Two months later Mary writes: “I have at last safely disposed of my bride.... She had accumulated on her person so much finery that she looked as if by mistake she had put on two wedding dresses instead of one [and having wept copiously] was by many degrees the greatest fright I ever saw in my life. Indeed between crying and blushing brides, and bridesmaids too, do generally look strange figures. I am sure we did, though to confess the truth I really could not cry, much as I wished to keep all my neighbours in countenance, and was forced to hold my handkerchief to my eyes and sigh in vain for ‘_ce don de dames que Dieu ne m’a pas donné_.’” Mary Mitford always enjoyed writing to Sir William upon literary matters, as the reader knows, and comparing their respective opinions. “I am almost afraid to tell you,” she writes, “how much I dislike _Childe Harold_. Not but there are very many fine stanzas and powerful descriptions; but the sentiment is so strange, so gloomy, so heartless, that it is impossible not to feel a mixture of pity and disgust, which all our admiration of the author’s talents cannot overcome.... Are you not rather sick—now pray don’t betray me—are you not rather sick of being one of the hundred thousand confidants of his lordship’s mysterious and secret sorrows?... I would rather be the poorest Greek whose fate he commiserates than Lord Byron, if this poem be a true transcript of his feelings.” In one of her letters she remarks: “I prefer the French pulpit oratory to any other part of their literature.... I mean, of course, their old preachers—Fénelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon and Bossuet—especially the last, who approaches as nearly to the unrivalled sublimity of the sacred writings as any writer I have ever met with. Oh! what a contrast between him and our dramatic sermonists Mesdames Hawkins and Brompton! I am convinced that people read them for the story, to enjoy the stimulus of a novel without the name.... Ah! they had better take South and Blair and Secker for guides, and go for amusement to Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. By the way, how delightful is her _Emma_, the best, I think, of all her charming works.” “Have you read _Pepys’ Memoirs_?” she asks on another occasion. “I am extremely diverted with them, and prefer them to Evelyn’s, all to nothing. He was too precise and too gentlemanly and too sensible by half; wrote in full dress, with an eye if not to the press, at least to posthumous reputation. Now this man sets down his thoughts in a most becoming _déshabille_—does not care twopence for posterity, and evidently thinks wisdom a very foolish thing. I don’t know when any book has amused me so much. It is the very perfection of gossiping—most relishing nonsense.”