Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/24

24 The mention of the paternal gift (the "Arabian Nights"), suggests a reference, before we proceed further, to a little sketch in which the circumstance is mentioned by L. E. L. herself. It is called "The History of a Child," and formed one of about a dozen sketches published in 1836, under the title of "Traits and Trials of Early Life." Some of the incidents of her own childhood are related in it; but the whole bear the same relation to reality that phantasies bear to facts. The joy in the gift, the "delicious odour of the Russian leather," and the charm of the "pictures that glanced through the half-opened leaves," as she received the precious volumes—the excitement of "reading those enchanted pages," which was ranked as the "most delicious of her life"—may all be unexaggerated; but for the other events, the scenes, the feelings associated with them, they are just as unlike her own history, as Robinson Crusoe's island is unlike England. Taking this sketch in an autobiographical sense, we see in the heroine a shy, melancholy, lonely, unloved child—whose pride is stung by whispered affronts from servants about her "plainness"—whose affections are jokes or mysteries to all about her—whose heart breaks when her nurse calls her "a tiresome little thing"—and who, left to ruminate in solitude, found no pleasure but in a sense of neglect and presentiments of misery. Now the real L. E. L. was anything on earth but this. True, she seldom mixed with other children, for one reason, that there were none of her own age in the neighbourhood; true, that although very affectionate, she never cared to "pet" any animal, dog, cat, or bird—nor took pleasure in girlish toys; for her "pleasure-books" were her sole pets. But it is just as certain that so far from