“When the eye becomes accustomed to the darkness the contrasts are sufficiently amusing. Solemn tragedians ... hatted and great-coated, skipping about, chatting and joking like common mortals ... tragic heroines sauntering languidly through their parts in the closest of bonnets and thickest of shawls; untidy ballet girls (there was a dance in _Foscari_) walking through their quadrille to the sound of a solitary fiddle, striking up as if of its own accord from amidst the tall stools and music-desks of the orchestra, and piercing, one hardly knew how, through the din that was going on incessantly. “Oh, that din! Voices from every part, above, below, around, and in every key, bawling, shouting, screaming; heavy weights rolling here and falling there, bells ringing, one could not tell why, and the ubiquitous call-boy everywhere!... “No end to the absurdities and discrepancies of a rehearsal! I contributed my full share to the amount.... There is a gun in _Julian_, and I, frightened by one when a child, ‘hate a gun like a hurt wild duck’ ... and my first address to Mr. Macready was an earnest entreaty that he would not suffer them to fire that gun at rehearsal. They did, nevertheless, ... but the smiling bow of the great tragedian had spared me the worst part of that sort of fright, the expectation.... “Troubled and anxious though they were,” she adds, “those were pleasant days, guns and all, days of hope dashed with so much fear, and of fear illumined with fitful rays of hope. And in those rehearsals ... where nobody is ever found when he is wanted, and nobody ever seems to know a syllable of his part ... the business must somehow have gone on, for at night the scenes fall into the right places, the proper actors come at the right times, speeches are spoken in due order, and to the no small astonishment of the novice, who had given herself up for lost, the play succeeds.” CHAPTER XXVI _RIENZI_ Miss Mitford’s capacity of throwing herself heart and soul into the widely varying subjects upon which she was engaged was truly remarkable. For whilst writing her playful or pathetic stories of village life, breathing as they do the calm and beauty of the surrounding country, she was composing one after another her stirring tragedies. The finest of these is generally considered to be _Rienzi_ to which Miss Mitford had given much time and thought. She wrote in August, 1824, to a female friend who had enquired after her literary undertakings:—