BOOKS.

CHARLES BONER AND MISS MITFORD.*

Ix these pleasant volumes Miss Kettle has revived the memory of one of those men who inhabit, as it were, the atmosphere of literature, and who, without making any great mark in their own. proper persons, occupy a large place in the affections and iu the correspondence of writers of note. Miss Mitford was really fond of Charles Boner, and wrote him some scores of lively, gossippy letters, embodying literary and political judgments (particularly on the Emperor Napoleon) which read rather oddly now ; and he had intercourse with Wordsworth, Lever, Giffillan, the Arnolds, Carlyle, and a host of other notabilities. His own contributions• to literature were numerous ; a work on Transylvania and• Chamois-hunting in Bavaria were the natural and lively result of his long residence abroad in the family of a German nobleman ; and he wrote besides volumes of ballads, critical articles on• German literature for the English Press, and many translations. In 1865 he became the Vienna correspondent for the Daily News, and wrote most interesting letters. We note particularly those- on the unfortunate Archduke Maximilian.

Charles Boner was born in 1815, at a village near Bath, and' was a strong and beautiful boy until the age of six, when one of those cruel accidents befell him of which one shudders to read. A. young student under the elder Boner's tuition squeezed the hand of poor little Charles (in a fit of obstinate horse-play) so severely that, says the victim, " from that day forth for nine years I suffered severely and continuously. Yet I had my seasons of enjoyment, when for a few hours free from pain, I hopped about the room and desired nothing in the world." It was natural that. a child so circumstanced should dig and delve into all sorts of litera- ture, and so he laid the foundations of the versatile faculty for- which in later life he was remarkable. When he was a lad of six- teen he became tutor to the two sons of Constable, the painter, and ever remained in close intimacy with that family for nearly forty years. Mr. Boner went to East Bergholt with Charles Con- stable, and writes :—" I saw the scenes of all his great pictures ;. spots which were familiar to me, though I had never been Suffolk, for Constable so often talked to me about them, and I had seen so many sketches of them under various aspects, that it. seemed at last as if I, too, had lived bodily among them."

Boner was yet a very young man when, after the death of both his- parents, he became a permanent resident in Germany. An invite- tation from Baron Auguste Doernberg, the then Postmaster-General of Austria, took him to Ratisbon, and there he was offered the post of tutor in the family of Prince Thurn and Taxis, Baron. Doernberg's brother-in-law. This post, which he retained for twenty years, speedily grew into a position of varied respon- sibility and confidence. Here, in the free life of a German. nobleman's castle, the young English tutor got health and strength, and found a position far superior to his- nominal one. The friends of the house invited him to their- homes, and allowed him unlimited hunting. "In the royal domains of the King of Bavaria, and the forests of the Prince of Leiningen, and of many of the German nobles, he pursued the: chamois and other game with intense delight; and the exclusive circles of the highest society in Austria and Bavaria welcomed him with cordial kindness." He dedicated a book on "Forest Creatures" to Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, one of his. companions in sport, and he wrote much and well on the sylvan life wherein was his greatest delight.

In 1844-5 he passed some months in England, and then it Watls= that, seeing much literary society, he contracted a lasting intimacy with Miss Mitford, and began a correspondence which spread over- ten years of her remaining life. He seems to have attached more importance to her letters than to those of the many other remark- able people with whom he was associated, for Miss Kettle tells us that during the last month of his life, March, 1870, during the • Memoirs andleliers of Charles Bona•, with Letters of Mary Zama Mitford. Edited. by B. M. Kettle. London : Bentley.

progress of an illness which, though painful, had no appearance of being dangerous, Mr. Boner occupied himself in arranging and transcribing Miss Mitford's letters, intending to publish them in a valtme with a memoir. Owing to his long residence abroad, he only heard of the life of his old friend being given to the world after its publication.

On December 12, 1845, Miss Mitford fires off her first shot,— and what a correspondent she was ! how she read and read! how she wrote and wrote I In these days of post-cards and penny pipers we have no mental breath to expend on the feats of even twenty-five years ago ; and the authoress of Our Village belonged to an older generation, and had reminiscences of but lately extinguished franks. In this first letter she speaks of Casimir Delavigne, St. Beuve, and Balzac, of Sandman and Old Bogie, of Rudolf of Hapsburg, Ben Jonson, Dickens, Forster, Mark Lemon, and Douglas Jerrold, of Carlyle, Cromwell, Leslie, and Constable. The next combines Miss Edgeworth and Hans Christian Andersen ; and the third contains such a shower of proper names that to attempt to recapitulate them would be labour lost. About all such Miss Mitford says something gay and kindly, darting from one to another like an epistolary butter- fly, the sun always glistening on her wings as she sips from flower to flower. Her literary judgment is perhaps as true as can be expected, seeing that she read everything, and passed an -opinion on everything she read, without ever seeming to incur a literary indigestion. Yet one might think Balms, Count Joseph de Maistre, and the Diary of Madame D'Arblay would have had, taken conjointly, the effect of certain salts rashly partaken of by a drug-loving patient, who died because they " blew up inside."

But her practical judgment on what was likely to result in regard to pens or principles was oddly at fault. She tells us in February, 1847, that " Mr. Walter's (Times) health is failing, and the paper will have to combat the success of the Daily News." -Jupiter is Jupiter still, and likely to remain so ! But of all the astonishing pages to read now-a-days are those in which she adores Louis Napoleon. We have now a somewhat clear idea of the Ex- Emperor. We know how able in some directions he was, how failing in others ; we know his power of grasping certain large ideas, such as are involved in free-trade and in a kind of governmental socialism, and we have had awful experience of that moral flaw which caused rottenness to breed beneath the shadow of his authority. Here is Miss Mitford in 1853 :-

"Now, to come to my Emperor. How charmed I am with this marriage, the finest homage ever paid to woman and to love, and how more than charmed with the speech in which he announced it, so sud- den, so unexpected, so condensed, so full of bold and truthful appeal to -common human feeling Wise were the French to consolidate their Government and to choose the really great man now at their bead, to plan for them large measures and wise ameliorations. I rejoice in all that he has done, and think the Princess Matbilde a great simpleton to desert a man of genius for a mere common young prince."

Then of Paris improvements,—Mr. Bennoch goes to Paris and tells her that,—

" Not only in beauty, but in perfect drainage, supply of water, and work-people's habitations, Louis Napoleon has done in two years all that we have been talking about and have not done in twenty. Tell me anything you hear of this great man Yes, my Emperor is -indeed a man to be proud of. Tell me anything you hear of him or of his sweet wife. I suppose the Countess Taseher de la Pagerie is now in Paris. Those papers are admirable. It is delightful to see the solemn ,coxcomb Gnizot and the little scamp Thiers so completely put aside, and the Governments and Courts who held to one another's rottenness forced to come round. Can anybody depend on Austria and Prussia, -especially the latter."

Oh, Miss Mitford! Miss Mitford ! you were a most excellent, kind, clever, woman ; gifted with even a certain delicate genius of appreciation for art and literature, violets and hayfields, grey- hounds and village children ; but your political foresight was of the very flimsiest, and there is a whimsical interest in your -observations of twenty years ago which is due to their utter wrongheadedness, as proved by the events. We will conclude an extract from these amusing and clever letters by a very sweet -confession of faith from the old woman whose death-bed was so nigh

" We have seldom, I think, spoken of religion. I always firmly believed in the Divine Mission, but I used to worry myself about the manner of it. This long visitation, however, has been, I firmly believe, sent in mercy to draw me closely to Him. I have read the whole of the New "Testament through once, the Gospels twice, and am now going through them again for the third time ; and I feel that the mystery being above our finite faculties, the only way is to take it exactly as it is written, and throw ourselves on the mercy of God through the great Mediator."

Charles Boner was in England a year before Miss Mitford's death, and she welcomed him with the greatest delight.

In 1860 a new figure appears in the biography ; a little daughter,

Marie (of her mother we hear nothing), comes home from school, and settles with her father in Munich. "Before that time," says she, "he used often to come and visit me at school, and in the holidays we made delightful little excursions, on foot, together in the mountains of the Tyrol. I never was happier than at that time. The life we led together from the year 1860 until my marriage in 1865 was most happy,—we both felt it to be so ; I could not possibly think of any greater happiness than that it might always remain the Mile. My dear father showed me all I had to attend to in our housekeeping, and himself conducted my studies. We lived very quietly without going into society, and very modestly, as we had very little to spend in luxuries. My father thoroughly understood economy, and was practically self- denying." In September, 1865, Mr. Boner published, in London, his largest and most important work, Transylvania, and during the last years of his life he wrote incessantly for London news- papers, and, as his editor remarks, "his perfect knowledge of the German language, and familiarity with the literature, cus- toms, and politics of the German, Hungarian, Roumanian, and Sclavonic nations gave infinite variety as well as depth to his communications from Vienna to the different London jour- nals. He brought to bear on the voluminous topics set before him the full force of a most powerful and highly cultivated intellect, as well as an intimate acquaintance, such as few Englishmen could obtain, with society in the most exclusive circles." His health, however, suffered from the climate of the Austrian capital, and his daughter (who had lately married Professor Horschelt) says that every time he went to Pesth on political matters he had fever, and grew more weak each time. In 1869 he returned to Munich to live altogether with the Horschelts, and under their roof he died in April, 1870. In him the literary world lost a man well known, it is true, for vivid and excellent writing, but more remarkable in his own proper person for culture, goodness, and the possession of high social esteem, both in Germany and at home.