I did not become versed in any of my cousins' learned lore, or
accomplished in the lighter labors of their leisure hours--to wit, the
shoemaking, bread-seal manufacturing, and black and white Japan, table
and screen painting, which produced such an indescribable medley of
materials in their rooms, and were fashionable female idle industries of
that day.

Remote from the theatre, and all details of theatrical life, as my
existence in my aunt's school was, there still were occasional
infiltrations of that element which found their way into my small
sphere. My cousin John Twiss, who died not very long ago, an elderly
general in her Majesty's service, was at this time a young giant,
studying to become an engineer officer, whose visits to his home were
seasons of great delight to the family in general, not unmixed on my
part with dread; for a favorite diversion of his was enacting my uncle
John's famous rescue of Cora's child, in "Pizarro," with me clutched in
one hand, and exalted to perilous proximity with the chandelier, while
he rushed across the drawing-rooms, to my exquisite terror and triumph.

I remember, too, his sisters, all three remarkably tall women (the
eldest nearly six feet high, a portentous petticoat stature), amusing
themselves with putting on, and sweeping about the rooms in, certain
regal mantles and Grecian draperies of my aunt Mrs. Whitelock's, an
actress, like the rest of the Kembles, who sought and found across the
Atlantic a fortune and celebrity which it would have been difficult for
her to have achieved under the disadvantage of proximity to, and
comparison with, her sister, Mrs. Siddons. But I suppose the dramatic
impression which then affected me with the greatest and most vivid
pleasure was an experience which I have often remembered, when reading
Goethe's "Dichtung und Wahrheit," and the opening chapters of "Wilhelm
Meister." Within a pleasant summer afternoon's walk from Bath, through
green meadows and by the river's side, lay a place called Claverton
Park, the residence of a family of the name of A----. I remember nothing
of the house but the stately and spacious hall, in the middle of which
stood a portable theatre, or puppet-show, such as Punch inhabits, where
the small figures, animated with voice and movement by George A----, the
eldest son of the family, were tragic instead of grotesque, and where,
instead of the squeaking "Don Giovanni" of the London pavement,
"Macbeth" and simila