The taste of the Queen was itself not unimpeachable. With regard to the drama, she would rather have seen little Quick in Tony Lumpkin, than Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth. So her ‘reader’ was not called upon to exert her powers upon any great works. The first book she was required to read aloud was Colman’s broad farce of ‘Polly Honeycomb.’ The young lady must have had a difficult task with the novel-reading Polly, whose heart beat for Mr. Scribble, and into whose head her sire could not beat a favourable opinion for ‘the rich Jew’s wife’s nephew,’ Mr. Ledger. The young Princesses were listeners, and it could hardly have been edifying for them to hear the rollicking Polly say of her father, ‘Lord, lord! my stupid papa has no taste; he has no notion of humour and character and the sensibility of delicate feeling.’ ‘A novel,’ says Miss Honeycomb, ‘is the only thing to teach a girl life;’ and she adds, ‘Every girl elopes when her parents are obstinate and ill-natured about marrying her.’ Her ridicule of the long-lived affection of her parents is expressed in the coarsest manner; and she thinks it a good joke that her father recommends her to read the ‘Practice of Piety;’ she runs away with a scamp, and her honest lover, rightly disenamoured, declares of her that ‘he would not underwrite her for ninety per cent.’ What Miss Pope made of Polly and King of Scribble, when this farce was first produced, in 1760, it is not worth inquiring. Miss Pope was considered great in it; but it is worth noticing that when Miss Burney was reading the piece to the Queen and her daughters, an actress whose name can never be separated from that of the Queen’s third son was then turning half the heads in town with her Polly. Mrs. Jordan was well supported by Palmer in Scribble, and the piece seems to have found its way to court, as the ‘Dragon of Wantley’ did in the preceding reign, on the strength of its popularity. The reader to the royal audience performed her vocation under great disadvantages. She read on in mortal silence on the part of those who listened; neither comment, applause, nor feeling of any sort was ever exhibited; and when Miss Burney had to read other of the elder Colman’s plays, and once ventured to relieve the voice, long fatigued by reading, by making some remark on the construction of the piece, the innovation was submitted to without being commended.