I would not recommend any friend to write for the stage because it nearly killed me with its unspeakable worries and anxieties, and I am certainly ten years older for having so written; but of all forms of poetry it is the one I prefer, and I would always advise the writing with a view to the production of the piece upon the boards, because it avoids the danger of interminable dialogues of coldness and languor.... Write for the stage, but don’t bring the play out--that is my advice. If you wish to know my reasons, you may find some of them in the fact that one of my tragedies had seven last acts, and that two others fought each other during a whole season at Covent Garden Theatre; Mr. Macready insisted on producing one, Charles Kemble was equally bent upon the other--neither of them even pretending to any superiority of either play but because one, a man of fifty, would play the young man’s part, and the other insisted that none but himself should have anything like a telling part at all. Both were read in the green-room, both advertised--and just think of the poor author in the country all the time, while the money was earnestly wanted, and the non-production fell upon her like a sin! MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to Mr. Digby Starkey_, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford,’ by L’Estrange. * * * * * I would rather serve in a shop--rather scour floors--rather nurse children, than undergo these tremendous and interminable disputes, and this unwomanly publicity. [Sidenote: Drudgery.] Pray forgive this sad no-letter. Alas! the free and happy hours, when I could read and think and prattle for you, are passed away. Oh! will they ever return? I am now chained to a desk, eight, ten, twelve hours a day, at mere drudgery. All my thoughts of writing are for hard money. All my correspondence is on hard business.... A washerwoman hath a better trade.... I myself hate all my own doings, and consider the being forced to this drudgery as the greatest misery that life can afford. But it is my wretched fate and must be undergone--so long, at least, as my father is spared to me. If I should have the misfortune to lose him, I shall go quietly to the workhouse, and never write another line--a far preferable destiny. MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to Sir William Elford_, in the former’s ‘Life,’ by L’Estrange. * * * * * [Sidenote: Lionized in London.]