“Louis soon followed the ladies into the drawing-room, when again all stood, and Lady C. served her royal guest with coffee, which being over, she told him that some of the neighbouring families were come for a little dance in the dining-room and that perhaps His Majesty would be seated at cards. He good humouredly said he would first go and pay his respects in the next room, which was the thing she wished; therefore handed him in, his family and nobles following, which was a fine sight for those assembled, in all sixty-two. At the King’s desire she introduced each person to him by name, and, on the King’s sitting down, the band struck up, and Monsieur, who is supposed to be the finest dancer in Europe, led off with Lady C., who, spite of Lord Charles’s horror and her own fears for her lame ankle, hopped down two country dances with him, and they were followed by Charlotte and the Duke d’Angoulême.” We have sat in the long dining-room at the Deanery where these festivities took place more than a hundred years ago. The room is evidently little changed, and as we gazed around, the whole scene seemed to rise before our eyes. We saw the French guests in their stars and orders sparkling under the lights of the chandeliers, and it seemed almost as if an echo of their bright racy talk reached our ears. CHAPTER XV PLAYS AND POETRY Mary Russel Mitford had from early youth been fond of writing verses upon subjects which had taken her fancy. “No less than three octavo volumes,” she writes, “had I perpetrated in two years. They had all the faults incident to a young lady’s verses, and one of them had been deservedly castigated by the _Quarterly_.” Here she adds in later years the following footnote: “This article was fortunate for the writer at a far more important moment. Mr. Gifford himself, as I have been given to understand, came to feel that however well deserved the strictures might be, an attack by his great review upon a girl’s first book was something like breaking a butterfly upon the wheel. He made amends by a criticism in a very different spirit on the first series of _Our Village_, which was of much service to the work.” The first volume of poems was published in the year 1810 and again with additions in 1811. Two more volumes followed soon afterwards. In spite of some adverse criticism the poems “had had their praises,” writes Miss Mitford, “as what young lady’s verses have not? Large impressions had gone rapidly off; we had run into a second edition. They had been published in America—always so kind to me! Two or three of the shorter pieces had been thought good enough to be stolen, and Mr. Coleridge had prophesied of the larger one that the authoress of ‘Blanche’ would write a tragedy.”