2 Nicholson, Hemans — Nicholson Correspondence. 



up the estate, the fourth and final dividend being paid in 

 1804. FeHcia was born on the 25th September, 1793,* 

 six months after her father's failure, in Duke Street, 

 Liverpool. The house has been identified by Mr. G. T. 

 Shawf as that formerly numbered 65, but in 1896 

 numbered 118. 



Mr. Browne's failure reduced the family from affluence 

 to genteel poverty. They left Liverpool in 1800, and 

 went to live at Gwrych, near Abergele, where Felicia 

 spent a happy childhood amidst surroundings of great 

 natural beauty, which undoubtedly had their effect on 

 her imagination. Naturally enough, considering the 

 straitened circumstances of the family, the girls (for 

 Felicia had a younger sister) were educated at home. 

 Their mother, who had been a Miss Wagner, and was a 

 woman of considerable culture, trained her daughters her- 

 self They were both precocious children, much given to 

 rhyming, and their juvenile efforts, circulated in manu- 

 script, had met with the praise of many friends. One of 

 those to whom Felicia's poems had been submitted was 

 Lady Kirkwall. She expressed her " high and flattering 

 approval " of them, and caused the shabby manuscript to 

 be most elegantly bound before she returned it to the 

 author. At one time Mrs. Browne wished to send Felicia 

 to a boarding school to finish her education, but was 

 prevented from doing so by want of means. In this 

 difficulty it occurred to Mrs. Browne that the means for 

 Felicia's education might be provided by the publication 

 of the child's poems. Her reasoning seems to have been 

 that as the poems had obtained the approval of the 



* This date appears in the mother's autograph, and I therefore think it 

 correct, although all the authorities do not accept it : H. F. Chorley, for 

 instance, gives it as 1794. 



t Liverpool homes of Mrs. Hemans {Hist. Soc. of L. &= C. xlviii. 123 ; 

 liv. 207). 



