MISS MITFORD.*
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD, that "Prose Crabbe in the Sun" (to quote her friend Mrs. Browning's elaborate yet ingenuously felicitous phrase) is known to the present generation only as the author of Our Village. Yet her production was large and varied, and for forty years she held a place of real distinction in the literary world of her time. Her poems were not only praised but bought, she wrote tragedies which Macready and ICemble played to enthusiastic houses, and she was the close friend of many whose names are still famous,- yet in spite of all this her life was an extraordinarily quiet one. Indeed, except for one visit to Northumberland in her twentieth year (1806), she seems never to have travelled north of Reading, the ." Belford Regis" of her books, within three miles of which -Our Village was situated. Quiet as it was, however, her life had its tragedy. Fifty-five years of it were sacrificed to the caprice of a worthless and selfish father who, after gambling away his own and his wife's fortunes, spent the rest of his life in the complacent dissipation of his daughter's hardly-won earnings. By a singular fatality it was she herself who was responsible for his 'greatest success, 'when, at the age of ten, she chose a lottery ticket for him (numbered 2224, the total of her own years) which brought him in 220,000. Indeed, neither she nor her mother ever seemed able or even anxious 'to exercise any restraining influence over him. As early as 1807 we find his 'daughter . sending him sage advice as to his gambling--.- not urging him to abandon it, but advising him on the price Of lottery tickets and the expedience of confining his opera- tions to clubs where he knew the society., while in 1823 she writes pathetically of a proposal that her father should look out for some work, "I hope there is no want of duty in my wishing him to contribute his efforts with mine to our support." "A detestable old humbug," her lifelong friend William The Lip caul Friendships of Mary 1luss3r. Milford. By W• J. Roberta. t A Pri.ener tn Fairy'anil. By Algernon Blackwood, :
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Harness called him, but yet there must have been a -geniality and =charm about the old profligate, whom we first meet carrying his little daughter on his shoulders through the orchard of their silresford home, he holding her little feet and she clinging fast to his pigtail and tugging it so heartily that the ribbon comes off between her fingers and sends his hair and the powder flying down his back. Miss Mitford herself often said that had it not been for domestic pressure she would never have written at all, and it seems certain that, in happier. circumstances, she would not have produced Our Village That may perhaps incline us to look charitably on the "old humbug."
None the less, it is tragic to trace the lifelong sacrifice of so much brightness, courage, and affection, and one does not wonder that Mr. Roberts accepts Harness's view. For the rest, his book covers much the same ground as L'Estrange's volumes of Miss Mitford's life and "friendships." These, with her own writings, the delightful letters edited by Chorley, and the Memoirs of Harness, Mrs. Hall, and others, tell us practically all that there is to be known of this life of quiet heroism. Mr. Roberts draws on all these sources, and he has also had access to personal relics and memories which give his book additional value.
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