fession of a want of beauty in childhood!—we unhesitatingly venture to assert that it is all for the better, if L. E. L. would but ask herself in what it consists; and as to not reading the "Arabian Nights," why she ought not, by the same rule, to look again on the primroses and violets that so charmed her childish mind—or on a beautiful pointer, or the blue sky, or anything that formed part of the paradise of her in fancy.
The first scene of that paradise was Hans-place, Chelsea, where she was born, and where she resided during several years of her life;—which, by the way, she ought not to have done, as that too must have marked the bitterness of the change—had there been more than imaginary bitterness in it. Much of her earlier time was passed under the guardianship of her grandmother. Is it not of L. E. L. we have heard it related, that, upon seeing a little girl of her own age crying, and finding that the cause of grief was the death of a grandmother, she turned anxiously to the servant and said—"I've got two grandmamas; shall I have to cry for them both?" If this be true, there was a tendency when a child to economise in the article of sorrow, which subsequent indulgencies and habits of gloomy reflection are provokingly contrasted with. So far we are bound to admit the distressing change, without allowing that it ought to be distressing; and can only wish that L. E. L., whenever she sits down to verse or prose, would commune with her own mind, with the view of ascertaining how little misery will do for the occasion—how few may be the tears absolutely required for any given calamity in life that is natural and inevitable. What sighs people might save if they chose! to the immense improvement of their own sympathies, and the incalculable advantage of the unhappy people they mourn for!
It was at an early age that Miss Landon became an inmate of the school of the Misses Lance in Hans-place, and with those ladies she continued to reside until recently, when they gave up their establishment. The house has been a temple for tuition ever since it was built, and can boast of other gifted scholars, as well as its latest and most gifted. It claims Mary Russel Mitford as one who was educated within its walls. Lady Caroline Lamb was also there for a time.
As to the period when L. E. L. first began to write poetry, we can only pretend to fix it with any tolerable certainty by saying, that it did not occur till after she was ascertained to have been born. Perhaps we shall be most correct in dating it as near the time of birth as may be practicable. We shall not state positively that she improvised before she could speak; but it is certain that she composed verses before she could write them. There was a certain epic poem of the infant L. E. L.'s, which became the subject of an express condition—energetic ally insisted upon by her brother—that she was not always to recite it when they went to play in the garden! Her first wild snatches of song and fragments of romance that appeared in the "Literary Gazette" were written at a very early age; so early as to be incredible, if the performances of Cowley, Pope, and others, when mere children, had left us any room for doubt, or much for wonder, on the score of precocity. She sprang almost from the nurse's arms into those of Fame, and had won the undying wreath before she knew that it was anything
