“She was assiduous in presents to me at home and at school; sent me cakes with cautions against over-eating, and needle-cases with admonitions to use them; she made over to me her own juvenile library, consisting of a large collection of unreadable books ... nay, she even rummaged out for me a pair of old battledores, curiously constructed of netted pack-thread—the toys of her youth! But bribery is generally thrown away upon children, especially on spoilt ones; the godmother whom I loved never gave me anything, and every fresh present from Mrs. Patience seemed to me a fresh grievance. I was obliged to make a call and a curtsy, and to stammer out something which passed for a speech, or, which was still worse, to write a letter of thanks—a stiff, formal, precise letter! I would rather have gone without cakes or needle-cases, books or battledores to my dying day. Such was my ingratitude from five to fifteen.” One of the most prominent figures in the Reading of those days was Dr. Valpy, headmaster of the Reading Grammar School. The school consisted of a group of buildings “standing,” writes Miss Mitford, “in a nook of the pleasant green called the Forbury, and parted from the churchyard of St. Nicholas by a row of tall old houses. It was in itself a pretty object—at least I, who loved it almost as much as if I had been of the sex that learns Greek and Latin, thought so.... There was a little court before the door of the doctor’s house with four fir trees, and at one end a projecting bay window belonging to a very long room [the doctor’s study] lined with a noble collection of books.” The Forbury was used as the boys’ playground. Dr. Valpy was much reverenced by his fellow-townsmen and greatly loved by his pupils, in spite of the stern discipline of those days which he considered it his duty to administer to culprits. Among his pupils was Sergeant Talfourd, who thus describes his character: “Envy, hatred and malice were to him mere names—like the figures of speech in a schoolboy’s theme, or the giants in a fairy-tale, phantoms which never touched him with a sense of reality.... His system of education was animated by a portion of his own spirit: it was framed to enkindle and to quicken the best affections.” Another contemporary who happened to be of a cynical turn of mind remarks of Dr. Valpy: “Had he been more supple in his principles or less open in their avowal he might have risen to the highest position in his sacred profession. A mitre might have been the reward of subserviency and the revenues of a diocese the bribe of tergiversation and hypocrisy, [but] he left to others such paths to preferment ... and lived in the enjoyment of an unblemished reputation and a clear conscience.”