r many years, and connected with him in the memory
of my parents. It was the corner house of Great Russell Street and
Montague Place, and, since we left it, has been included in the new
court-yard of the British Museum (which was next door to it) and become
the librarian's quarters, our friend Panizzi being its first occupant
afterward. It was a good, comfortable, substantial house, the two
pleasantest rooms of which, to me, were the small apartment on the
ground floor, lined with books from floor to ceiling, and my own
peculiar lodging in the upper regions, which, thanks to my mother's
kindness and taste, was as pretty a bower of elegant comfort as any
young spinster need have desired. There I chiefly spent my time,
pursuing my favorite occupations, or in the society of my own especial
friends: my dear H---- S----, when she was in London; Mrs. Jameson, who
often climbed thither for an hour's pleasant discussion of her book on
Shakespeare; and a lady with whom I now formed a very close intimacy,
which lasted till her death, my dear E---- F----.

I had the misfortune to lose the water-color sketches which Mrs. Jameson
had made of our two drawing-rooms in James Street, Buckingham Gate. They
were very pretty and skillful specimens of a difficult kind of subject,
and valuable as her work, no less than as tokens of her regard for me.
The beautiful G---- S----, to whose marriage I have referred, had she
not been a sister of her sisters, would have been considered a wit; and,
in spite of this, was the greatest beauty of her day. She always
reminded me of what an American once said in speaking of a countrywoman
of his, that she was so lovely that when she came into the room she took
his breath away. While I was in Bath I was asked by a young artist to
sit for my miniature. His portrait had considerable merit as a piece of
delicate, highly finished workmanship; it was taken in the part of
Portia, and engraved; but I think no one, without the label underneath,
would have imagined in it even the intention of my portrait. Whether or
not the cause lay in my own dissimilar expressions and dissimilar
aspects at different times, I do not know; but if a collection was made
of the likenesses that have been taken of me, to the number of nearly
thirty, nobody would ever imagine that they were intended to represent
the same person. Certainly, my Bath miniature produced a version of my
face perfectly unfamiliar to myself and most of my friend