Mrs. Miller’s Institution appears, however, to have been an unqualified social success. The first edition of the verses was exhausted in ten days,[197] and a second was published in the following year. Three similar volumes appeared at intervals,[198] and the series was terminated only by the death of the Institutress.[199] The publications received the compliment of an anonymous attack entitled Sappho,[200] in which Mrs. Miller was satirically hailed as ‘Mistress of the tuneful nine’; but a more deadly assault took the form of a solemn congratulatory Epistle to Mrs. Miller,[201] in which that lady is said to
Shine unmatched in old or modern time,
A friend of Genius, Pleasure, Taste and Rhime,
Which daily thrive beneath thy fostering hand
And pour the tide of learning o’er the land.
An examination of the volume published in 1775 hardly seems to bear out these statements. The following production of the hostess herself it is difficult to describe with accuracy, for the word verse hardly seems appropriate to it:
From Castor and Pollux, those twins of renown,
Arose the great dance taught at Lacedæmon;
Then a son of Achilles, with a barbarous name,
Taught his soldiers to dance, those Cretans of fame.