
wrote like a schoolgirl of thirteen, and with an extraordinary disregard to
grammar and spelling. And as Miss Amory felt very keenly that she was not
appreciated, and that she lived with persons who were not her equals in
intellect or conversational power, she lost no opportunity to acquaint her
family circle with their inferiority to herself, and not only was a martyr, but
took care to let everybody know that she was so. If she suffered, as she said
and thought she did, severely, are we to wonder that a young creature of such
delicate sensibilities should shriek and cry out a good deal? Without sympathy,
life is nothing; and would it not have been a want of candour on her part to
affect a cheerfulness which she did not feel, or pretend a respect for those
towards whom it was quite impossible she should entertain any reverence? If a
poetess may not bemoan her lot, of what earthly use is her lyre? Blanche struck
hers only to the saddest of tunes, and sang elegies over her dead hopes, dirges
over her early frost-nipt buds of affection, as became such a melancholy fate
and Muse.
    Her actual distresses, as we have said, had not been up to the present time
very considerable; but her griefs lay, like those of most of us, in her own
soul. That being sad and habitually dissatisfied, what wonder that she should
weep? So Mes Larmes dribbled out of her eyes any day at command; she could
furnish an unlimited supply of tears, and her faculty of shedding them increased
by practice. For sentiment is like another complaint mentioned by Horace, as
increasing by self-indulgence (I am sorry to say, ladies, that the complaint in
question is called the dropsy), and the more you cry, the more you will be able
and desirous to do so.
    Missy had begun to gush at a very early age. Lamartine was her favourite
bard from the period when she first could feel; and she had subsequently
improved her mind by a sedulous study of novels of the great modern authors of
the French language. There was not a romance of Balzac and George Sand which the
indefatigable little creature had not devoured by the time she was sixteen; and
however little she sympathized with her relatives at home, she had friends, as
she said, in the spirit-world, meaning the tender Indiana, the passionate and
poetic Lelia, the amiable Trenmor, that high-souled convict, that angel of the
galleys, the fiery Stenio, and the other numberless, heroes of the French
romances. She had been in
