t the grass and trees
made her sick, and fixed her abode in Leamington, then a small,
unpretending, pretty country town, which (principally on account of the
ability, reputation, and influence of its celebrated and popular
resident physician, Dr. Jephson) was a sort of aristocratic-invalid Kur
Residenz, and has since expanded into a thriving, populous, showy,
semi-fashionable, Anglo-American watering-place in summer, and
hunting-place in winter. Mrs. Kemble found the Leamington of her day a
satisfactory abode; the AEsculapius, whose especial shrine it was, became
her intimate friend; the society was comparatively restricted and
select; and the neighborhood, with Warwick Castle, Stoneleigh Abbey, and
Guy's Cliff, full of state and ancientry, within a morning's drive, was
(which she cared less for) lovely in every direction. Mrs. Whitelock
betook herself to a really rural life in a cottage in the beautiful
neighborhood of Addlestone, in Surrey, where she lived in much simple
content, bequeathing her small mansion and estate, at her death, to my
mother, who passed there the last two years of her life and died there.
I never returned to Heath Farm again; sometimes, as I steam by Watford,
the image of the time I spent there rises again before me, but I pass
from it at forty miles an hour, and it passed from me upwards of forty
years ago.

We were now occupying the last of the various houses which for a series
of years we inhabited at Bayswater; it belonged to a French Jew diamond
seller, and was arranged and fitted up with the peculiar tastefulness
which seems innate across the Channel, and inimitable even on the
English side of it. There was one peculiarity in the drawing-room of
this house which I have always particularly liked: a low chimney with a
window over it, the shutter to which was a sliding panel of
looking-glass, so that both by day and candle light the effect was
equally pretty.

At this time I was promoted to the dignity of a bedroom "to myself,"
which I was able to make into a small study, the privacy of which I
enjoyed immensely, as well as the window opening above our suburban bit
of garden, and the sloping meadows beyond it. The following letters,
written at this time to my friend Miss S----, describe the interests and
occupations of my life. It was in the May of 1827. I was between sixteen
and seventeen, which will naturally account for the characteristics of
these epistles.