Before there was a regular demand and an established market, there were certain hawkers and pedlars of literature, fetchers and carriers of bays, and at every turn copies of impromptus, charades, and lines by the honourable Miss C----, and the honourable Mrs. D----, were put into my hands by young ladies, begging for praise, which it was seldom in my power conscientiously to bestow. I early had a foreboding--one of my mother’s _presentiments_--that I should come to disgrace with Lady Anne Mowbray about some of these cursed scraps of poetry. Her ladyship had one--shall I say?--_peculiarity_. She could not bear that any one should differ from her in matters of taste; and though she regularly disclaimed being a reading lady, she was most assured of what she was most ignorant. With the assistance of Fowler’s flattery, together with that of all the hangers-on at Brantefield Priory, her temper had been rendered incapable of bearing contradiction. But this defect was not immediately apparent: on the contrary, Lady Anne was generally thought a pleasant, good-humoured creature, and most people wondered that the daughter could be so different from the mother. Lady de Brantefield was universally known to be positive and prejudiced. Her prejudices were all old-fashioned, and ran directly counter to the habits of her acquaintance. Lady Anne’s, on the contrary, were all in favour of the present fashion, whatever it might be, and ran smoothly with the popular stream. The violence of her temper could, therefore, scarcely be suspected, till something opposed the current: a small obstacle would then do the business--would raise the stream suddenly to a surprising height, and would produce a tremendous noise. It was my ill fortune one unlucky day to cross Lady Anne Mowbray’s humour, and to oppose her opinion. It was about a trifle; but trifles, indeed, made, with her, the sum of human things. She came one morning, as it was her custom, to loiter away her time at my mother’s till the proper hour for going out to visit. For five minutes she sat at some fashionable kind of work--_wafer work_, I think it was called, a work which has been long since consigned to the mice; then her ladyship yawned, and exclaiming, “Oh, those lines of Lord Chesterfield’s, which Colonel Topham gave me; I’ll copy them into my album. Where’s my _album_?--Mrs. Harrington, I lent it to you. Oh! here it is. Mr. Harrington, you will finish copying this for me.” So I was set down to the _album_ to copy--_Advice to a Lady in Autumn_. “Asses’ milk, half a pint, take at seven, or before.” My mother, who saw that I did not relish the asses’ milk, put in a word for me. “My dear Lady Anne, it is not worth while to write these lines in your _album_, for they were in print long ago, in every lady’s old memorandum-book, and in Dodsley’s Collection, I believe.”