have been forbidden in consideration for the
common character of the profession; to say
nothing of other reasons.

But we must not stop longer with Mr.
Elphinstone. Of the school kept in this same
house by the Jesuits, a delightful account has
been left by Mr. Shiel in the memoir
prefixed to the volume of his Speeches. Charles
the Tenth, of France, was one of " the boys."
Poor Charles the Tenth! himself one of
the least of children in the greatest of schools
— adversity; which he left only to be sent
back to it and die.

In the year eighteen hundred and nineteen
Kensington House was a Catholic boarding
establishment, kept by a Mr. and Mrs.
Salterelli.

"In the chapel (says Bowden, in his Memoirs of
Mrs. Indibald) the Archbishop of Jerusalem
performed mass regularly during the early part of her
residence, and the Abbé Mathias officiated when
the Primate quitted the house. The society was
extremely genteel and cheerful, changing, however,
too frequently for perfect cordiality and the formation
of intimacy. The Schiavonettis, however, seem
to be acquaintances; and Mrs. Beloc, and Mr.
Skeene from Aberdeen, were old friends, who on
their arrival met with an unlooked for pleasure:—
the celebrated artists, Mr. and Mrs. Cosway, upon
leaving Stratford Place, were at Kensington House
from August to October, before they settled upon
a house in the Edgeware road."

Here Mrs. Inchbald spent the last two
years of her life; and here, on the first
of August, eighteen hundred and twenty-one,
she died, we fear — how shall we say it of so
excellent a woman, and in the sixty-eighth
year of her age? — of tight lacing! But she
had been very handsome; was still handsome;
was growing fat; and had never liked to part
with her beauty.

We have dwelt a little on this point as a
warning — if tight-lacers can take warning.
We almost fear they would sooner quote
Mrs. Inchbald as an excuse, than an
admonition. But at all events, beauties of sixty-
eight may perhaps consent to be a little
startled.

If this was a weakness in Mrs. Inchbald,
let tight-lacers resemble her in other respects,
and if their rickety children can forgive them
the rest of the world may heartily do so.
Mrs. Inchbald never had any children to
need their forgiveness. She was a woman of
rare endowments — an actress, a dramatist,
a novelist — and possessed of virtue so rare,
that she would practise painful self-denials in
order to afford deeds of charity. Her acting
was perhaps of the sensible, rather than
the artistical sort; and though some of her
plays and farces have still their seasons of
reappearance on the stage, she was too much
given, as a dramatist, to theatrical and
sentimental effects — too melo-dramatic; but her
novels are admirable, particularly the Simple
Story, which has all the elements of duration
— invention, passion, and thorough truth to
nature in word and deed. To balance these

advantages, which she possessed over other
people, she must needs have some faults; and
we take them (besides the tight-lacing) to
have been those of temper and stubbornness.
Charles Lamb speaks of her somewhere as
the "beautiful vixen." The word must
surely have been too strong for such a
woman, who is said to have possessed both
the respect and affection of all who knew her.
If our memory does not deceive us, he applies
it to her upon an occasion when she might
well have been angry, and when she
thought herself bound to resort to measures
of self-defence, physical as well as moral. A
distinguished actor, who was enamoured of
her—and who seems to have been a warmer
lover off the stage than he was upon it —
persisted one day in forcing upon her a
salutation, which appeared so alarming, that she
seized him by the pigtail and tugged it with
a vigour so efficacious as forced him to desist
in trepidation. She related the circiimstance
to a friend; adding, with a touch of her
comic humour, which must have been heightened
by the difficulty of getting out the words
(for she stammered sometimes) — " How lucky
that he did not w-w-wear a w-w-w-wig."
— Mrs. Inchbald had lived in several other
houses in Kensington, which shall be noticed
as we pass them; for the abodes of the
authoress of the Simple Story make classic
ground.

We have now come to Kensington High
Street, and shall take our way on the left-
hand side of it, continuing to do so through
the whole town, and noticing the streets
and squares that turn out of it as we
proceed. We shall then turn at the end of the
town, and come back by Holland House,
Campden House, and Kensington Palace and
Gardens.

On our right hand, over the way, is tho
Palace Gate with its sentinels, and opposite
this gate, where we are halting, is a sturdy
good-sized house, a sort of undergrown
mansion, singularly so for its style of building,
and looking as if it must have been the work
of Vanbrugh; one of whose edifices will be
noticed further on. It is just in his " No-
nonsense" style; what his opponents called
"heavy," but very sensible and to the purpose;
built for duration. It is only one storey high,
and looks as if it had been made for some
rich old bachelor who chose to live alone, but
liked to have everything about him strong
and safe.

Such was probably the case; for it is called
Colby House after a baronet of that name,
who lived in the time of George the First,
and who appears to have been a man of
humble origin, and a miser. A spectator
might imagine that the architect was
stopped when about to commence a third
storey, in order to save the expense. Dr,
King, the Jacobite divine, who knew Colby,
and who thinks he was a commissioner in the
Victualling Office, says (in his Literary and