to a taste for poetry among our girls. Though my mother was a writer
of prose, and revelled in satire, the poetic feeling clung to her
to the last.

In the first ten years of her married life she became the mother of
six children, four of whom died of consumption at different ages.
My elder sister married, and had children, of whom one still lives;
but she was one of the four who followed each other at intervals
during my mother's lifetime. Then my brother Tom and I were left to
her,--with the destiny before us three of writing more books than
were probably ever before produced by a single family. [Footnote:
The family of Estienne, the great French printers of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, of whom there were at least nine or ten,
did more perhaps for the production of literature than any other
family. But they, though they edited, and not unfrequently translated
the works which they published, were not authors in the ordinary
sense.] My married sister added to the number by one little anonymous
high church story, called Chollerton.

From the date of their marriage up to 1827, when my mother went
to America, my father's affairs had always been going down in the
world. She had loved society, affecting a somewhat liberal role
and professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which sprung from
the wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of patriot exiles.
An Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second shirt from
the clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to exterminate,
or a French proletaire with distant ideas of sacrificing himself to
the cause of liberty, were always welcome to the modest hospitality
of her house. In after years, when marquises of another caste had
been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory, and thought that