Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 71, No. 437, March 1852

No. CCCCXXXVII. MARCH, 1852. Vol. LXXI.
EDINBURGH: WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET; AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON. To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed. SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. No. CCCCXXXVII. MARCH, 1852. Vol. LXXI.
No one can have glanced at Our Village , or any of the charming sketches of Miss Mitford, without having been struck by the peculiar elegance, the raciness, the simplicity of her style. It is as free in all its movements as that pet of hers, the Italian greyhound she has made so familiar to us all—as free and as graceful. A beautiful style is no singularity in our days, and there are many orders of such beauty; nevertheless, Miss Mitford has a dialect of her own. It is a style gathered from familiarity with the classic, and especially the dramatic poets, and with whatever is most terse and elegant amongst our prose writers, and yet applied with perfect ease to the simplest details of life, to the real transaction and the daily scene before her. You would think every one was talking in the same manner; it is only Miss Mitford who speaks this dialect. It is as if any one should learn Italian from the works of Petrarch or Tasso, or any other of their classics, and be able to apply the language he had thus acquired without the least restraint to the common purposes of life; every Italian would understand him, and seem to speak like him, and yet he would remain in exclusive possession of his own Tuscan speech.
Miss Mitford is one of those who have made the discovery that there is always a California under our feet, if we look for it. She detected, by her own independent sagacity, and before the truth was so generally known and so generally acted upon as it is at present, that what most interests in books is precisely that which is nearest to us in real life. She did not find it necessary to go to the Alps or the Pyrenees for her landscape, nor to Spain or Constantinople for her men and women; she looked down the lane that led from her own cottage-door; she saw the children in it, and the loaded hay-cart; she saw Arabia with all her tents in that gipsy encampment where the same kettle seems to swing for ever between the same three poles—nomadic race, eternally wandering and never progressing. She looked out of her own window, and within it her own home—always cheerful, or always deserving to be such, from the cheerful spirit of its owner; and she found in all these things, near and dear to her, sufficient subjects for her pencil. And very faithfully she paints the village scene—with, at least, as much fidelity to truth as a graceful womanly spirit could summon up resolution enough to practise. A light something too golden falls uniformly over the picture.