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MARY RUSSELL MITFORD

[Mary Russell Mitford was born on the 16th of December 1787, being the only child of fairly well-connected parents, who were then living at Arlesford in comfortable circumstances. But Dr. Mitford was a reckless and dissipated gamester, who rapidly reduced his family to poverty. His daughter wrote poetry and criticism for magazines, edited annuals and collections, turned her hand to plays and operas, with indefatigable energy; and thus, at the cost of her own health, managed to keep the wolf from the door. By 1820, however, the Mitfords were compelled to move to a tiny cottage at Three Mile Cross, the original "Village," a mile or two from Reading, and when the doctor died in 1843, more than £1600 in debt, she was almost worn out. By the help of friends and a pension, she lived on till 10th January 1855.

She published poems and plays, 1810-1828. Our Village appeared in a periodical, and afterwards in parts, 1824, 1826, 1828, 1830, 1832. It was followed by Belford Regis, 1835, other stories, and Recollections of a Literary Life, 1835. A Life of Miss Mitford, "related in a selection from her letters to her friends," 3 vols., edited by Harness and L'Estrange, appeared in 1870.]

"Of course I shall copy as closely as I can nature and Miss Austen-keeping, like her, to genteel country life; or rather going a little lower, perhaps; and, I am afraid, with more of sentiment and less of humour. I do not intend to commit these delinquencies, mind. I mean to keep as playful as I can; but I am afraid of their happening in spite of me . . . It will be called -at least, I mean it so to be-Our Village; will consist of essays and characters and stories, chiefly of country life, in the manner of The Sketch Book; connected by unity of locality, It is exceedingly playful and lively, and I think you will like it. Charles Lamb (the matchless Elia of the London Magazine) says nothing so fresh and characteristic has appeared for a long time."

and of purpose.

So wrote Miss Mitford in those delightful letters which, by her own account, "are just like so many bottles of ginger-beer, bouncing and frothy, and flying in everybody's face," concerning

the work with which her name has since become inseparably connected.

Her own estimate of her powers and their limitations is singularly discerning, though somewhat over modest, for Our Village is not entirely imitative. At another time, indeed, she ventured to criticise the authoress whom she thus frankly owns as her model, and she had doubtless some right to desire for Miss Austen "a little more taste, a little more perception of the graceful," since these are the very qualities in which her own writings excel. With an individuality of their own, a charm rather subtle than brilliant, they have the flavour of culture, and were clearly composed by a woman familiar with the world of books and in touch with the best intellects of the day-a professional in comparison with the authoress of Pride and Prejudice.

She was not without experience in composition when she began Our Village, though at that time, and apparently always, she found much difficulty in writing prose; being more at home in metre, and having accustomed herself by much letter-writing "to a certain careless sauciness, a fluent incorrectness,” that she feared would "not do at all for that tremendous correspondent, the public." We are less pedantic, however, than she anticipated, and rather choose to praise her style for the epistolary characteristics, which it exhibits in such perfection.

In her own day Miss Mitford was charged with working in the literal manner of Crabbe or Teniers, and it is certain that she drew entirely from her own experience. But, unlike them, she always sought out the beautiful and, despite her own protests to the contrary, regarded life with the eyes of a sentimentalist. "Are your characters and descriptions true?" asked her friend Sir William Elford, and she replied: "Yes! yes! yes! as true as is well possible. You, as a great landscape painter, know that, in painting a favourite scene, you do a little embellish, and can't help it; you avail yourself of happy accidents of atmosphere, and if anything be ugly, you strike it out, or if anything be wanting, you put it in. But still the picture is a likeness."

Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, has thus recorded, in the new illustrated edition of Our Village, her impressions of the little hamlet from which it was named: "I saw two or three commonplace looking houses skirting the dusty road, I saw a comfortable public house with an elm tree, and beside it another gray unpretentious little house, with a slate roof and square walls, and an

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inscription, The Mitford,' painted over the doorway." She who found so much beauty and goodness in this spot, must have been acting on the motto,

Be to her virtues very kind;

Be to her faults a little blind.

It may be acknowledged that Miss Mitford's work requires pruning, though the excuse is not far to seek :-"I write for remuneration," she says emphatically, "and I would rather scrub floors, if I could get as much by that healthier, more respectable, and more feminine employment." The urgent necessity for earning money, from which she was never absolved, forced her to use her pen when, to put it plainly, she had nothing to say. The most sprightly writing requires more body than is provided for some of her sketches, and the most charming spots or characters become tiresome when treated at too great length.

Thus it happens that the first series of Our Village is on the whole the best, and that her later books are again on a slightly lower level. In Belford Regis she touches on the comparatively new material of a small country town (i.e. Reading), and introduces the same character in several of the stories; features which led her to prefer it above her other works, and gave her some confidence in attempting to comply with "Mr. Bentley's desire for a novel." But, though Atherton, her one attempt at the novel proper, contains some charming passages, it is wanting in varied interest, and the progress of the story is too slow. She had not, in fact, enough imagination to construct a plot or create a character. Persons and scenes which were before her, whether in books or in nature, she could describe and even "compose," but more ambitious attempts proved a failure.

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Her letters are almost as interesting as Our Village, and the attractiveness of both springs from the writer's own personality, her enthusiasm for books and friends, her devotion to animals, and her great love for flowers, so prettily recognised by the gardeners, who were constantly calling plants after her, and sending her one of the first cuttings as presents." That which she loved, moreover, she observed with unerring attention, and described with a light touch and graphic humour, tempered and refined by a generous loving-kindness for humanity, which long trials could not weaken.

R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON.

HANNAH

THE prettiest cottage on our village-green is the little dwelling of Dame Wilson. It stands in a corner of the common, where the hedge-rows go curving off into a sort of bay round a clear bright pond, the earliest haunt of the swallow. A deep woody, green lane, such as Hobbema or Ruysdael might have painted, a lane that hints of nightingales, forms one boundary of the garden, and a sloping meadow the other; whilst the cottage itself, a low thatched irregular building, backed by a blooming orchard, and covered with honeysuckle and jessamine, looks like the chosen abode of snugness and comfort. And so it is.

Dame Wilson was a respected servant in a most respectable family, where she passed all the early part of her life, and which she quitted only on her marriage with a man of character and industry, and of that peculiar universality of genius which forms, what is called in country phrase, a handy fellow. He could do any sort of work; was thatcher, carpenter, bricklayer, painter, gardener, gamekeeper, "everything by turns, and nothing long." No job came amiss to him. He killed pigs, mended shoes, cleaned clocks, doctored cows, dogs, and horses, and even went so far as bleeding and drawing teeth in his experiments on the human subject. In addition to these multifarious talents, he was ready, obliging, and unfearing; jovial withal, and fond of good fellowship; and endowed with a promptness of resource which made him the general adviser of the stupid, the puzzled, and the timid. He was universally admitted to be the cleverest man in the parish; and his death, which happened ten years ago, in consequence of standing in the water, drawing a pond for one neighbour, at a time when he was over-heated by loading hay for another, made quite a gap in our village commonwealth. John Wilson had no rival and has had no successor, for the Robert Ellis whom certain youngsters would fain exalt to a copartnery

of fame is simply nobody—a bell-ringer, a ballad-singer, a troller of profane catches, a fiddler, a bruiser, a loller on alehouse benches, a teller of good stories, a mimic, a poet! What is all this to compare with the solid parts of John Wilson? Whose clock hath Robert Ellis cleaned? whose windows hath he mended? whose dog hath he broken? whose pigs hath he ringed? whose pond hath he fished? whose hay hath he saved? whose cow hath he cured? whose calf hath he killed? whose teeth hath he drawn? whom hath he bled? Tell me that, irreverent whipsters! No! John Wilson is not to be replaced. He was missed by the whole parish; and most of all he was missed at home. His excellent wife was left the sole guardian and protector of two fatherless girls; one an infant at her knee, the other a pretty handy lass about nine years old. Cast thus upon the world, there must have been much to endure, much to suffer; but it was borne with a smiling patience, a hopeful cheeriness of spirit, and a decent pride, which seemed to command success as well as respect in their struggle for independence. Without assistance of any sort, by needlework, by washing and mending lace and fine linen, and other skilful and profitable labours, and by the produce of her orchard and poultry Dame Wilson contrived to maintain herself and her children in their old comfortable home. There was no visible change; she and the little girls were as neat as ever; the house had still within and without the same sunshiny cleanliness, and the garden was still famous over all other gardens for its cloves, and stocks, and double wall-flowers. But the sweetest flower of the garden, and the pride and joy of her mother's heart, was her daughter Hannah. Well might she be proud of her! At sixteen Hannah Wilson was, beyond a doubt, the prettiest girl in the village, and the best. Her beauty was quite in a different style from the common country rosebud-far more choice and rare. Its chief characteristic was modesty. A light youthful figure, exquisitely graceful and rapid in all its movements; springy, elastic, and buoyant as a bird, and almost as shy; a fair innocent face, with downcast blue eyes, and smiles and blushes coming and going almost with her thoughts; a low soft voice, sweet even in its monosyllables; a dress remarkable for neatness and propriety, and borrowing from her delicate beauty an air of superiority not its own ;-such was the outward woman of Hannah. Her mind was very like her person; modest, graceful, gentle, affectionate, grateful, and generous above all.

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