We found two very nice little girl-cousins, who assisted us to pass the time. But the old dislike to our surroundings, returned with redoubled violence. Everything appeared to us so small, so mean, so ugly. The faces of the women were the only exception to the general rule of hideousness. The houses were so unlike houses, and more like the Nuremberg toys magnified. The outsides were so prim, so priggish, so utterly unartistic. The little bits of garden were mere slices, as if they had been sold by the inch. The interiors were cut up into such wretched little rooms, more like ship-cabins than what was called rooms in Italy. The drawing-rooms were crowded with hideous little tables, that made it dangerous to pass from one side to the other. The tables were heaped with nick-nacks, that served neither for use or show. And there was a desperate neatness and cleanness about everything that made us remember the old story of the Stoic who spat in the face of the master of the house because it was the most untidy place in the dwelling.
Then came a second parting. Edward was to be placed under the charge of the Rev. Mr. Havergal, rector of some country parish. Later on, he wrote to say that "Richard must not correspond with his brother, as he had turned his name into a peculiar form of ridicule." He was in the musical line, and delighted in organ-playing. But Edward seemed to consider the whole affair a bore, and was only too happy when he could escape from the harmonious parsonage.
In the mean time I had been tried and found wanting. One of my father's sisters (Mrs. General D'Aguilar, as she called herself) had returned from India, after an uninterrupted residence of a score of years, with a large supply of children of both sexes. She had settled herself temporarily at Cambridge, to superintend the education of her eldest son, John Burton D'Aguilar, who was intended for the Church, and who afterwards became a chaplain in the Bengal Establishment. Amongst her many acquaintances was a certain Professor Sholefield, a well-known Grecian. My father had rather suspected that very little had been done in the house, in the way of classical study, during the last two years. The Professor put me through my paces in Virgil and Homer, and found me lamentably deficient. I did not even know who Isis was! worse still, it was found out that I, who spoke French and Italian and their dialects like a native, who had a considerable smattering of Bearnais, Spanish, and Provençale, barely knew the Lord's Prayer, broke down in the Apostles' Creed, and had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles—a terrible revelation!
[1] "The Sword," in three large works nobly planned out, when after the first part was brought out, death frustrated the other two.—I. B.
[2] There are three hundred and sixty-five of these pits, one for every day in the year.—I. B.
[3] In 1861 he painted Richard's and my portraits as a wedding gift.—I. B.