Describing their first acquaintance in later years to a friend, Mary said: “Sir William had taken a fancy to me, and I became his child-correspondent. Few things contribute more to that indirect after-education, which is worth all the formal lessons of the schoolroom a thousand times told, than such good-humoured condescension from a clever man of the world to a girl almost young enough to be his grand-daughter. I owe much to that correspondence.... Sir William’s own letters were most charming—full of old-fashioned courtesy, of quaint humour, and of pleasant and genial criticism on literature and on art.”[6] [Footnote 6: See _Yesterdays with Authors_, by James T. Fields.] Sometimes he would send Mary a few verses he had written upon some congenial subject. Amongst these occur the following lines, composed after witnessing a performance of Mrs. Siddons in the Plymouth theatre:— “Her looks, her voice, her features so agree, Uniting all in such fine harmony, That from her _voice_ the blind her looks declare, And in her sparkling _eyes_ the deaf may hear.” In one of his early letters to Mary he remarks: “Pray never refrain from writing much because you want time and inclination to read over what you have written. I would a thousand times rather see what falls from your pen naturally and spontaneously than the most polished and beautiful composition that ever went to the press, and so would you I doubt not from your correspondents.... Pope’s maxim (if it is his) that ‘easy writing is not easily written’ is certainly true with respect to what is intended for the world ... but is utterly false as applied to familiar writing, of which his own letters—pretended to be warm from the brain, but in reality polished and revised on publication—are a striking proof. Write away then, my dear, as fast as you can drive your quill, and abuse Miss Seward as much as you please.” These words call to mind the same kind of advice given by the good “Daddy” Crisp about forty years earlier to the young Fanny Burney: “Let this declaration serve once for all, that there is no fault in an epistolary correspondence like stiffness and study. Dash away whatever comes uppermost; the sudden sallies of imagination clap’d down on paper, just as they arise, are worth folios, and have all the warmth and merit of that sort of nonsense that is eloquent in love.” Crisp had greater powers as a critic than Sir William Elford, but Sir William had qualities that specially suited the case in question. He supplied a channel through which Mary could express and think out her views on all kinds of topics, always secure of a kind and friendly listener, and one whose judgment she valued. Being an only child and with few intimate female friends, this was a great boon, and we owe to their correspondence a fuller knowledge of Mary’s mind in its development from youth to womanhood than we could have obtained by any other means.