LETTER VI.

DESCRIPTION OF MISS TYLER'S HOUSE AT BATH.

INOCULATION.

MISS TYLER'S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES.

April 7th, 1821.

On her return from Lisbon Miss Tyler took a house in Bath, and there my earliest recollections begin, great part of my earliest childhood having been passed there.

The house was in Walcot parish, in which, five and forty years ago, were the skirts of the city. It stood alone, in a walled garden, and the entrance was from a lane. The situation was thought a bad one, because of the approach, and because the nearest houses were of a mean description; in other respects it was a very desirable residence. The house had been quite in the country when it was built. One of its fronts looked into the garden, the other into a lower garden, and over other garden grounds to the river, Bath Wick Fields (which are now covered with streets), and Claverton Hill, with a grove of firs along its brow, and a sham castle in the midst of their long dark line. I have not a stronger desire to see the Pyramids, than I had to visit that sham castle during the first years of my life. There was a sort of rural freshness about the place. The dead wall of a dwelling-house (the front of which was in Walcot Street) formed one side of the garden enclosure, and was covered with fine fruit trees: the way from the garden door to the house was between

that long house-wall, and a row of espaliers, behind which was a grass plat, interspersed with standard trees and flower beds, and having one of those green rotatory garden-seats shaped like a tub, where the contemplative person within may, like Diogenes, be as much in the sun as he likes. There was a descent by a few steps to another garden, which was chiefly filled with fragrant herbs, and with a long bed of lilies of the valley. Ground rent had been of little value when the house was built. The kitchen looked into the garden, and opened into it; and near the kitchen door was a pipe, supplied from one of the fine springs with which the country about Bath abounds, and a little stone cistern beneath. The parlour door also opened into the garden; it was bowered with jessamine, and there I often took my seat upon the stone steps.

My aunt, who had an unlucky taste for such things, fitted up the house at a much greater expense than she was well able to afford. She threw two small rooms into one, and thus made a good parlour, and built a drawing-room over the kitchen. The walls of that drawing-room were covered with a plain green paper, the floor with a Turkey carpet: there hung her own portrait by Gainsborough, with a curtain to preserve the frame from flies and the colours from the sun; and there stood one of the most beautiful pieces of old furniture I ever saw,-a cabinet of ivory, ebony, and tortoise-shell, in an ebony frame. It had been left her by a lady of the Spenser family, and was said to have belonged to the great Marlborough. I may mention as part of the parlour furniture a square

screen with a foot-board and a little shelf, because I have always had one of the same fashion myself, for its convenience; a French writing-table, because of its peculiar shape, which was that of a Cajou nut or a kidney, — the writer sat in the concave, and had a drawer on each side; an arm chair made of fine cherry wood, which had been Mr. Bradford's, and in which she always sat, mentionable, because if any visitor who was not in her especial favour sat therein, the leathern cushion was always sent into the garden to be aired and purified before she would use it again; a mezzotinto print of Pope's Eloisa, in an oval black frame, because of its supposed likeness to herself; two prints in the same kind of engraving from pictures by Angelica Kauffman, one of Hector and Andromache, the other of Telemachus at the court of Menelaus, these I notice because they were in frames of Brazilian wood; and the great print of Pombal, o grande Marquez, in a similar frame, because this was the first portrait of any illustrious man with which I became familiar. The establishment consisted of an old man servant, and a maid, both from Shobdon. The old man used every night to feed the crickets. He died at Bath in her service.

Here my time was chiefly passed from the age of two till six. I had many indulgences, but more privations, and those of an injurious kind; want of playmates, want of exercise, never being allowed to do anything in which by possibility I might dirt myself; late hours in company, that is to say, late hours for a child, which I reckon among the privations (having always had the healthiest propensity for going to bed betimes);

late hours of rising, which were less painful perhaps, but in other respects worse. My aunt chose that I should sleep with her, and this subjected me to a double evil. She used to have her bed warmed, and during the months while this practice was in season I was always put into Molly's bed first, for fear of an accident from the warming-pan, and removed when my aunt went to bed, so that I was regularly wakened out of a sound sleep. This, however, was not half so bad as being obliged to lie till nine, and not unfrequently till ten in the morning, and not daring to make the slightest movement which could disturb her during the hours that I lay awake, and longing to be set free. These were, indeed, early and severe lessons of patience. My poor little wits were upon the alert at those tedious hours of compulsory idleness, fancying figures and combinations of form in the curtains, wondering at the motes in the slant sunbeam, and watching the light from the crevices of the window-shutters, till it served me at last by its progressive motion to measure the lapse of time. Thoroughly injudicious as my education under Miss Tyler was, no part of it was so irksome as this.

I was inoculated at Bath at two years old, and most certainly believe that I have a distinct recollection of it as an insulated fact, and the precise place where it was performed. My mother sometimes fancied that my constitution received permanent injury from the long preparatory lowering regimen upon which I was kept. Before that time, she used to say, I had always been plump and fat, but afterwards became the lean, lank, greyhound-like creature

She came to Bath

that I have ever since continued. to be with me during the eruption. Except the spots upon the arm, I had only one pustule; afraid that this might not be enough, she gave me a single mouthful of meat at dinner, and, before night, above a hundred made their appearance, with fever enough to frighten her severely. The disease, however, was very favourable. A year or two afterwards, I was brought to the brink of death by a fever, and still I remember the taste of one of my medicines (what it was I know not), and the cup in which it was administered. I remember, also, the doses of bark which followed. Dr. Schomberg attended me on both occasions. One of Schomberg's sons was the midshipman who was much talked of some forty years ago for having fought Prince William Henry, then one of his shipmates. I think he is the author of a history of our naval achievements. Alexander, another son, was a fellow of Corpus, and died in 1790 or 1791, having lost the use of his lower parts by a stroke of the palsy. I had the mournful office of going often to sit by him as he lay upon his back in bed, when he was vainly seeking relief at Bath. Boy as I was, and till then a stranger to him, he, who had no friend or relation with him, was glad of the relief which even my presence afforded to his deplorable solitude.

Miss Tyler had a numerous acquaintance, such as her person and talents (which were of no ordinary kind) were likely to attract. The circle of her Herefordshire acquaintance, extending as far as the sphere of the three music meetings in the three