74 PRÆTERITA-I

the House,”¹ was an extremely beautiful girl of seventeen; she sang “Tambourgi, Tambourgi”* with great spirit and a rich voice, went at blackberry time on rambles with us at the Norwood Spa, and made me feel generally that there was something in girls that I did not understand, and that was curiously agreeable. And at last, because I was so fond of the Doctor, and he had the reputation (in Walworth) of being a good scholar, my father thought he might pleasantly initiate me in Greek, such initiation having been already too long deferred. The Doctor, it afterwards turned out, knew little more of Greek than the letters, and declensions of nouns; but he wrote the letters prettily, and had an accurate and sensitive ear for rhythm. He began me with the odes of Anacreon, and made me scan both them and my Virgil thoroughly, sometimes, by way of interlude, reciting bits of Shakespeare to me with force and propriety. The Anacreontic metre entirely pleased me, nor less the Anacreontic sentiment. I learned half the odes by heart merely to please myself, and learned with certainty, what in later study of Greek art it has proved extremely advantageous to me to know, that the Greeks liked doves, swallows, and roses just as well as I did.

82. In the intervals of these unlaborious Greek lessons, I went on amusing myself-partly in writing English doggerel, partly in map drawing, or copying Cruikshank’s illustrations to Grimm,² which I did with great, and to most people now incredible, exactness, a sheet of them being, by good hap, well preserved, done when I was

* Hebrew Melodies.

¹ [Emily Augusta Andrews (first wife of Coventry Patmore) was the fifth daughter. Her eldest sister became Mrs. Orme, whose house in St. John’s Wood was “a haunt of Rossetti, Swinburne, Woolner, Holman Hunt, and a crowd of other young artists, poets, men of letters, and thinkers” (Pall Mall Gazette, May 8, 1892). She died in that year.]

² [For specimens of the “doggerel” of these years, see Vol. II. part iii. Some of his maps

“examples of many done by the time I was ten years old”-were shown at the Fine Art Society in 1878 (see Vol. XIII. p. 503), and again in 1907. The copies from Cruikshank were also shown in 1878 (ibid.).]

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