But my particular enjoyment of this long-desired entertainment was mitigated by circumstances both moral and physical. We had at that time a nurse who, though by nature endowed with most affectionate impulses, strongly disapproved of all dramatic entertainment, and who, for some weeks before this annually projected tampering with the forces of evil, tormented my spirit by a somewhat vivid picture of the eternal perils which I was destined to encounter. On the first of these theatre parties that I can recollect, when she was coerced by my mother to form one of the party, in order that her numerous flock should have proper protection, her original antipathy to all things theatrical was strongly enforced and confirmed from the fact that, in the first piece which preceded the pantomime, one of the actors, shipwrecked upon a desert shore, gave utterance to a sentiment which to her mind seemed profoundly impious--that “what man could do he had done, and that God must do the rest.” As she explained to me the next evening, when I lay tucked up in bed, the mere mention of God within the four walls of a theatre was an act of profanity altogether unpardonable, and from that time forward she would never consent to take any part in these annual orgies. But her manifest disapproval, as the recurring season of Christmas approached, set my spirit in terrible debate between the pleasure I longed for and the sin I knew I was about to commit. That internal struggle, fierce as it seemed to me at the time, must, I suppose, have been conducted with insufficient force on her side, for the issue left me always eager and ready for the adventure of sin. Indeed, so eager was our anticipation of the treat in store for us, that for many days beforehand we could think of nothing else; and so great our excitement as the appointed day approached, that the long-looked-for pleasure nearly always ended in disaster. Excitement in our family always revealed itself in an overmastering tendency to sickness, and from the age of five till the age of ten my vision of the splendours of the pantomime was intermittent, such glimpses of its glory as I derived being for the most part only obtained through the small lunette at the back of the dress-circle, the remainder of the evening being nearly always passed in a state of utter prostration in the ladies’ cloak-room. I neither claim nor profess any isolated distinction in this recurring malady, it was the abiding characteristic of our family; and I have often since, looking back on those days, reflected with admiration upon the dauntless courage of my father and mother to whom these occasions, repeated again and again, in spite of all example, must have been fraught with nothing short of misery.