a play from her
without even reading it. Thus encouraged she wrote a comedy named The
Witlings. Fortunately it was never acted or printed. We can, we think,
easily perceive from the little which is said on the subject in the
Diary, that The Witlings would have been damned, and that Murphy and
Sheridan thought so, though they were too polite to say so. Happily
Frances had a friend who was not afraid to give her pain. Crisp, wiser
for her than he had been for himself, read the manuscript in his lonely
retreat, and manfully told her that she had failed, that to remove
blemishes here and there would be useless, that the piece had abundance
of wit but no interest, that it was bad as a whole, that it would remind
every reader of the _Femmes Savantes_, which, strange to say, she had
never read, and that she could not sustain so close a comparison with
Moliere. This opinion, in which Dr. Burney concurred, was sent to
Frances in what she called a "hissing, groaning, cat-calling epistle."
But she had too much sense not to know that it was better to be hissed
and cat-called by her Daddy than by a whole sea of heads in the pit of
Drury-Lane Theatre; and she had too good a heart not to be grateful for
so rare an act of friendship. She returned an answer which shows how
well she deserved to have a judicious, faithful, and affectionate
adviser. "I intend," she wrote, "to console myself for your censure by
this greatest proof I have ever received of the sincerity, candour, and,
let me add, esteem, of my dear daddy. And as I happen to love myself
rather more than my play, this consolation is not a very trifling one.
This, however, seriously I do believe, that when my two daddies put
their heads together to concert that hissing, groaning, cat-calling
epistle they sent me, they felt as sorry for poor little Miss Bayes as
she could possibly do for herself. You see I do not attempt to repay
your frankness with the air of pretended carelessness. But, though
somewhat disconcerted just now, I will promise not to let my vexation
live out another day. Adieu, my dear daddy! I won't be mortified, and I
won't be _downed_; but I will be proud to find I have, out of my own
family, as well as in it, a friend who loves me well enough to speak
plain truth to me."

Frances now turned from her dramatic schemes to an undertaking far
better suited to her talents. She determined to write a new tale, on a
plan excellently contrived for the display of the powe