It was her misfortune that the mental atmosphere which surrounded her during these years of adolescence was almost entirely feminine. No father, no brother, was there to break in upon the gentle monotony of the daily round with impetuosity, with rudeness, with careless laughter and wafts of freedom from the outside world. The Princess was never called by a voice that was loud and growling; never felt, as a matter of course, a hard rough cheek on her own soft one; never climbed a wall with a boy. The visits to Claremont--delicious {33} little escapes into male society--came to an end when she was eleven years old and Prince Leopold left England to be King of the Belgians. She loved him still; he was still 'il mio secondo padre--or, rather, _solo_ padre, for he is indeed like my real father, as I have none'; but his fatherliness now came to her dimly and indirectly, through the cold channel of correspondence. Henceforward female duty, female elegance, female enthusiasm, hemmed her completely in; and her spirit, amid the enclosing folds, was hardly reached by those two great influences, without which no growing life can truly prosper--humour and imagination. The Baroness Lehzen--for she had been raised to that rank in the Hanoverian nobility by George IV before he died--was the real centre of the Princess's world. When Feodora married, when uncle Leopold went to Belgium, the Baroness was left without a competitor. The Princess gave her mother her dutiful regards; but Lehzen had her heart. The voluble, shrewd daughter of the pastor in Hanover, lavishing her devotion on her royal charge, had reaped her reward in an unbounded confidence and a passionate adoration. The girl would have gone through fire for her '_precious_ Lehzen,' the 'best and truest friend,' she declared, that she had had since her birth. Her journal, begun when she was thirteen, where she registered day by day the small succession of her doings and her sentiments, bears on every page of it the traces of the Baroness and her circumambient influence. The young creature that one sees there, self-depicted in ingenuous clarity, with her sincerity, her simplicity, her quick affections and pious resolutions, might almost have been the daughter of a German pastor herself. Her enjoyments, her admirations, her _engouements_ were of the kind that {34} clothed themselves naturally in underlinings and exclamation marks. 'It was a _delightful_ ride. We cantered a good deal. SWEET LITTLE ROSY went BEAUTIFULLY!! We came home at a ¼ past 1.... At 20 minutes to 7 we went out to the Opera.... Rubini came on and sang a song out of "Anna Boulena" _quite beautifully_. We came home at ½ past 11.'[28] In her comments on her readings, the mind of the Baroness is clearly revealed. One day, by some mistake, she was allowed to take up a volume of memoirs by Fanny Kemble. 'It is certainly very pertly and oddly written. One would imagine by the