Lablache, to train the piping treble upon his own rich bass.  The Dean of Chester, the official preceptor, continued his endless instruction in Scripture history, while the Duchess of Northumberland, the official governess, presided over every lesson with becoming solemnity.  Without doubt, the Princess’s main achievement during her school-days was linguistic.  German was naturally the first language with which she was familiar; but English and French quickly followed; and she became virtually trilingual, though her mastery of English grammar remained incomplete.  At the same time, she acquired a working knowledge of Italian and some smattering of Latin.  Nevertheless, she did not read very much.  It was not an occupation that she cared for; partly, perhaps, because the books that were given her were all either sermons, which were very dull, or poetry, which was incomprehensible.  Novels were strictly forbidden.  Lord Durham persuaded her mother to get her some of Miss Martineau’s tales, illustrating the truths of Political Economy, and they delighted her; but it is to be feared that it was the unaccustomed pleasure of the story that filled her mind, and that she never really mastered the theory of exchanges or the nature of rent.

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 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