“I didn’t mind the great reviewer’s blows at all,” she used to say.  “My poems had been republished in America; and Coleridge had prophesied that I should one day write a tragedy.”

Talfourd was then, though a young man, a most excellent critic, and lent a helping hand to the young authoress.  Her anxieties attending the first representation of her play at Covent Garden she was always fond of relating, and in such a manner that we who listened fell into such boisterous merriment with her, that I have known carriages stop in front of her window, and their inmates put out anxiously inquiring heads, to learn, if possible, what it all meant inside the cottage.

She never forgot “the warm grasp of Mrs. Charles Kemble’s hand, when she saw her, all life and heartiness, at her house in Soho Square,—­or the excellent acting of Young and Kemble and Macready, who did everything actors could do to secure success for her.”

“These are the things,” she once wrote, “one thinks of, when sitting calm and old by the light of a country fire.”

The comic and the grotesque that were mingled up with her first experiences of the stage as a dramatic author were inimitably rendered by herself, whenever she sat down to relate the story of that visit to London for the purpose of bringing out her tragedy.  The rehearsals, where “the only grave person present was Mr. Liston!—­the tragic heroines sauntering languidly through their parts in bonnets and thick shawls,—­the untidy ballet-girls” (there was a dance in “Foscari”) “walking through their quadrille to the sound of a solitary fiddle,”—­she was never weary of calling up for the amusement of her listeners.

The old dramatists she had grown up to worship,—­Shakspeare first, as in all loyalty bound, and after him Fletcher.  “Affluent, eloquent, royally grand,” she used to call both Beaumont and Fletcher; and whole scenes from favorite plays she knew by heart.  Dr. Valpy was her neighbor, he being in the days of her youth headmaster of Reading School.  A family intimacy of long standing had existed between her father’s household and that of the learned and excellent scholar, so that his well-known taste for the English dramatists had no small influence on Doctor Mitford’s studious daughter.  “He helped me also,” she said, “to enter into the spirit of those mighty masters who dealt forth the stern Tragedies of Destiny.”

One of the dearest friends of her youth was Miss Porden, (afterwards married, as his first wife, to Sir John Franklin,) and at her suggestion Miss Mitford wrote “Rienzi.”  I have heard her say, that, going up to London to bring out that play, she saw her old friend, then Mrs. Franklin, working a flag for the captain’s ship, then about to sail on one of his early adventurous voyages.  The agitation of parting with her husband was too great for her delicate temperament, and before the expedition was out of the Channel Mrs. Franklin was dead.