“One common objection to the country is, one sees no faces but those of one’s own family; but my papa thinks he has found a remedy for that, by teaching me to draw; but then he husbands these faces in so cruel a manner, that he brings me sometimes a nose, sometimes an eye, at a time; but on the king’s birthday, as it was a festival, he brought me out a whole face, with its mouth wide open.” In another letter, she says: “I would advise you not to draw old men’s heads. It was the rueful countenance of Socrates or Seneca that first put me out of conceit with it. Had my papa given me the blooming faces of Adonis and Narcissus, I might have been a very apt scholar; and when I told him I found their great beards difficult to draw, he gave me St. John’s head in a charger. So, to avoid the speculation of dismal faces, which, by my art, I dismalised ten times more than they were before, I threw away my pencil. If I drew a group of little figures, I made their countenances so sad and their limbs so distorted, that from a set of laughing Cupids, they looked like the tormented infants in Herod’s cruelty, and smiling, became like Rachel weeping for her children.” After more in this strain, she calls herself the best hospital painter; “for I never drew a figure that was not lame or blind, and they had all something of the horrible in their countenances ... you would have thought they had seen their own faces in the glass.” Her failure in the above respect at home found ample compensation in success at Tunbridge Wells, at Bath, and at country races, at all of which Elizabeth Robinson’s beauty attracted all eyes; her vivacious wit charmed or stung all ears. At these places, she studied life quite as much as she enjoyed its pleasures; and she could not go down a dance at the Wells or at “The Bath,” without making little mental epigrams on the looks of newly married people, the manners of lovers, and the doings of eccentric folk. These found their way, in writing, to her ducal friend, who had already bestowed on the restless maiden the nickname of “La Petite Fidget.” At Bath, she was as restless, as observant, and as epigrammatic as at Tunbridge Wells. She describes Bath life, in 1740, as consisting all the morning of “How d’ye does?” and all night of “What’s Trumps?” The women, in the “Ladies’ Coffee House,” talk only of diseases. The men, “except Lord Noel Somerset, are altogether abominable. There is not one good; no, not one.” Among the lady eccentrics, was a certain dowager duchess, who, said Miss Robinson, “bathes, and, being very tall, had nearly drowned a few women in the Cross Bath; for she had ordered it to be filled till it reached her chin; and so all those who were below her stature, as well as her rank, were obliged to come out or drown.”