She writes on June 4th to her mother: “I had not time to tell you [yesterday] how very much I was gratified at the Opera House on Friday evening. I dined at the St. Quintins’, and we proceeded to take possession of our very excellent situation, a pit-box near the stage. The house was crammed to suffocation. Young is an admirable actor; I greatly prefer him to Kemble, whom I had before seen in the same character (Zanga in _The Revenge_).... Billington, Braham, Bianchi, Noldi, Bellamy and Siboni sang after the play, and the amateurs were highly gratified. But my delight was yet to come. The dancing of Vestris is indeed perfection. The ‘poetry of motion’ is exemplified in every movement, and his Apollo-like form excels any idea I had ever formed of manly grace.” This grand performance, it seems, was for Kelly’s benefit. Kelly was a popular singer of his day, and was also a composer of music. He happened in addition to be a wine merchant, and Sheridan called him “a composer of wine and importer of music.” Besides visits to the Opera House and theatres Mary describes expeditions to the Royal Academy, then at Somerset House, to the Exhibition of Water Colours in Spring Gardens, and to the Panorama, where she saw “a most admirable representation of Grand Cairo, taken from drawings by Lord Valentia.” She also gives full particulars of a grand ball given in a mansion where five splendid rooms opened into each other; and there were upwards of three hundred people. “The chalked floors and Grecian lamps,” she says, “gave it the appearance of a fairy scene, which was still further heightened by the beautiful exotics which almost lined these superb apartments.” It is curious to note that in those days Bedlam was looked upon as one of the sights of London, to which both foreigners and provincial visitors were taken as a matter of course. In her last letter from town Mary says: “To-morrow we go first to Bedlam, then to St. James’s Street to see the Court people, and then I think I shall have had more than enough of sights and dissipation.” CHAPTER XVI A CHOSEN CORRESPONDENT Among the many names of well-known people that occur in Miss Mitford’s letters of this period is that of Cobbett, to whom she had addressed one of her early odes. He was an intimate friend of her father’s, and we are told that some of his letters to the Doctor “are written enigmatically and evidently with a view to secrecy, whilst others, on the contrary, express his sentiments as openly as did the ‘Porcupine.’” In these latter the violent denunciations of the King and the Government, and indeed of all persons in authority, comically recall to the mind of the reader the admirable skit upon Cobbett in the _Rejected Addresses_. His letters to the Doctor usually conclude with the words, “God bless you, and d—— the ministers!”