pothecary had to be called in about once a week to
cure many of surfeit. But this fair young flower-bed was saved from
blight and choking weeds, first, by the innate rectitude and nobility of
her disposition, which (save only when that dangerous look was in her
eyes) taught her to keep a rein over her caprices, and subdue a too warm
and vigorous imagination; next, by the entire absence of Vanity and
Self-Conceit in her mind,--a happy state, which made her equally alive
to her own faults and to the excellences of others; and, last, by her
truly prodigious aptitude for polite learning. I have often been told
that but for adverse circumstances Mrs. Greenville must have proved one
of the most learned, as she was one of the wittiest and best-bred, women
of her Age and Country. In the languages, in all manner of fine
needlework, in singing and fingering instruments of music, in medicinal
botany and the knowledge of diseases, in the making of the most cunning
electuaries and syllabubs, and even in Arithmetic,--a science of which
young gentlewomen were then almost wholly deficient,--she became, before
she was sixteen years of age, a truly wonderful proficient. A Bristol
bookseller spoke of printing her book of recipes (containing some
excellent hints on cookery, physic, the casting of nativities, and
farriery); and some excellent short hymns she wrote are, I believe, sung
to this day in one of the Bristol free-schools. But the talent for which
she was most shiningly remarkable was in that difficult and laborious
art of Painting in Oils. Her early drawings, both in crayons and Chinese
ink, were very noble; and there are in this House now some miniatures of
her father, brother, and school-companions, limned by her in a most
delicate and lovely fashion; but 'twas in oils and in portraiture of the
size of life that she most surpassed. She speedily out-went all that the
best masters of this craft in Bristol could teach her; and her
pictures--especially one of her Father, in his buff coat and
breastplate, as a Colonel of the Militia--were the wonder, not only of
Bristol, but of all Somerset and the counties adjacent.

About this time those troubles in the West, with which the name of
Prince Rupert is so sadly allied, grew to be of such force and fury as
to decide Mr. Greenville on going to London, taking his daughter
Arabella with him, to make interest with the Parliament, so that peril
might be averted from his estate. For although h