easily,
his large handsome face showing well above it, down to his magnificent
auburn beard, which in those less hirsute days than these he seldom
exhibited, except in the privacy of his own back garden, where he used
occasionally to display it, to our immense delight and astonishment.
Great, too, was our satisfaction in visiting Madame Belzoni, who used to
receive us in rooms full of strange spoils, brought back by herself and
her husband from the East; she sometimes smoked a long Turkish pipe, and
generally wore a dark blue sort of caftan, with a white turban on her
head. Another of our neighbors here was Latour, the musical composer, to
whom, though he was personally good-natured and kind to me, I owe a
grudge, for the sake of his "Music for Young Persons," and only regret
that he was not our next-door neighbor, when he would have execrated his
own "O Dolce Concerto," and "Sul Margine d'un Rio," and all his
innumerable progeny of variations for two hands and four hands, as
heartily as I did. I do not know whether it was instigated by his advice
or not that my mother at this time made me take lessons of a certain Mr.
Laugier, who received pupils at his own house, near Russell Square, and
taught them thorough-bass and counterpoint, and the science of musical
composition. I attended his classes for some time, and still possess
books full of the grammar of music, as profound and difficult a study,
almost, as the grammar of language. But I think I was too young to
derive much benefit from so severe a scienc