In the Robinson family, personal grace came naturally; but the mind was cultivated. Indeed, in that household, the wits were not allowed to rust. It was the delight of those bright girls and boys to maintain or to denounce, for the sport’s sake, some particular argument set up for the purpose. Occasionally the pleasant skirmish would develop into something like serious battle. The triumphant laugh of the victor would now and then bring tears to the eyes of the vanquished. At such times there was a moderator of the excited little assembly. The mother of the young disputants sat at a table close at hand. She read or worked; sometimes she listened smilingly, sometimes was not without apprehension. But she was equal to the emergency. Her children recognised her on such occasions as “Mrs. Speaker;” and that much-loved dignitary always adjourned the house when victory was too hotly contested, or when triumph seemed likely to be abused. It is hard to believe that Elizabeth Robinson, who was the liveliest of these disputants, assumed or submitted to the drudgery of copying the whole of the _Spectator_, when she was only eight years of age. Her courage and perseverance, however, were equal to such a task; but her energies were often turned in another direction. She was as unreservedly given to dancing, she tells us, as if she had been bitten by a tarantula. She as ardently loved fun—“within the limits of becoming mirth”—as she devotedly pursued learning. “My mind used to sleep,” she writes to Lord Lyttelton, “eight or ten hours without even the visitation of a dream, and rose in the morning, like Aurora, throwing freshness and joy on every object, tricked itself out in sunbeams, and set in gay and glowing colours.” With a head furnished with knowledge beyond that possessed by most girls of her age; with feet restless and impatient to join any dance anywhere; she had a heart most sisterly and tenderly attuned to love for, and sympathy with, her brothers. “I have seven of them,” she wrote, while she was yet in her teens, “and would not part with one for a kingdom. If I had but one, I should be distracted about him. Surely, no one has so many or so good brothers.” This is only one out of a score of such testimonies of sisterly affection.