d at Islington where
this queen is said to have pitched her tent. Any one who asked was
welcome to "some verses by 'Little Lizzie,'" written in her peculiar and
fairy-like hand, (for when very young, her writing was remarkable for
its extreme smallness and finish.) given with childlike simplicity, and
artless ignorance of the worth of what she bestowed with a kiss and a
smile.

Her poems were composed at once, with scarcely a correction. Her earlier
ones, for the most part, were written at the corner of a large table,
covered with the usual heaps of "after-lessons," in a school-room, where
some twenty enfranchised girls were putting away copybooks, French
grammars, etc., and getting out play-boxes and fancy-work, with the
common amount of chatter and noise. Contrasted with such young persons,
this child looked a strange, unearthly creature,--her large, dark gray
eye full of inspiration, and every movement of her frame and tone of her
voice instinct with delicate energy.

At the same age she would extemporize for hours on the organ, after
wreathing the candlesticks with garden-flowers which she had brought in
her hand,--their scent, she would say, suggesting the wild, sweet
fancies which her fingers seemed able to call forth on the shortest
notice. Persons straying into the church, as they often did, attracted
by the sound of music, would declare the performer to be an experienced
masculine musician.

When but a year older, she was an excellent Latin scholar, and, to use
her father's words, she might then have "gone in for honors at Oxford."
French she spoke and wrote fluently, besides reading Goethe and Schiller
with avidity, and translating as fast as she read,--Schiller having
always the preference. At fourteen she began the study of Hebrew, of
which language she was a worshipper, and could not at that early age
even let Greek alone. Her wonderful power of seizing on the genius of a
language, and becoming for the time a foreigner in spirit, was noticed
by all her teachers; her ear was so delicate that no subtile inflection
ever escaped her, nor any idiom.

And now she surprised her most intimate friend by the present of a prose
story, sent to her, when absent, in chapters by the post. This was
succeeded by many other tales, and finally by "Charles Auchester,"
--which romance, as well as that of "Counterparts," was written
in the few hours she could command after her teaching was over:
for in her mother's school s