We have read _Rienzi_ with deep interest. The tragic scenes are very powerful, tension being kept up throughout the whole action, while the love passages are beautiful, tender and truly pathetic. If we might venture upon a criticism it is that there is an absence in the play of all humour—a quality so conspicuous in Miss Mitford’s village stories. Perhaps it is only Shakespeare who possesses the consummate art of relieving the strain wrought upon the mind by deep tragedy with a touch of humour. It is certainly absent in some of the finest French and German tragedies. Miss Mitford’s incessant work at this period, coupled with much domestic anxiety (for her mother’s health was then failing), made her possibly over anxious. “I shall have hard work,” she observes in a letter to a friend, “to write up to my own reputation, for certainly I am at present greatly overrated.” And alluding to the triumph of _Rienzi_ she says:— “Dramatic success, after all, is not so delicious, so glorious, so complete a gratification as in our secret longings we all expect to find. It is not satisfactory. It does not fill the heart.... It is an intoxication.... Within four-and-twenty hours [of the performance of _Rienzi_] I doubted if triumph there were, and more than doubted if it were deserved. It is ill-success that leads to self-assertion. Never in my life was I so conscious of my dramatic short-comings as on that day of imputed exaltation and vainglory.” But Mary’s fame as a dramatic author was growing in spite of her own modest estimate of her powers, and in spite also of many a disappointment that she had to endure. Her play of Charles I, the subject of which was suggested to her by Macready, was condemned by the Licenser, “who saw a danger to the State in permitting the trial of an English monarch to be represented on the stage.” It was forbidden, therefore, at the two great houses although it afterwards appeared at a minor theatre. The fate of another play, _Inez de Castro_, was still more unfortunate, for after having been rehearsed three times at the Lyceum Theatre, apparently with the approval of all concerned, it was suddenly withdrawn for some unknown reason. Fanny Kemble, whom Miss Mitford describes as “a girl of great ability,” was taking the part of the heroine. “Great at the moment were these anxieties and tribulations,” writes Miss Mitford in after life, “but it is good to observe in one’s own mind and good to tell others how just as the keenest physical pain is known to be soon forgotten, so in mental vicissitudes time carries away the bitter and leaves the sweet. The vexations and the injuries fade into dim distance and the kindness and the benefits shine vividly out.”