te knowledge of the Bible has always seemed the
greatest benefit I derived from my school training.

Of the secular portion of the education we received, the French lady who
was Mrs. Rowden's partner directed the principal part. Our lessons of
geography, grammar, history, arithmetic, and mythology (of which latter
subject I suspect we had a much more thorough knowledge than is at all
usual with young English girls) were conducted by her.

These studies were all pursued in French, already familiar to me as the
vehicle of my elementary acquirements at Boulogne; and this soon became
the language in which I habitually wrote, spoke, and thought, to the
almost entire neglect of my native tongue, of which I never thoroughly
studied the grammar till I was between fifteen and sixteen, when, on my
presenting, in a glow of vanity, some verses of mine to my father, he
said, with his blandest smile, after reading them, "Very well, very
pretty indeed! My dear, don't you think, before you write poetry, you
had better learn grammar?" a suggestion which sent me crestfallen to a
diligent study of Lindley Murray. But grammar is perfectly uncongenial
matter to me, which my mind absolutely refuses to assimilate. I have
learned Latin, English, French, Italian, and German grammar, and do not
know a single rule of the construction of any language whatever. More
over, to the present day, my early familiar use of French produces
uncertainty in my mind as to the spelling of all words that take a
double consonant in French and only one in English, as apartment, enemy,
etc.

The men of my family--that is, my uncle John, my father, and my eldest
brother--were all philologists, and extremely fond of the study of
language. Grammar was favorite light reading, and the philosophy which
lies at the root of human speech a frequent subject of discussion and
research with them; but they none of them spoke foreign languages with
ease or fluency. My uncle was a good Latin scholar, and read French,
Italian, and Spanish, but spoke none of them; not even the first, in
spite of his long residence in French Switzerland. The same was the case
with my father, whose delight in the dry bones of language was such that
at near seventy he took the greatest pleasure in assiduously studying
the Greek grammar. My brother John, who was a learned linguist, and
familiar with the modern European languages, spoke none of them well,
not even German, though he resided for many ye