Miss Mitford tells us in the Introduction to one of her works that her father had engaged the English teacher Miss Rowden, of whom we have already spoken, to act as a sort of private tutor—a governess out of school hours to his young daughter. “At the time I was placed under her care,” writes Mary, “her whole heart was in the drama, especially as personified by John Kemble; and I am persuaded that she thought she could in no way so well perform her duty as in taking me to Drury Lane whenever his name was in the bills. “It was a time of great actors—Jack Bannister and Jack Johnstone, Fawcett and Emery, Lewis and Munden, Mrs. Davenport, Miss Pope and Mrs. Jordan (most exquisite of all) made comedy a bright and living art, an art as full as life itself of laughter and tears. “My enthusiasm for the drama soon equalled that of Miss Rowden.... There was of course a great difference in kind between her pleasure and mine; hers was a critical, mine a childish enjoyment; she loved fine acting, I loved the play.” Writing in later years of her pleasure, however imperfect then, in the acting of “the glorious family of Kemble,” she says: “The fame of John Kemble ... has suffered not a little by the contact with his great sister. Besides her uncontested and incontestable power Mrs. Siddons had one advantage not always allowed for—she was a woman. The actress must always be dearer than the actor, goes closer to the heart, draws tenderer tears.... Add that the tragedy in which they were best remembered was one in which the heroine must always predominate, for Lady Macbeth is the moving spirit of the play. But the characters of more equality—Katherine and Wolsey, Hermione and Leontes, Coriolanus and Volumnia, Hamlet and the Queen—and surely John Kemble may hold his own. How often have I seen them in those plays! What would I give to see again those plays so acted!” In the year 1802, when Mary was fourteen years of age, her thirst for knowledge was growing rapidly. Miss Rowden happened to be reading Virgil, and Mary longed to be able to read it also. “I have just taken a lesson in Latin,” she writes to her mother, “but I shall in consequence omit some of my other business. It is so extremely like Italian that I think I shall find it much easier than I expected.” “I told you,” she says in a letter to her father, “that I had finished the _Iliad_, which I admire beyond anything I ever read. I have begun the _Æneid_, which I cannot say I admire so much. Dryden is so fond of triplets and Alexandrines that it is much heavier reading; ... when I have finished it I shall read the _Odyssey_.... I am now reading that beautiful opera of Metastasio, _Themistocles_, and when I have finished that I shall read Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_. His poetry is really heavenly.”