which was in the year 1778, he left the whole of his property to Miss Tyler, except 50l. to my mother, and a small provision, charged upon his estates, for my poor uncle William, as one utterly incapable of providing for himself. Finding herself mistress of 15007. in money from Mr. Bradford's effects, besides the estate, and her own paternal portion of 600l., she began to live at large, and to frequent watering places. At one of these (I think it was Weymouth) she fell in with Armstrong, the physician and poet, a writer deservedly respectable for his poem upon Health, and deservedly infamous for another of his productions. He recommended her to try the climate of Lisbon, less for any real or apprehended complaint, than because he perceived the advice would be agreeable; and thus before you and I were born did Armstrong prepare the way for our friendship, as well as for the great literary labours of my life. To Lisbon accordingly she went, taking with her my uncle, who had lately entered into orders, and Mrs. (a distant relation, the widow of a decayed Bristol merchant) as a sort of ama. Miss Palmer (sister of that Palmer who planned the mail coach system), one of her Bath acquaintances, joined the party. They remained about twelve months abroad, where some of your friends no doubt remember them, during the golden age of the factory, in 1774, the year of my birth. Miss Tyler was then thirty-four. She was remarkably beautiful, as far as any face can be called beautiful in which the indications of a violent temper are strongly marked. LETTER VI. INOCULATION. DESCRIPTION OF MISS TYLER'S HOUSE AT BATH. 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 illustrious man with which I became familiar. The establishment consisted of an old man servant, and a maid, both from Shobdon. to feed the crickets. any The old man used every night 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 |