Read it through once

Early in the year 1813 a letter was received from Mr. and Mrs. Perry, inviting Miss Mitford to stay with them at their house in Tavistock Square. Mr. Perry was then Editor of the _Morning Chronicle_, and the invitation was gladly accepted, not only because Perry was a friend of her father’s, but because the latter had assured her that Tavistock House was the rendezvous for many of the leaders in the political and literary worlds. During this visit she met Mrs. Opie—“thinner, paler, and much older, but very kind and pleasant”—and Thomas Moore,—“that abridgement of all that is pleasant in man,”—with whom she had the “felicity” of dining frequently. “I am quite enchanted with him,” she wrote. “He has got a little wife (whom I did not see) and two little children, and they are just gone into Wales,[17] where he intends to finish a great poem [_Lalla Rookh_] on which he is occupied. It is a Persian tale, and he says it will be his fault if it is not a fine work, for the images, the scenery, the subject, are poetry itself. How his imagination will revel among the roses, and the nightingales, and the light-footed Almé!” Mr. Moore did not forget his little friend and, a year later, gave her the added pleasure of reading over a part of his manuscript, “and I hope in a few days to see the whole in print. He has sold it for three thousand pounds. The little I have seen is beyond all praise and price,” she wrote enthusiastically. These visits to town were undoubtedly something more than mere pleasure jaunts, for it is quite apparent that they were undertaken with a view to keeping the name and person of Mary Russell Mitford well in the public mind and eye. Making her headquarters at 33, Hans Place, the residence of Fanny Rowden’s mother, she spent a whirling fortnight during the summer of 1814, meanwhile keeping Mrs. Mitford well-informed on all details, however slight. Under date, June 16, 1814, she writes: “Yesterday, my own dearest Granny, was, I think, the most fatiguing morning I ever underwent. Stuffed into a conspicuous place, stared at, talked to, or talked at, by everybody, dying with heat, worn out with flattery, I really should have wished myself in heaven or somewhere worse, if I had not been comforted by William Harness, who sat behind me, laughing at everybody, and more playful and agreeable than any one I ever remember.” The occasion was the Midsummer Breaking-up performance at her old school, during which an ode she had composed for another function was recited.