she made that comment upon my
acting I felt very well convinced, and have since had good reason to
know, that my school-mistress thought my performance a threat, or
promise (I know not which to call it) of decided dramatic power, as I
believe it was.

With this performance of "Andromaque," however, all such taste, if it
ever existed, evaporated, and though a few years afterward the stage
became my profession, it was the very reverse of my inclination. I
adopted the career of an actress with as strong a dislike to it as was
compatible with my exercising it at all.

I now became acquainted with all Racine's and Corneille's plays, from
which we were made to commit to memory the most remarkable passages; and
I have always congratulated myself upon having become familiar with all
these fine compositions before I had any knowledge whatever of
Shakespeare. Acquaintance with his works might, and I suppose certainly
would, have impaired my relish for the great French dramatists, whose
tragedies, noble and pathetic in spite of the stiff formality of their
construction, the bald rigidity of their adherence to the classic
unities, and the artificial monotony of the French heroic rhymed verse,
would have failed to receive their due appreciation from a taste and
imagination already familiar with the glorious freedom of Shakespeare's
genius. As it was, I learned to delight extremely in the dignified
pathos and stately tragic power of Racine and Corneille, in the
tenderness, refinement, and majestic vigorous simplicity of their fine
creations, and possessed a treasure of intellectual enjoyment in their
plays before opening the first page of that wonderful volume which
contains at once the history of human nature and human existence.

After I had been about a year and a half at school, Mrs. Rowden left her
house in the Rue d'Angouleme, and moved to a much finer one, at the very
top of the Champs Elysees, a large, substantial stone mansion, within
lofty iron gates and high walls of inclosure. It was the last house on
the left-hand side within the Barriere de l'Etoile, and stood on a
slight eminence and back from the Avenue des Champs Elysees by some
hundred yards. For many years after I had left school, on my repeated
visits to Paris, the old stone house bore on its gray front the large
"Institution de jeunes Demoiselles," which betokened the unchanged tenor
of its existence. But the rising tide of improvement has at length swept
it