and
so irresponsible that public affairs become an actual part of life and
of experience. While their elders are still discussing the news and
weighing its importance, it is already a part of the children's life.
Little Amelia Alderson must have been a happy child, free, affectionate,
independent; grateful, as a child should be, towards those who befriended
her. One of her teachers was a French dancing-master called Christian,
for whom she had a warm regard. She relates that long afterwards she
came with her husband and a friend to visit the Dutch church at Norwich.
'The two gentlemen were engaged in looking round and making their
observations, and I, finding myself somewhat cold, began to hop and
dance upon the spot where I stood, when my eyes chanced to fall upon
the pavement below, and I started at beholding the well-known name of
Christian graved upon the slab; I stopped in dismay, shocked to find
that I had actually been dancing upon the grave of my old master--he who
first taught me to dance.'

III.

After her mother's death, Amelia Alderson, who was barely fifteen at the
time, began to take her place in society. She kept her father's house,
received his friends, made his home bright with her presence. The lawyers
came round in due season: Sir James Mackintosh came, the town was full
of life, of talk, of music, and poetry, and prejudice.

Harriet Martineau, in her memoir of Mrs. Opie, gives a delightful and
humorous account of the Norwich of that day--rivalling Lichfield and its
literary coterie, only with less sentimentality and some additional
peculiarities of its own. One can almost see the Tory gentlemen, as Miss
Martineau describes them, setting a watch upon the Cathedral, lest the
Dissenters should burn it as a beacon for Boney; whereas good Bishop
Bathurst, with more faith in human nature, goes on resolutely touching
his hat to the leading Nonconformists. 'The French taught in schools,'
says Miss Martineau, 'was found to be unintelligible when the peace
at length arrived, taught as it was by an aged powdered Monsieur
and an elderly flowered Madame, who had taught their pupils' Norfolk
pronunciation. But it was beginning to be known,' she continues, 'that
there was such a language as German, and in due time there was a young
man who had actually been in Germany, and was translating "Nathan the
Wise." When William Taylor became eminent as almost the only German
scholar in England, old Norwich was very pr