The Mechanical Difficulties incident to the Perform- | Wild Flowers of March, 144; of June, 302 ance of Music-306 The Royal Pardon Vindicated-Mr. Barber's Case WORK-by AIGUILLETTE :- The Story of Angelique (a True Incident) - by The Tribes of the North-east Frontier - by an The Woman of the Writers-by Mary Cowden Turner, J. M. W., Notice of (with Portrait), 330 THE CHILD'S CORNER: Annie's Thoughts-by Hannah Clay-36 149 Antique Lace Collar, 259 Knitted Mitten, with Cuff, 38 Sleeve, in Broderie Anglaise, 95 POETRY. A Bugle-call from a Volunteer Rifleman-by Mar- Address to Frenchmen, on the Encroachment of Scandal in Fairy-land-by Charles H. Hitchings 231 Song-by Ada Trevanion-314 Calvin's Death-bed-by the Hon. Julia A. Maynard Sonnet-by Dora Greenwell-89 -27 Days Gone-by Mrs. White-27 Eros and Anteros-by Charles H. Hitchings-68 Faith's Vigil-by Charles H. Hitchings-288 Heart-echoes-by Fritz-288 I mourn for thee, sweet Josephine-by I*** Life's Koh-i-noor-by J. J. Reynolds-287 My Cottage Home-by Lizzie W.-180 Old Christmas-by Mrs. Newton Crosland-40 Stanzas-by Ada Trevanion-118 Stars on a frosty Night-by Ada Trevanion-68 The Bee and the Maiden-248 The Christmas Tree-by Maria Norris-10 Printed by Kogerson & Tuxford, 246, Strand, Loudon. THE NEW MONTHLY BELLE ASSEMBLÉE, INCORPORATED WITH THE LADIES' JANUARY, 1852. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LAURA STUDLEGH. BY MRS. DAVID OGILVY. Author of "Traditions of Tuscany," "Highland Minstrelsy," &c., &c. СНАР. І. "Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall." “If thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all.” Well would it have been for me had such fears assailed me on the first budding of my aspirations; yet then I should have been a cautious babe-for I was little beyond infancy when the dream awoke in my soul to become famous. I cannot remember the time when I could not read. There was indeed some talking among my elders of teaching me according to a newly-invented method; but when they came to examine me for tuition they found I had already picked up a perfect knowledge of reading, from overhearing my sister's lessons while I played about the school-room; I was not then three years old. The commendations lavished on my "great cleverness" were the first stimulants bestowed on ambition. I was soon not a reader, but a devourer of books. All kinds, however unsuitable they might seem to a child's taste, were eagerly welcomed; and I was alternately praised and ridiculed for my absorbing passion. I did not then care for ridicule: politeness in a company of strangers was forgotten if Fate placed me near the book-stand. I could read by snatches in the pauses of a quadrille, or steal from a game of romps to finish Macbeth in the shadow of some friendly window-curtain. I was not a happy child; I had those varying spirits and passionate gusty impulses which have been said to be characteristics of genius. Unluckily I read such a remark in a trashy biography of a wicked great man (I forget who, it is so very long ago); and it was too selfflattering a theory for me not to adopt it as a creed. I had elder sisters-showy, handsome, accomplished girls; half-a-dozen brothers, dashing and self-sufficient; and a mother of high rank and petty fortune, who was the proudest off-shoot of aristocracy I ever met in all my adventures. I do not say this unfilially-I would have loved my mother with the fervour of a naturally warm heart had she permitted me; but she was of a cold disposition, and there was shame not to be endured on my face-the fact of its being actually ugly. Adelicia and Millicent were both like herself, handsome; and my mother resented as an indignity to her race, and to the noble blood of all the Effinghams, that I should resemble my father's family—the rich, but homely Studleghs, of Studlegh Hall, Cheshire, and the great firm of Studlegh, Counterpoint, and Co., Leadenhall-street, London. My father was a well-meaning, quiet, selfcomplacent little man; whose great glories in life were the rank of his lady's family, and the wealth of his own. His had been a marriage of convenience, arranged entirely by his father. This worthy old gentleman, who had bought a large property and land on the banks of the Mersey, and had built thereon a mansion of the Elizabethan, George-the-Thirdean styles ingeniously commingled, which he had lovingly christened Studlegh Hall, after his own name, was annoyed by finding himself sneered down by the "good old Cheshire families," who were as plentiful around him as the good old Cheshire cheeses. To remedy this misfortune he made proposals for his son to the proud, poor house of Effingham; and Lady Arabella, with countless quarterings, consented to become the bride of John Studlegh, with countless hundreds. The young merchant was too busy to care much about his wedlock; he saw his intended was elegant, beautiful, and high bred, and he concluded that so soft-spoken a lady must be sweet tempered. His vanity was flattered by the loftiness of her connexions, and he gave his wife carte blanche for the expenditure necessary for her station in society. My mother's was not obtrusive pride; it was rather the under-current of all she said, thought, and did. She made no dash in the world; she lived quietly, but with a costly elegance, whose perfect keeping gave you the impression of refinement rather than of riches. She employed the most expensive tradespeople; she lived in the most expensive part of London when she spent the season there; her equipage was symmetrical in its appointments; her dress and that of her children B simple, but of the most costly materials. It is well she is not alive now; it would be an hourly annoyance to her to see the shops filled with imitations. Nothing moved her supine placidity to anger like the sight of imitation-lace upon the persons of her daughters. Adelicia and Millicent seldom offended in this particular; they preferred running up a long bill (which they at some auspicious moment coaxed my father to pay) rather than irritating Lady Arabella by mock Mechlin or Valenciennes. It was poor I who was always in scrapes; who scorned the idea of a debt, and yet had all a maiden's love of finery, and fancied my plain person advantageously set off by the cheap trimmings, which, to a cursory observer, looked so showy. "I am ashamed of you, Laura," said my mother. "You are always so Quixotic about being truthful in season and out of season, and yet you can wear what is a deceitful sham." "Well, mamma," replied I, "all dress is a sham, more or less, and the only difference is in the degree; besides, I think it a less outrage on honesty to wear pretence Mechlin than to flaunt in unpaid magnificence." My sisters tossed their heads, but profited by my taunts to represent their poverty in such moving terms, that my mother gave them each twenty pounds for a point-lace veil. As for me, I wore linen collars and gauze veils ever after, as the cheapest realities to be purchased. There were three brothers, older than myself, at Eton, whence they came home every vacation, shrewd, haughty, extravagant, and yet worldlywise. Effingham, the eldest, was very handsome, and my mother destined him for the Guards; my father had other intentions, which in the end he fulfilled, to the ruin of us all. The younger ones were my playfellows; they were good-natured, and permitted me, as their senior, to play Lady Paramount, and to invent games for their laziness. The reader must not imagine that although I was a book-worm in-doors I was a pensive child in the open air; no: once beyond the house I was the most outrageous of romps-climbed gates and trees, rode ponies without stirrups, jumped from the top of the hay-stacks, and demeaned myself so hoydenishly that I often forgot I was a girl, till the fatal hour arrived when my hair had to be brushed, my white frock to be donned, my sash to be girded, and my little sunburned, freckled, redfingered, awkward self to be ushered into the dining-room, with the dessert. My father insisted on keeping up this old-fashioned customhe liked the sudden irruption of noisy children, after the stiff, stately meal. "My favourite moment," he would say, "is when the footmen turn their backs and the children show their faces." His boys were his darlings. Round his chair clustered the little knot of velvet coats and white trowsers; and I, as I often said to myself, seemed to belong to nobody. My mother was too much engaged with my tall young lady sisters and their fashionable Parisian governess, to attend to me; unless she chanced to remark that my heated face had been washed with soap, instead She of rose-water, and that my hands were ruined But I was so awkward and so careless that nonentity, and had a dim idea of his duties as Lord Fitzinterest was really a very agreeable accounted for by his being only the second of a nobleman. This extraordinary fact may be his title; and he had not been long enough a lord to discover that he was sent into the world for no other purpose than to eat, drink, and be merry. He admired Wilberforce, and always voted with his charitable measures; and had returned his tenants ten per cent. of their exorbitant rents, the last year before his marriage. N.B. He never repeated this act of munificence after Adelicia became Lady Fitzinterest. But to return to the scene in the dining-room. The boys had come trooping in, the elder ones from their horses and hounds, the younger from their cricket, when I stole in as stealthily as I could, for I had just torn my last clean frock. "Where is Laura ?” asked my mother. "Jumping in the saw-pit, near the pond," answered one of my brothers; " she took offence at our cricket because the ball hit her shin; and she was so angry for us at laughing-she jerked about so funnily with the pain." "That was not kind," said Mr. Anson, the new tutor. "Oh, dear!" answered the boy, "if girls will play at boys' games they must expect boys' roughness." I heard all this, and, cut to the heart with shame, and also deeply overcome by the gentle way in which the tutor had reproached my playmates, I felt ready to burst into tears. But the presence hall was no place for crying; and I was endeavouring to steal out as noiselessly as I had stolen in, when the flutter of my torn dress caught my mother's eye. "Come here, Laura,' she said, "and let me look if you are fit to be seen; I hardly expect it, when I hear where you have been." "Comment? Mademoiselle Laure! allons, qu'est ce que vous avez fait? La voici, miladi." "La voici" indeed! my bonnet crushed, my gown soiled and torn in most unseemly shreds, my hands dirty, and my shoes crusted with mud! And at that very moment the door opened, and my father, with a pomposity unusual to his kindly simplicity, introduced his august son-inlaw-elect-Lord Fitzinterest. "Take the child away-send her to bed, Mademoiselle," sighed my mother. "We shall never make a lady of her. I doubt if she can be my child." Mademoiselle dragged me unresistingly away; not without her murmuring something in Adelicia's ear about ce bel fiancé. She had a prophetic eye towards securing a good post in La Baronne's establishment. Mr. Anson was my first friend. He pitied me; he saw how clever, and wayward, and unhappy I was-that my unregulated passions were preparing misery for me. He asked permission to take me under his charge. Mademoiselle, who was preparing Millicent for her first season, was glad to get me off her hands; for now my mother had complained of me so bitterly, that the gouvernante imagined it a reflection on her indifference with regard to my manners. But "vraiment, Mademoiselle Laure est si brusque, elle a tant de fierté." Lady Arabella was offended: "Enough, Mademoiselle; no lady can manage Laura. We will try the government of a man." And a happy trial it was for me. Mr. Anson induced me to learn Latin; he read to me selections from the best Roman and Greek authors, also from the best English poets. He explained things which had puzzled my young brain for years; he steadied my wandering faith, which even at that early age had been staggered by Hume, comforted by Paley, materialized by Gibbon. To him I carried all my doubts about the wisdom of this mysterious world, the sins and sorrows which jostle along its crowded paths. Where he could not explain, he led me humbly to trust a higher Spirit than belongs to humanity. To him I complained of the inconsistencies which revolted me; the deceits, the meannesses, the ingratitude I saw around me. I bestowed on him the extravagant gratitude of childhood. I felt so much, I never even could thank him for his kindness; but he never seemed to consider me cold, as others did. To him I ventured to give my dazzling theories for the amendment of a disordered society. He might smile, but he never sneered ; he encouraged me in high aims, in lofty purposes. But even to him I did not dare to trust my darling hopes, my precious ambition. I had an undefined idea that his good sense would dissolve my airy hopes, and I promised myself I would do something great ere I said anything of intending to be great. And so I still roamed the woods alone, and filled the backs of old letters with scratches of poetry. For four years Mr. Anson, remained in our family; every one of those four seasons was spent by my parents in London. Millicent was not so dashing as Adelicia, and considerable difficulty was experienced in "settling her." My mother would have a nobleman; my father would have a rich man; and Millicent herself would have a handsome man. The three conjoined were hard to find. Millicent withered ere her fourth season, and a leader of fashion_pronounced her passée. This was alarming. Lady I did not see my noble brother-in-law for Arabella, to whom the unfavourable verdict was many years; for, in consequence of my mis- kindly communicated by a dear friend who had demeanours, I was excluded from all participa- two disposable nieces on her hands, took enertion in the nuptial festivities. This scene made getic measures to convince Millicent she had no a deep impression on me; I resolved to turn more time for trifling. The poor girl, whose over a new leaf, and "to live cleanly" for the small stock of romance had been flirted away in future. I was just twelve years old; short and the heartless coquetries of the gay world, consturdy for my years; not pretty, but with a de-sented to dispose of herself to the highest bidtermined air, which prevented me from being insignificant in appearance. der, and accepted Sir Harriman Hauton-a general, who had distinguished himself at Sering apatam, who had a handsome estate, a pension, and one arm. Although I had learned improved manners from my gentle tutor, I could not help staring rudely at my sister's betrothed. Millicent was four-and-twenty; he was sixty-five. Yet he was very much attached to her; gave her entirely her own way; and by his sterling good qualities won so much upon the by no means unfeeling disposition of the poor girl, that she was ever a true and attentive wife to him, though he lived for ten years, leaving her a widow at the age of thirty-four. Poor misguided Millicent. She was just the sort of girl who would have been happy, married to a moderately rich, moderately clever man, of her own age; hers was a passive character, yet capable of having warmth infused into it. No one had tried the experiment but her husband, and he was not a person to excite romantic love. Millicent liked him, and was grateful for his kindness-that was all. She never had any children, which I always thought the bitterest drop in her cup. Perhaps as she never had them she never missed them; but I am sure those little suggestions of Almighty love would have wakened in her torpid heart the warm fountains of maternal happiness. A short time previously to Millicent's marriage there had been quite a fracas in the familya domestic hurricane awful to behold. When Effingham left college he was informed by my father that he was to take his place in the bankhouse as junior partner. Effingham flatly refused, and was supported in his rebellion by my mother. His incensed parent threatened to disinherit him; he replied angrily. Lady Arabella had a fainting fit; little Celia, who was in the room, fell screaming on her insensible mamma, crying out on "naughty papa who had killed her." Mr. Studlegh ordered her out of the room, and his son out of the house. Lady Arabella kept her bed some days; she was really ill from the effects of this agitation. Mr. Studlegh did not attempt a reconciliation. He had so adored his firm-the fountain of his wealth, the prop of his honours-that he had expected raptures in the youth whom he had condescended to name his successor in this great and onerous situation. He was enraged at his son's contumacious claim of a cornetcy in the Guards" a place to spend money, not to make it; and after my keeping my plans secret till now, to be a pleasant surprise to them all!" The good merchant felt himself seriously aggrieved; and on learning that his wife was making secret overtures for the purchase of her son's commission, he wrathfully proceeded to the bankers on whom he had given her a credit account, and stopped all further supplies. This energetic measure was effectual: Lady Arabella was the last person to exist without money, and Effingham found the threat of disinheritance too near probability to be lightly heeded. He returned after a disappearance of a fortnight, made his submission, and was admitted junior partner of the firm. Woe worth the day he entered it! He had neither taste nor talents for business. He was rash without courage, and hasty without diligence. He had an appearance of genius, which was in reality only an unsound and shallow quickness; and this was more fatal to his fortunes than if he had been the dullest dolt that ever, with pen on ear, dangled his legs over a high three-legged stool. My father then peaceably disposed of his two next sons. One got a writership, the other a direct appointment to the Bengal Cavalry; and there were only left the three little ones, who were still at Eton. My mother's health never recovered the shock she had received. Perhaps idleness had something to do in her decline, for Celia was too young to make projects about, and she solemnly sighed "that no man in his senses would marry such a strange, flighty, plain girl as Laura was. I was now seventeen-still short, and still far from a beauty, and too much absorbed in my own wild enthusiastic reveries to care what was thought of me. The cause of Mr. Anson's leaving us was his reception of the Episcopalian chaplaincy at Inverness; an office of little value, but agreeable in many ways to my gentle, pious friend. He asked permission, the summer of his departure, to take my three youngest brothers and myself on a little tour in the Highlands, to see his future home. My father, who was really well attached to him, readily consented, persuading his widowed sister to accompany us as my chaperone. We set out from Liverpool, by a sailing vessel, for Glasgow. I had never been out of Cheshire, except as a very little girl; for of latter years I had not been allowed to go to London with my parents, as they said I was not fit to be seen in good society. I was wild with joy at this emancipation; but when the next morning I came on deck, and found we were standing far out from land, having sailed at midnight, when I saw the bounding white waves, and felt the fresh breeze, and heard the rejoicing waters, the novelty and grandeur so overpowered my untravelled senses, that I burst into a wild fit of weeping. When I at last raised my eyes, I saw a young man was regarding me attentively. He was decidedly plain, like myself; I think that was the reason I took a fancy to him at once. He was not even intellectual-looking-he had not the "high white forehead," nor the "large dark eyes," nor the "classically curved mouth" that appertain by right to all heroes of young lady romance. He was a very ordinary-looking youth-in fact, on the wrong side of beauty, had not his expression, when he smiled, been full of the most earnest, kindly eloquence that looks ever possessed. And thus he smiled on me when he caught my sudden half-ashamed glance. But I was too unsophisticated to be easily abashed, and replied with the quick impulse of my nature to that wordless but most meaning smile. You think me very foolish for crying at first sight of the sea, I daresay; but is it not true that all the greatest and most glorious things in nature make the human heart melancholy. One feels self-reproachful that one cannot admire |