LIFE AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL. “The pilgrim’s discovery is when he looks into his own heart and finds a picture of a city there. The pilgrim’s life is a journeying along the roads of the world seeking to find the city which corresponds to that picture.”--STEPHEN GRAHAM. Dorothea Beale, who was born on March 21, 1831, was fortunate in her parentage and early environment. Her father, Miles Beale, was a surgeon who had been trained at Guy’s Hospital. He came of a family of literary traditions, and he himself was a man of wide interests and learning. Her mother, Dorothea Margaret Complin, was of Huguenot extraction and belonged to a family distinguished for its ability, counting among its members several “advanced” women. Mrs. Beale’s aunt, Mrs. Cornwallis, the wife of a rector of Wittersham, Kent, was a woman of considerable intellect and great spiritual gifts. She wrote several books of a devotional character. One of these, “Preparation for the Lord’s Supper with a Companion to the Altar,” contains much excellent advice to ladies on the use and abuse of speech, the regulation of time, indolence, desire of admiration, sickness, etc., breathing a devout and earnest spirit, and revealing in the writer an attitude of great severity towards herself. This little book, with its old-fashioned appearance, seemed to me, as I read it, full of the spirit which animated Mrs. Cornwallis’s celebrated great-niece. Her daughter, Caroline Frances Cornwallis, was a remarkable woman. Her published letters are extremely interesting, and deal with a variety of subjects, Italy, Education, Religion, Science, Philosophy. She wrote a number of books in the series called “Small Books on Great Subjects”. These were published anonymously, and were considered to be the work of a man, at a time when the known authorship of a woman would have damned any book. Miss Cornwallis often used to laugh up her sleeve at the appreciation of critics who would undoubtedly have criticised her work unfavourably had they known it was that of a woman. She had a frail body, a courageous mind, and a devout spirit. At times she adopted a cynical attitude towards men’s low estimate of the intellectual powers of her sex. “Every man, you know, thinks he has a prescriptive right to be better informed than a woman, unless he has science enough to see that the said woman is up with him and therefore must know something.” This was, however, just a strain of bitterness bred in a brilliant, active mind handicapped by lack of facilities for real education, and restricted on every side by the bounds of custom and prejudice. These two women undoubtedly influenced the future head of Cheltenham. Mrs. Beale’s sister, Elizabeth Complin, had lived for some time with the Cornwallises and was the medium through whom the young Beales came into contact with their ideas and ideals.