THE FRIENDSHIPS OF MARY RUSSELL MITFORD.* ABOUT thirteen years ago,

Mr. L'Estrange published in three volumes a Life of Miss Mitford, "related in a selection of letters to her friends." The book, as we said at the time, abounds with delightful gossip and with personal reminiscences. True woman as she was, Mary Russell Mitford had the power -of winning love not merely from friends admitted to close fellow- ship, but from men and women who knew her only by corre- spondence. Her pretty country cottage, with its lovely garden, may be said to have been known all over England, and from all parts presents of flowers and of books were sent to Swallow- -field. She read voraciously, and her passion for books and flowers gave light and warmth to a life the anxieties of which would have crushed a less buoyant spirit. Miss Mitford, as all the world knows, had the misfortune to be cursed with a hand- some, good-for-nothing father, in whose virtues she believed implicitly. He was her idol, and neither the reckless squander- ing of 270,000, nor the bitter fact that she was forced to work like a slave to keep the wolf from the door, lessened the glow of -her devotion. "My life," she wrote, "is only valuable as being useful to him. I have lived for him, and for him only ;" and she adds that she had lost her health in the struggle. Some of Miss Mitford's friends seem to have taken her word for it that this scapegrace of a parent deserved all the affection she lavished upon him. 'Tell me anything of yourself," writes Miss Sedgwick, "anything of your noble father." The daughter's self-sacrifice is beautiful, but it is also not a little irritating. One does not like a sensible woman to set up an-idol of clay, believing all the while that it is made of pure gold.

Affectionate and warm-hearted though she was, Miss Mitford -does not spare her words in criticising books and men. She had strong prejudices and decided opinions, and expresses both with -the utmost frankness. Uncle Tom's Cabiii she cannot read, Longfellow's prose is trash, Leigh Hunt's want of truth pre- vents his being a poet, but" he might have been near to Chaucer, if he had only been true ; " Wordsworth sat next to her one year in London four days running," to the great endangerment," she writes, "of my admiration, for a man so wrapt up in the double worship of his own poetry, and of mere rank and riches in -others, I never did see." She considers Dickens, Jerrold, and Bulwer Lytton "all so vulgar, in their different ways." She is indignant with "a lad called Vernon Harcourt," for writing "inflated and bombastic" letters to the Times, abusing her 4' dear Emperor," the Third Napoleon ; sneers at Landseer for being "faithful to his worship of lords," and tells a saying -of the late Alexander Smith, the impertinence- and grace- lessness of which seem well-nigh incredible. Carlyle is accused of writing according to the ill-humour of the moment, and without the slightest regard to consistency and truth ; Macready is blamed for his "most offensive manner- ism ;" and Thackeray wins no praise for Esmond, which she finds 4‘ tiresomely long." "The English novels of these days," she writes, in 1853, "seem to me the more detestable the one than the other. Dickens all cant (Liberal cant, the worst sort) and caricature ; Thackeray all cynicism, with an affectation of fashionable experience; and -the lady writers, the Miss Jews- Imrys, the Miss Lynns, and tuU,e gueste, emulous of the passion

• and doing of George Sand, without her grossness, butalso without her genius and her beauty." Miss Mitford's heart was open as -day, and her strong feelings often overpowered her judgment. She declares that justice was not done by the newspapers to an -oratorio called "Jerusalem," because the composer was a gentle- man, well-born and highly educated. "Henry Chorley, who gives the tone to the musical critics, had the audacity to tell me so ;" and she adds,—" Trnly, of all the fine things Louis Napoleon is doing for France, none, to my mind, is so valuable as the putting down of journalism. That vile engine, the Press, is to genius of modern times what the rack was of old. I abhor it, not on my own account, for to me it is civil enough, but on the score of my betters."

• The Friendships of Man Russell Milford, as Recorded in Letters from her Literary Correspondents Edited by the Rev. A. G. L'Estrange. 2 vols. London ; Hurst and Blackett.

On the other hand, Miss Mitford's judgment of herself is uni- formly modest, and she does not over-rate her own work, except in preferring her dramas to her tales. The success of both was

very great. At first, indeed, like almost all dramatic writers, she had great difficulties to encounter, and was "thrown about like a cricket-ball between Kemble and Macready," but ulti- mately her plays drew full houses, and for Rienzi the writer

received "probably the largest sum given to any tragic author

during the century." Of this drama, eight thousand copies were sold in two months. One of Miss Mitford's correspondents calls her a "great poet," which assuredly she was not. Her dramas are nearly forgotten, but the author of Our Village and of Atherton has taken a place in our literature which is occupied

by few other writers. There is art in her stories, but no artifice, and the kind of charm we find in cottage gardens and woodland flowers.

She pleases every one whose taste has not been depraved by sen- sational fiction, and it is scarcely fanciful to say that her pages have the fragrance of clove pinks, of lavender, and of southern- wood. The success of these books was sufficient to satisfy the pride and ambition of any author, and they were as warmly welcomed in the United States as in England. "I must tell you," writes Mr. Fields, one of Miss Mitford's best friends and pleasantest correspondents, "with what delight I have read Atherton, and how everybody is charmed with it. Whittier

wrote me to-day a note filled with expressions of his gratitude to you for writing such an exquisite story. Every page is a gem, and our newspapers and periodicals are outvying each other in their words of praise. I know of no book that has appeared for years which has been received with such an out- burst of applause."

"You would soon get tired of authors, if you saw much of them," writes Miss Mitford, with perhaps a slight feeling of feminine spite ; but it is evident from these volumes, and is one of the best traits in them, that her friends loved the woman even more than they admired the author. Several of Miss Mitford's own letters are given, but a large portion of the book consists of letters addressed to her, or written about her. The compilation is not always edited satisfactorily. We complained, when noticing the Life, that allusions were often made which, for lack of an explanatory note, the reader would not under- stand. A similar fault occurs in these volumes, which also con- tain matter that is almost, if not wholly, irrelevant. We have noticed, too, several errors, misprints, and misstatements, one of the latter being that a certain S. J. Pratt preceded Southey as Poet Laureate.

These errors affect the literary character of the book, but they do not greatly diminish its interest. It is eminently readable and entertaining, neither is it without suggestiveness. For example, one feels upon reading it, how few years suffice to sweep away many a literary reputation. We wonder whether any of our readers are acquainted with that prolific author, R. A. Davenport; with George Darley, who wrote volumes of

poetry, and also, if we remember rightly, a mathematical text- book ; with Courtier, who wrote the Pleasures of Solitude; with Pratt, the supposed Laureate, and author of the Tears of Genius; with Digby Starkey, whose poems, published in 1847, gave Miss Edgeworth "exquisite enjoyment ;" or even with Mrs. Opie, who, after she became a Quakeress, was not permitted to invent a story. We wonder, too, if the once famous Mrs. Hnfland has even seventy readers, for her seventy works; and whether a poem called "Passion Flowers," by Mrs. Julia Howe, which delighted the Quaker poet Whittier in 1854, retains any fresh-

ness of poetic beauty still After all, quotations from a chatty book like this are better than speculations. Here is a characteristic passage from a letter written at Keswick by Mr. Ruskin, who, in Miss Mitford's judgment, "is the best letter-writer of his or any age ;"—

" I am recovering trust and tranquillity, though I had been wiser to come to your fair English pastures and flowering meadows, rather than to these moorlands, for they make me feel too painfully the splendour, not to be in any wise resembled or replaced, of those mighty scenes, which I can reach no more,—at least, for a time. I am thinking, however, of a tour among our English abbeys,—a feature which our ccuntry possesses of peculiar loveliness. As for our mountains or lakes, it is in vain they are defended for their finish or their prettiness. The people who admire them, after Switzerland, do not understand Switzerland,—even Wordsworth does not. Oar mountains are mere bogs and lumps of spongey moorland, and our lakes are little, swampy fishponds. It is curious I can take more pleasure in the chalk Downs of Sussex, which pretend to nothing, than in these would-be hills; and I believe I shall have more pleasure in your pretty Lowland scenery and richly-painted gardens, than in all the pseudo-sublime of the barren Highlands, except Killiekrankie. I went and knelt beside the stone that marks the spot of Claver's death-wound, and prayed for more such spirits—we need them now."

And here is an account still more characteristic, of a conversa- tion between Carlyle, whom Miss Mitford evidently cannot tolerate, and Fields, the American publisher, in her judgment the most brilliant of talkers, whose conversation "is for your pleasure and his own, without an idea of display ;"—

" So, Sir, you're an American?' quoth the self-sufficient Scotch- man. Mr. Fields assented.—' Ah, that's a wretched nation of your am. It's all wrong. It always has been wrong from the vera beginning. That grete mon of yours—George' (did any one under the sun ever dream of calling Washington George before), your grate raon, George, was a monstrous bore, and wants taking down a few hundred pegs.'—` Really, Mr. Carlyle,' replied my friend, you are the last man in the world from whom I should have expected such an observation. Look at your own book on Cromwell ! What was Washington, but Cromwell, without his personal ambition and with. out his fanaticism.'—' Eh, Sir,' responded Carlyle, George had neither ambition, nor religion, nor any good quality under the sun.— George was just Oliver with all the juice squeezed out !' Another thing in Carlyle displeased him (Mr. Fields) far more ; every one knows that Emerson makes him a perfect idol, and it was thought that if Carlyle cared for any one in the world, it was for Emerson. I have heard it said of them, they are not only like brothers, but like twin-brothers. Well, remember that Emerson and Hawthorne both live at Concord, and you will appreciate the kindness of Mr. Carlyle's speech. Isna there a place called Concord near ye ? What like is it ?'—' A pretty little New England town,' was Mr. Fields' answer, 'of no political importance, bat lively and pleasant as a residence.'—' Pretty ! lively !—ye ken I had fancied it a dull, dreary place, wi' a drowsy river making believe to creep through it ; and muddy, and stagnant like the folk that inhabit it."

We have not space even to recount the number of notable personages introduced in these pages. Miss Sedgvrick, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Hewitt, Mrs. Hofland, and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Eliot Warburton, Serjeant Talfourd, Mrs. Opie, N. P. Willis, and last and best of all, Miss Barrett, who will be better known in poetical history as Mrs. Browning, all take a share in the story of Miss Iditford's life. Barely more than a quarter of a century has passed since Miss Mitford's death, and now, with one exception, for Mrs. Hovritt is still living, all these friends of hers, and many more that might be mentioned, have been gathered to their fathers. It is after reading a narrative like this, recorded in letters from persons whose voices and features are still remembered, that one feels the truth of Burke's saying,—" What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue !"