"I am almost nineteen, madam," said I, elevating my head, with much pride. "You must not laugh!" I added, seeing that her risible muscles again exhibited symptoms of incipient activity, and well they might; for I was the most tom-boy, childish-looking creature who ever sat down by herself in a large room to study the merits of Pitt and Fox; and, what was worse, one of the most perfectly uneducated young women of my age that ever went to school; but then my school was only a French convent, where there really was nothing which excited in me the slightest curiosity after knowledge, and I never learned a single lesson by heart in my life, nor I believe ever could. The abbess was in despair about me. The confessor said, with Fred Bentinck, that I should come to no good; and I played the old nuns so many tricks that they were all frightened to death of me. Being once more left to myself, I snatched up a volume of Shakespeare, _pour me désennuyer un moment_, and opened it at this passage, in the tragedy of _Antony and Cleopatra:_ The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver; Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggar'd all description: she did lie In her pavilion (cloth of gold of tissue), O'erpicturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature: on each side her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid, did. "How beautiful!" said I, throwing down the book, "Can anything be imagined more glowing or more animated than this description! However I came here to study--and Shakespeare is too amusing to be considered study. True I have heard people remark that many passages of Shakespeare's writings are obscure; yet it seems to me that all the beauties are clear and plain, and the little obscurities not worth puzzling about:--therefore I'll study history; one must know something of that. I'll begin with ancient Greece, never mind English history, we can all get credit for that."