Again she writes of her on further acquaintance: “Miss Barrett has translated the most difficult of the Greek plays (the _Prometheus Bound_). If she be spared to the world you will see her passing all women and most men as a narrative and dramatic poet. Our sweet Miss Barrett!—to think of virtue and genius is to think of her.... She is so sweet and gentle and so pretty that one looks at her as if she were some bright flower.” The two corresponded afterwards, and their letters are full of interest. We should like to quote a passage from one of Miss Barrett’s upon the Greek drama. “The Œdipus is wonderful,” she writes, “the sublime truth which pierces through to your soul like lightning seems to me to be the humiliating effect of guilt, even when unconsciously incurred. The abasement, the self-abasement, of the proud, high-minded King before the mean mediocre Creon, not because he is wretched, not because he is blind, but because he is criminal, appears to me a wonderful and most affecting conception. And there is Euripides with his abandon to the pathetic, and Æschylus who sheds tears like a strong man and moves you to more because you know that his struggle is to restrain them.” Miss Mitford writes to her friend in October of this year (1836):— “I have just read your delightful ballad.[17] My earliest book was _Percy’s Reliques_, the delight of my childhood, and after them came Scott’s _Minstrelsy of the Borders_, the favourite of my youth, so that I am prepared to love ballads, although perhaps a little biased in favour of great directness and simplicity by the earnest plainness of my old pet. Do read Tennyson’s _Ladye of Shalott_. You will be charmed with its spirit and picturesqueness. [Footnote 17: “The Romaunt of the Page.”] “Are you a great reader of the old English drama? I am—preferring it to every other sort of reading; of course, admitting and regretting the grossness of the age, but that from habit one skips without a thought, just as I should over so much Greek or Hebrew which I knew that I could not comprehend. Have you read Victor Hugo’s plays? ... and his _Notre Dame_? I admit the bad taste of these, the excess, but the power and the pathos are to me indescribably great. And then he has broken through the conventional phrases and made the French a new language. He has accomplished this partly by going back to the old fountains, Froissart, etc. Again these old chronicles are great books of mine.”