bright
glances on her friends, confident, intelligent, full of interest in
life, carried along in turn by one and by another influence, she comes
before us a young and charming figure, with all the spires of Norwich
for a background, and the sound of its bells, and the stir of its
assizes, as she issues from her peaceful home in her father's tranquil
old house, where the good physician lives widowed, tending his poor and
his sick, and devotedly spoiling his only child.

II.

Amelia Opie was born in 1769 in the old city of Norwich, within reach of
the invigorating breezes of the great North Sea. Her youth must have
been somewhat solitary; she was the only child of a kind and cultivated
physician, Doctor James Alderson, whose younger brother, a barrister,
also living in Norwich, became the father of Baron Alderson. Her mother
died in her early youth. From her father, however, little Amelia seems
to have had the love and indulgence of over half a century, a tender and
admiring love which she returned with all her heart's devotion. She was
the pride and darling of his home, and throughout her long life her
father's approbation was the one chief motive of her existence. Spoiling
is a vexed question, but as a rule people get so much stern justice from
all the rest of the world that it seems well that their parents should
love and comfort them in youth for the many disgraces and difficulties
yet to come.

Her mother is described as a delicate, high-minded woman, 'somewhat of a
disciplinarian,' says Mrs. Opie's excellent biographer, Miss Brightwell,
but she died too soon to carry her theories into practice. Miss Brightwell
suggests that 'Mrs. Opie might have been more demure and decorous had
her mother lived, but perhaps less charming.' There are some verses
addressed to her mother in Mrs. Opie's papers in which it must be
confessed that the remembrance of her admonition plays a most important
part--

Hark! clearer still thy voice I hear.
Again reproof in accents mild,
Seems whispering in my conscious ear,

and so on.

Some of Mrs. Alderson's attempts at discipline seemed unusual and
experimental; the little girl was timid, afraid of black people, of
black beetles, and of human skeletons. She was given the skeleton to
play with, and the beetles to hold in her hand. One feels more sympathy
with the way in which she was gently reconciled to the poor negro with
the frightening black face--by being told the story