_compartment_ of an edifice.] of three rooms; but, thirdly and chiefly,
in a pile of ruined archways, most picturesque so far as they went, but
so small that Drury Lane could easily have found room for them on its
stage. These stood in the miniature pleasure-ground, and were
constantly resorted to by artists for specimens of architectural
decays, or of nature working for the concealment of such decays by her
ordinary processes of gorgeous floral vegetation. Ten rooms there may
have been in the Priory, as offered to my mother for less than five
hundred pounds. A drawing-room, bed-rooms, dressing-rooms, etc., making
about ten more, were added by my mother for a sum under one thousand
pounds. The same miniature scale was observed in all these additions.
And, as the Priory was not within the walls of the city, whilst the
river Dee, flowing immediately below, secured it from annoyance on one
side, and the church, with its adjacent church-yard, insulated it from
the tumults of life on all the other sides, an atmosphere of conventual
stillness and tranquillity brooded over it and all around it forever.

Such was the house, such was the society, in which I now found myself;
and upon the whole I might describe myself as being, according to the
modern phrase, "in a false position." I had, for instance, a vast
superiority, as was to have been expected, in bookish attainments, and
in adroitness of logic; whilst, on the other hand, I was ridiculously
short-sighted or blind in all fields of ordinary human experience. It
must not be supposed that I regarded my own particular points of
superiority, or that I used them, with any vanity or view to present
advantages. On the contrary, I sickened over them, and labored to
defeat them. But in vain I sowed errors in my premises, or planted
absurdities in my assumptions. Vainly I tried such blunders as putting
four terms into a syllogism, which, as all the world knows, ought to
run on three; a tripod it ought to be, by all rules known to man, and,