Every day we had from sixty to seventy visitors, and three times more parties made for me than I could have attended, even if I had refused all exhibiting show parties and gone only to friends, dining with what they called quiet parties of twenty or thirty, and thirty or forty more arriving to tea. At last, however, I was forced to break off this, or I should have returned to the country without seeing any public place whatever; and my last week or ten days were spent in seeing all to be seen in London in the morning, and attending operas and plays every evening--the artists all writing to show me their galleries, and the very best private boxes everywhere being reserved for my accommodation--no queen could have been more deferentially received. MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to Emily Jephson_, 1834, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford,’ by L’Estrange. * * * * * [Sidenote: Town and country manners.] Miss Landon called her “Sancho Panza in petticoats”; yet among the lanes and glades of her own sunny Berkshire she might have aptly seemed a merry milk-maid--proper to the place. Her round figure, jolly face, perpetual smile, ready greeting, kindly words, seemed of kin to the nature that is away from crowded streets. Assuredly she was more at home at Three-Mile Cross than she was in London. In London she seemed always _en garde_, thought an air of patronage was the right thing, and that an author about whom the whole world was talking, and who had achieved the greatest of all literary successes--the production of a tragedy--was bound to be stately as well as cordial--to have company manners that she would have thrown off as a paralyzing incumbrance where the breezes blew among the trees that shaded her native heath. S. C. HALL: ‘Retrospect of a Long Life.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Mrs. Hall’s first impression of Miss Mitford.]