The English lady happened to be a lady well endowed as to her mind, her tastes, and her accomplishments. She was exactly the mother for such a boy. She was not only excessively fond of reading the best poets, but of reading passages aloud, or reciting them from memory. Her audience was her boy. His tastes were in sympathy with his mother’s, and he was never more delighted than when he sat listening to her reading or reciting, except when he was reciting passages to her. It was a peculiar training; it really shaped the boy’s life--and it was no ill shape which the life took. The father had his share, however, in clearing the path for the bright, though brief, career. One day the father, whose intellectual tastes responded to his wife’s, repeated to his son the speech of Cardinal Wolsey, beginning, ‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness.’ In doing this, he suited the action to the word. Young Betty had never seen this before, and he asked the meaning of it. ‘It is what is called acting,’ said the father. The boy thought over it, tried by himself action and motion with elocution, and he spoke and acted the cardinal’s soliloquy before his mother with an effect that excited in her the greatest surprise and admiration. Not the faintest idea of the stage had, at this time, entered the minds of any of the family. The eager young lad himself was satisfied with reading plays, learning passages from them, and reciting speeches from ‘Douglas’ and ‘Zara,’ from ‘Pizarro’ and the ‘Stranger.’ He also repeated the episodical tales from Thomson’s ‘Seasons.’ Only the above trace of his learning anything from Shakespeare is to be found, but he listened to readings from the national poet by one or other of his parents. This course had its natural results. By degrees the boy took to rude attempts, from domestic materials, of dress. ‘Properties’ were created out of anything that could be turned to the purpose; a screen was adopted for scenery; audiences of ones and twos were pressed by the stage-struck youth to tarry and see him act; and finally his father, well qualified, taught him fencing, the son proving an apt pupil, and becoming a swordsman as perfect and graceful as Edmund Kean himself. His reputation spread beyond home into distant branches of the family. Those branches shook with disgust. The parents were warned that if they did not take care the boy would come to the evil end of being a play-actor! They were alarmed. The domestic stage was suppressed; silence reigned where the echoes of the dramatic poets once pleasantly rang, and the heir of Hopton Court and Hopton Wafers was ignominiously packed off to school. When I say ‘the heir,’ it is because Master Betty was so called; but it really seems as if his claim resembled that of the Irish gentleman who was kept out of his property by the rightful owner.