admiration; my mother has always seemed to me to have been overshadowed
by their celebrity; my sister and myself, whose fate it has been to bear
in public the name they have made distinguished, owe in great measure to
her, I think, whatever ability has enabled us to do so not unworthily.

I was born on the 27th of November, 1809, in 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