Dismissing from our minds that portion which deals with “Charles I” and what the critics thought of it and confining ourselves to the other matter, we shall plainly see that Miss Mitford’s suspicions as to the author had undergone a change by her receipt of the note from the real culprit and as she mentions her original suspicion regarding William Harness we may permissibly infer that he and the culprit were not one and the same. What Talfourd did with the note which was submitted to him in strict confidence is not known to us. Probably he returned it to Miss Mitford. In any case the letter from which we took our copy bore no clue, and the identity of the person who wrote the offending article cannot therefore be revealed. It is, however, quite clear from the postscript that Miss Mitford was apprehensive lest Macready should resort to law and that is a view which is strengthened by her appeal to Talfourd, who was a lawyer, to write his advice most minutely.

Whether Miss Mitford ever replied to Macready, and, if so, what was its purport, are questions which we can only surmise from a statement, made by Macready, some years later, but we do know that, for many years after, the great actor nursed a grievance against Miss Mitford and cherished a bitter resentful feeling against Harness, believing the latter to be the person who had written the Blackwood article. In his Diary, after an interval of eleven years—i.e. February, 1836—recalling his endeavours to be of service to Miss Mitford he writes of her as requiting him “by libel and serious injury,” while throughout that and the following year are many entries containing disparaging remarks about her and her “inability to write a play.”

Of Harness, in this same Diary, he wrote still more bitterly. “I believe the Rev. Mr. Harness was among my slanderers at the time” is a reference to the old grievance, written under date June 30, 1835. In the July following he classes Harness with those “who gain their livelihood and draw their gratifications from the imagined triumphs of their envious and malignant nature”; in March, 1836, he writes of Harness’ “blackguardism and rascality” and so on, frequently through the Diary until January 8, 1839. On this day Harness called on him by appointment to discuss a play by Mrs. Butler (Fanny Kemble) and, after the business was transacted, Macready detained him by saying there was another matter on which he wished to speak with him. “I observed to him that whatever faults of character might be ascribed to me, I was incapable of doing any one an injury wittingly; that my notions of honour and virtue, such as they were, were strictly revered by me, and if I had done him a wrong, I held myself bound to expatiate [sic] it in every possible way. I then mentioned to him the libellous article which in June, 1825, had been written against me in Blackwood’s Magazine; the effect it had had in raising the Press against me; the partial contradiction that Miss Mitford had given it.... He was evidently much embarrassed and seemed to suffer much; his mode of expressing himself was confused and rambling; he said that he must acknowledge that he was inculpated so far as that he had heard the story told by Miss Mitford, and had communicated it to the writer of the article, but that he had not written it.... I told him that I was very glad to hear that he was not the author, as I was happy to think well of all men, and was very sorry that I had suspected him of the fact. He was going away, when he turned back, having passed the door, and said, ‘I think we ought to shake hands.’ I gave him my hand, saying, ‘I was very happy to do so,’ and we parted. My heart was much lighter, and I fear his was much, very much heavier, as it is evident, though not the author, that he was deeply implicated in that shocking transaction—that assassination of my character. I think of him with perfect charity, and with the most entire and cheerful forgiveness.”[21]

Thus ended this extraordinary and lengthy feud begotten of a trifling incident which unwisdom magnified. Truly Miss Mitford might justly doubt the proverb that “in multitude of counsellors there is safety.” It was a sorry business in which neither of the participants can be said to have shone.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] George Colman the Younger, Examiner of Plays (1824-1836).

[21] The Diaries of William Charles Macready, 1833-1851, edited by William Toynbee, London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1912, 2 vols.

CHAPTER XIX
A SLAVE OF THE LAMP

The success of Our Village was really astonishing—it had entirely caught the public fancy. As proof of this we find in a letter to Sir William Elford, dated February 19, 1825, the statement that “Columbines and children have been named after Mayflower [one of her favourite dogs]; stage coachmen and postboys point out the localities; schoolboys deny the possibility of any woman’s having written the cricket-match without schoolboy help; and such men as Lord Stowell send to me for a key.” In addition to all this proof of popularity it is fairly evident that Campbell, who had originally thought the sketches not dignified enough for the pages of his New Monthly, must have relented somewhat, for in the same year she sent him two articles to the care of Mr. Colburn. This was probably due to the representations of William Harness, to whom, it will be remembered, Miss Mitford addressed herself on the matter.

Then, not to be outdone in loyal devotion to his friend, the woman of the hour, Haydon painted her portrait and exhibited it among portraits of other celebrities of the year. It was not a flattering likeness—a reproduction of it is given in these pages—and its reception, although not particularly hostile, was not altogether friendly. Haydon’s enemies—and he had many—sniggered and passed on; Miss Mitford’s friends nearly all commiserated her. “Now to the portrait,” says she in a letter to her friend, Mrs. S. C. Hall. “One friend of mine used to compare it to a cook-maid of sixty, who had washed her dishes and sat down to mend her stockings; another to Sir John Falstaff in the disguise of the old woman of Brentford; and a third to Old Bannister, in Moll Flagon. I have not myself seen it since it was finished, but there must have been something very formidable about it to put such comparisons into people’s heads.” With her usual good-nature she would not suffer Haydon or his work to be maligned, and so was kept well occupied in defending him.