Writing in 1819 she says: “Oh! but the oddest book I have met with is Madame de Genlis’s new novel _Les Parvenus_, an imitation of _Gil Blas_ ... while she sticks to that she is very good; her comic powers are really exceedingly respectable—but she flies off at a tangent to her old beaten path of sentimental vice and fanatical piety, and sends her heroine to the Holy Land as a Pilgrim in the nineteenth century and then fixes her in a Spanish convent!” Now she writes with deep admiration of Burns—“Burns the sweetest, the sublimest, the most tricksy poet who has blest this nether world since the days of Shakespeare! I am just fresh from reading Dr. Currie’s four volumes and Cromak’s one, which comprise, I believe, all that he ever wrote.... Have you lately read Dr. Currie’s work? If you have not, pray do, and tell me if you do not admire him—not with the flimsy lackadaisical praise with which certain gentle damsels bedaub his _Mountain Daisy_ and his _Woodlark_ ... but with the strong and manly feeling which his fine and indignant letters, his exquisite and original humour, his inimitable pathos must awaken in such a mind as yours. Ah, what have they to answer for who let such a man perish? I think there is no poet whose works I have ever read who interests me so strongly by the display of personal character contained in almost everything he wrote (even in his songs) as Burns.” After speaking of “his versatility and his exhaustless imagination,” she says: “By the way, my dear Sir William, does it not appear to you that versatility is the true and rare characteristic of that rare thing called genius—versatility and playfulness?” Writing to Sir William somewhat hurriedly in March, 1817, Mary remarks: “Rather than send the envelope blank I will fill it with the translation of a pretty allegory of M. Arnault’s, the author of ‘Germanicus.’ You must not read it if you have read the French, because it does not come near to its simplicity. If you have not read the French you may read the English. Be upon honour.” Translation of M. Arnault’s lines on his own exile:— “Torn rudely from thy parent bough, Poor withered leaf, where roamest thou? I know not where! A tempest broke My only prop, the stately oak; And ever since in wearying change With each capricious wind I range; From wood to plain, from hill to dale, Borne sweeping on as sweeps the gale, Without a struggle or a cry, I go where all must go as I; I go where goes the self-same hour A laurel leaf or rose’s flower!” CHAPTER XIX FROM MANSION TO COTTAGE