“Yesterday I went, as you know, to the play with papa, and on our road thither had a very great pleasure in meeting Lord Wellington, just arrived in London, and driving to his own house in an open carriage and six. We had an excellent sight of him, so excellent that I should know him again anywhere; and it was quite refreshing after all those parading foreigners, emperors, and so forth to see an honest English hero, with a famous Mitford nose, looking quite happy, without any affectation of bowing or seeming affable. He is a very fine countenanced man, tanned and weather-beaten, with good dark eyes.... Very few of the populace knew him, but the intelligence spread like wildfire, and Piccadilly looked like a hive of bees in swarming time.” Writing to Sir William Elford in July, 1815, Mary apologises for not having sent him, as she had proposed to do, a facsimile copy of _Louis le Desiré’s_ letter to Lady Charles Aynsley. “As kings of France are come in fashion again,” she remarks, “I hastened to repair my omission by copying as well as I was able the aforesaid epistle.... I heard a great deal respecting that very good but weak and bigoted man from a French lady, Madame de Gourbillon, who was one of the favourite attendants of his late wife. His memory exceeds even that of our own venerable king. If you mention the slightest, the least remarkable fact in natural history, in the belles-lettres, in history, or anything he will say, ‘Ay, Buffon, or La Harpe, or Vertot speaks of it (quoting the very words) in such a volume, such a chapter, such a page and such a line.’ He is always correct, even to a monosyllable!” This recalls to one’s mind the old aphorism applied to the Bourbons: “They forgot nothing and they learnt nothing.” “Another fact,” continues Mary, “which I ascertained respecting the King of France is that he is afraid of my friend _la Lectrice de la feue Reine_ as ever child was of its schoolmistress, and really it is no impeachment to his courage, for I am not at all sure that Buonaparte himself could stand against her.... Papa and she regularly quarrelled once a day on the old cause, ‘France versus England,’ varied occasionally into ‘French versus English,’ for she very reasonably used to attack Papa for his utter want of French, in which, I believe, he scarcely knows _ouí_ from _non_; and he, with no less reason, would retort on her want of English, she having condescended to vegetate twelve years in this island of fogs and roast beef without being able at the end of that time to distinguish ‘How do you do?’ from ‘Very well, I thank you!’” During Miss Mitford’s stay in town in the summer of 1814 she had an interesting and unlooked-for experience of which mention is made in the _Morning Chronicle_ of June 25th.