shows her to have been what family tradition reports, rich in talent and
accomplishments, gifted with imagination and keenly observant of her
surroundings, but withal cynical of speech and critical of temperament--a
woman, perhaps, more to be feared than loved.

Her brother John, the recipient of most of the following letters, was, on
the contrary, a youth of exceptional amiability, and unalterably popular
with all whom he encountered. Intellectual from his earliest childhood, in
later life he was a profound classical scholar. A seven months' child,
however, the constitutional delicacy which was a constant handicap to him
throughout his existence had been further accentuated by an unlucky
accident. When at Westminster, a fall resulting from a push given to him
by Ralph Nevill, Lord Abergavenny's son, had broken his collar-bone, and
with the Spartan treatment to which children were then subjected, this
injury received no attention. But what he lacked in physical strength was
supplied by dauntless grit and mental energy, so that, although in the
future debarred by his health from taking any active part in political
life, he early attained, as we shall see, to no mean fame as a traveller
and an explorer, while he was regarded as one of the savants of his
generation.

During 1805, when he was yet a freshman at Christ Church, his younger
brothers and sisters were likewise variously employed with their
education, the boys at the celebrated schools of Sunbury and Westminster,
the girls in the seclusion of a large school-room in the rambling house in
Grosvenor Square. And that the learning for which they all strove was of a
comprehensive nature, moreover, that those of their party who had already
entered the gay world never disdained to share such labours, is shown in a
letter written many years afterwards to John by his brother Charles, in
which the writer complains sarcastically--