ENGLISH REVIEW. tail like the pug dogs, after one regular established pattern. And pray observe her capitals. No sprawling K with a kicking leg no troublesome W making a long arm across its neighbour, and especially no great vulgar D unnecessarily sticking out its stomach. Her H, you see, seems to have stocks, her I to have worn a backboard, and even her S is hardly allowed to be crooked! CHAP. II. « Phoo! phoo! it's all banter, » exclaims the Courteous Writer. But possibly, my good sir, you have never seen that incomparable schoolmistress, Miss Crane, for a Miss she was, is, and would be, even if Campbell's Last Man were to offer to her for the preservation of the species. One sight of her were, indeed, as good as a thousand, seeing that nightly she retires into some kind of mould, like a jelly shape, and turns. out again in the morning the same identical face and figure, the same correct, ceremonious creature, and in the same costume to a crinkle. But no you never can have seen that She-Mentor, stiff as starch, formal as a Dutch hedge, sensitive as a Daguerreotype, and so tall, thin, and up-right, that supposing the Tree of Knowledge to have been a poplar, she was the very Dryad to have fitted it! Otherwise, remembering that unique image, all fancy and frost work-so incrusted with crisp and brittle particularities-so bedecked allegorically with the primrose of prudence, the daisy of decorum, the violet of modesty, and the lily of purity, you would confess at once that such a Schoolmistress was as unfit to travel unpacked as a Dresden China 'figure! » Excuse me, sir, but is there actually such a real personage? Real! Are there Real Natives Real Blessings to MothersReal Del Monte shares, and Real Water at the Adelphi? Only call her instead of Crane, and she is a living, breathing, flesh and blood, skin and bone individual! Why, there are dozens, scores, hundreds of her, Ex-Pupils, now grown women, who will instantly recognise their old Governess in the form with which, mixing up Grace and Gracefulness, she daily prefaced their rice-milk, batter-puddings, or raspberrybolsters. As thus: For what we are going to receive-elbows, elbows!-the Lord make us-backs in and shoulders down-truly thankful -and no chattering-amen. » # CHAP. III. But the letter, sir, the letter— » The professional epistle,» adds a tall, thin Instructress, genteelly in at the elbows, but shabbily out at the fingers' ends, for she has only twenty pounds per annum, with five quarters in arrear. The schoolmistress's letter, cries a stumpy Teacher-only a helper, but looking as important as if she were an educational coachwoman, with a team of her own, some five-andtwenty skittish young animals, without blinkers, to keep straight in the road of propriety. « The letter, sir, » chimes in a half-boarder, looking, indeed, as if she had only half-dined for the last half-year. # " Oh, I do so long, exclaims one who would be a stout young woman if she did not wear a pinafore, oh, I do so long to hear how a governess writes home! » Come, the letter you promised us from that paragon, Miss Crane. » That's true. Mother of the Muses, forgive me! I had forgotten my promise as utterly as if it had never been made. If any one had furnished the matter with a file and a rope ladder it could not have escaped more clearly from my remembrance. A loose tooth could not more completely have. gone out of my head. A greased eel could not more thoroughly have slipped my memory. But here is the letter, sealed with pale blue wax, and a device of the Schoolmisstress's own invention-namely, a note of interrogation (?) with the appropriate motto, of an answer required. And in token of its authenticity, pray observe that the cover is duly stamped, except that of the foreign postmark only the three last letters are legible, and yet even from these one may swear that the missive has come from, Holland; yes, as certainly as if it smelt of Dutch cheese, pickle-herrings and Schie ***! But hark to governess! « Under the protection of a superintending Providence we have arrived safely at this place, which as you know is a seaport in the Dutch dominions-chief city Amsterdam. «For your amusement and improvement I did hope to compose a journal of our continental progress, with such references to Guthrie and the School Atlas as might enable you to trace our course on the Map of Europe. But unexpected vicissitudes of mind and body have totally incapacitated me for the pleasing task. Some social evening hereafter I may entertain our little juvenile circle with my locomotive miseries and disagreeables; but at present my nerves and feelings are too discomposed for the correct flow of an epistolary correspondence. Indeed, from the Tower-stairs to Rotterdam I have been in one universal tremor and perpetual blush. Such shocking scenes and positions, that make one ask twenty times a day, is this decorum ?-can this be manners?-can this be morals? But I must not anticipate. Suffice it, that as regards foreign travelling it is my painful conviction, founded on personal experience, that a woman of delicacy or refinement cannot go out of England without going out of herself! The very first step from an open boat up a windy shipside is an alarm to modesty, exposed as one is to the officious but odious attentions of the Tritons of the Thames. Nor is the steamboat itself a sphere for the preservation of self-respect. If there is any feature on which a British female justly prides herself, it is a correct and lady-like carriage. In that particular I quite coincide with Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Hannah More, and other writers on the subject. But how - let me ask how is a dignified deportment to be maintained when one has to skip and straddle over cables, ropes, and other nautical hors d'œuvres-to scramble up and down impracticable stairs, and to clamber into inaccessible beds? Not to name the sudden losing one's centre of gravity, and falling in all sorts of un -- studied attitudes on a sloppy and slippery deck. An accident that I may say reduces the elegant and the awkward female to the same level. You will be concerned therefore to learn that poor Miss Ruth had a fall, and in an unbecoming posture particularly distressing-namely, by losing her footing on the cabin flight, and coming down with a destructive launch into the steward's pantry. For my own part, it has never happened to me within my remembrance, to make a false step, or to miss a stair there is a certain guarded carriage that preserves one from such sprawling dénouemens - but of course what the bard calls the poetry of motion,' is not to be preserved amidst the extempore rollings of an ungovernable ship. Indeed, within the last twenty-four hours, I have had to perform feats of agility more fit for a monkey than one of my own sex and species. Par example: getting down from a bed as high as the copybook-cup-board, and what really is awful, with the sensation of groping about with your feet and legs for a floor that seems to have no earthly existence. I may add, the cabin-door left ajar, and exposing you to the gaze of an obtrusive cabin-boy, as he is called, but quite big enough for a man. Oh, je ne jamais! As to the Mer Maladie, delicacy forbids the details; but as Miss Ruth says, it is the height of human degradation; and to add to the climax of our letting down, we had to give way to the most humiliating impulses in the presence of several of the rising generation - dreadfully rude little girls who had too evidently enjoyed a bad bringing up. To tell the truth, your poor Governess was shockingly indisposed. Not that I had indulged my appetite at dinner, being too much disgusted with a public meal in promiscuous society, and as might be expected, elbows on table, eating with knives, and even picking teeth with forks! And then no grace, which assuredly ought to be said both before and after, whether we are to retain the blessings or not. But a dinner at sea, and a dinner where we have even our regular beef and batter days, are two very different things. Then to allude to indiscriminate conversation, a great part of which is in a foreign language, and accordingly places one in the cruel position of hearing, without understanding, a word of the most libertine and atheistical sentiments. Indeed, I fear I have too often been smiling complacently, not to say engagingly, when I ought rather to have been flashing with virtuous indignation, or even administering the utmost severity of moral reproof. I did endeavour, in one instance, to rebuke indelicacy; but unfortunately from standing near the funnel, was smutty all the while I was talking, and as school experience confirms, it is impossible to command respect with a black on one's nose. : « Another of our Cardinal Virtues, personal cleanliness, is totally impracticable on ship-board but without particularizing, I will only name a general sense of grubbiness; and as to dress, a rumpled and tumbled tout ensemble, strongly indicative of the low and vulgar pastime of rolling down Greenwich Hill! And then, in such a costume to land in Holland, where the natives get up linen with a perfection and purity, as Miss Ruth says, quite worthy of the primeval ages! That, surely is bad enough but to have one's trunks rummaged like a suspected menial to see all the little secrets of the toilette, and all the mysteries of a female wardrobe exposed to the searching gaze of a male official-Oh, shocking! shocking! sex. In short, my dear, it is my candid impression, as regards foreign travelling, that except for a masculine tallyhoying female, of the Di Vernon genus, it is hardly adapted to our Of this at least I am certain, that none but a born romp and hoyden, or a girl accustomed to those new-fangled pulleyhauley exercises, the Calisthenics, is fitted for the boisterous evolutions of a sea-voyage. And yet there are creatures calling themselves Women, not to say, Ladies, who will undertake such long marine passages as to Bombay in Asia, or New York in the New World! Consult Arrowsmith for the geographical degrees. "Affection, however, demands the sacrifice of my own personal feelings, as my Reverend parent and my Sister are still inclined to prosecute a Continental Tour. I forgot to tell you |