Records of a Girlhood | Page 5

Newman Street, Oxford
Road, the third child of my parents, whose eldest, Philip, named after
my uncle, died in infancy. The second, John Mitchell, lived to
distinguish himself as a scholar, devoting his life to the study of his
own language and the history of his country in their earliest period, and
to the kindred subject of Northern Archæology.
Of Newman Street I have nothing to say, but regret to have heard that
before we left our residence there my father was convicted, during an
absence of my mother's from town, of having planted in my baby
bosom the seeds of personal vanity, while indulging his own, by having
an especially pretty and becoming lace cap at hand in the drawing-room,
to be immediately substituted for some more homely daily adornment,
when I was exhibited to his visitors. In consequence, perhaps, of which,
I am a disgracefully dress-loving old woman of near seventy, one of
whose minor miseries is that she can no longer find any lace cap
whatever that is either pretty or becoming to her gray head. If my father
had not been so foolish then, I should not be so foolish now--perhaps.
The famous French actress, Mlle. Clairon, recalled, for the pleasure of
some foreign royal personage passing through Paris, for one night to
the stage, which she had left many years before, was extremely anxious
to recover the pattern of a certain cap which she had worn in her young

days in "La Coquette corrigée," the part she was about to repeat. The
cap, as she wore it, had been a Parisian rage; she declared that half her
success in the part had been the cap. The milliner who had made it, and
whose fortune it had made, had retired from business, grown old;
luckily, however, she was not dead: she was hunted up and adjured to
reproduce, if possible, this marvel of her art, and came to her former
patroness, bringing with her the identical head-gear. Clairon seized
upon it: "Ah oui, c'est bien cela! c'est bien là le bonnet!" It was on her
head in an instant, and she before the glass, in vain trying to reproduce
with it the well-remembered effect. She pished and pshawed, frowned
and shrugged, pulled the pretty chiffon this way and that on her
forehead; and while so doing, coming nearer and nearer to the terrible
looking-glass, suddenly stopped, looked at herself for a moment in
silence, and then, covering her aged and faded face with her hands,
exclaimed, "Ah, c'est bien le bonnet! mais ce n'est plus la figure!"
Our next home, after Newman Street, was at a place called Westbourne
Green, now absorbed into endless avenues of "palatial" residences,
which scoff with regular-featured, lofty scorn at the rural simplicity
implied by such a name. The site of our dwelling was not far from the
Paddington Canal, and was then so far out of town that our nearest
neighbors, people of the name of Cockrell, were the owners of a
charming residence, in the middle of park-like grounds, of which I still
have a faint, pleasurable remembrance. The young ladies, daughters of
Mr. Cockrell, really made the first distinct mark I can detect on the
tabula rasa of my memory, by giving me a charming pasteboard figure
of a little girl, to whose serene and sweetly smiling countenance, and
pretty person, a whole bookful of painted pasteboard petticoats, cloaks,
and bonnets could be adapted; it was a lovely being, and stood artlessly
by a stile, an image of rustic beauty and simplicity. I still bless the Miss
Cockrells, if they are alive, but if not, their memory for it!
Of the curious effect of dressing in producing the sentiment of a
countenance, no better illustration can be had than a series of caps,
curls, wreaths, ribbons, etc., painted so as to be adaptable to one face;
the totally different character imparted by a helmet, or a garland of
roses, to the same set of features, is a "caution" to irregular beauties

who console themselves with the fascinating variety of their
expression.
At this period of my life, I have been informed, I began, after the
manner of most clever children, to be exceedingly troublesome and
unmanageable, my principal crime being a general audacious contempt
for all authority, which, coupled with a sweet-tempered, cheerful
indifference to all punishment, made it extremely difficult to know how
to obtain of me the minimum quantity of obedience indispensable in
the relations of a tailless monkey of four years and its elders. I never
cried, I never sulked, I never resented, lamented, or repented either my
ill-doings or their consequences, but accepted them alike with a
philosophical buoyancy of spirit which was the despair of my poor
bewildered trainers.
Being hideously decorated once with a