"
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.
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