here were at least a round
dozen, and, having finished reading them, it occurred to me that to make
a bonfire of them would be an additional pleasure to be derived from
them; and so I added to the intellectual recreation they afforded me the
more _sensational_ excitement of what I called "a blaze;" a proceeding
of which the dangerous sinfulness was severely demonstrated to me by my
new care-takers.

Camden Place, Bath, was one of the lofty terraces built on the charming
slopes that surround the site of the Aquae Solis of the Romans, and here
my aunt Twiss kept a girls' school, which participated in the favor
which every thing belonging to, or even remotely associated with, Mrs.
Siddons received from the public. It was a decidedly "fashionable
establishment for the education of young ladies," managed by my aunt,
her husband, and her three daughters. Mrs. Twiss was, like every member
of my father's family, at one time on the stage, but left it very soon,
to marry the grim-visaged, gaunt-figured, kind-hearted gentleman and
profound scholar whose name she at this time bore, and who, I have heard
it said, once nourished a hopeless passion for Mrs. Siddons. Mrs. Twiss
bore a soft and mitigated likeness to her celebrated sister; she had
great sweetness of voice and countenance, and a graceful, refined,
feminine manner, that gave her great advantages in her intercourse with
and influence over the young women whose training she undertook. Mr.
Twiss was a very learned man, whose literary labors were, I believe,
various, but whose "Concordance of Shakespeare" is the only one with
which I am acquainted. He devoted himself, with extreme assiduity, to
the education of his daughters, giving them the unusual advantage of a
thorough classic training, and making of two of them learned women in
the more restricted, as well as the more general, sense of the term.
These ladies were what so few of their sex ever are, _really well
informed_; they knew much, and they knew it all thoroughly; they were
excellent Latin scholars and mathematicians, had read immensely and at
the same time systematically, had prodigious memories stored with
various and well-classed knowledge, and, above all, were mistresses of
the English language, and spoke and wrote it with perfect purity--an
accomplishment out of fashion now, it appears to me, but of the
advantage of which I retain a delightful impression in my memory of
subsequent intercourse with those excellen