Mary Russell Mitford

by William James Roberts

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Miss Mitford was wrong in this; Moore went to a cottage near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire.

CHAPTER XII
DWINDLING FORTUNES AND A GLEAM OF SUCCESS

Miss Mitford’s great and growing affection for the simple delights of the country is amply proved in some of the letters which she wrote to Sir William Elford during the years 1812-1815, and in the publication of her poems on Watlington Hill and Weston Grove. Of these two works Watlington Hill is, on the whole, in praise of coursing, although it also contains some fine descriptions of scenery which all who know the locality will recognize and appreciate. The piece was originally published as a separate poem and dedicated to “James Webb, Esq., and William Hayward, Esq.,” two coursing friends of her father’s, the last-named being the owner of the Watlington Farm which Dr. Mitford made his headquarters whenever a coursing meeting was in progress in the district. In this form it was published by A. J. Valpy, but later on was embodied in a volume entitled Dramatic Scenes, and published in 1827, by George B. Whittaker.

Weston Grove is a description of the place of that name, near Southampton Water, then the seat of William Chamberlayne, Esq., M.P.—another friend of the Mitfords—to whom the poem was inscribed. Neither of these works had a great sale.

In addition to these Miss Mitford made, in 1813, an attempt to produce a play entitled The King of Poland, concerning which she wrote to her father that “it will be in five acts instead of three, and runs much more risk of being too long than too short. My favourite character is a little saucy page ... and who is, I think, almost a new character on the English stage. We have, it is true, pages in abundance, but then they commonly turn out to be love-lorn damsels in disguise. Now mine is a bona-fide boy during the whole play.”

Late in the year 1815 we find her telling Sir William Elford that she has “been teased by booksellers and managers, and infinitely more by papa, for a novel and a play; but, alas! I have been obliged to refuse because I can only write in rhyme. My prose—when I take pains, is stiffer than Kemble’s acting, or an old maid’s person, or Pope’s letters, or a maypole—when I do not, it is the indescribable farrago which has at this moment the honour of saluting your eyes. This is really very provoking, because I once—ages ago—wrote four or five chapters of a novel, which were tolerably lively and entertaining, and would have passed very well in the herd, had they not been so dreadfully deficient in polish and elegance. Now it so happens that of all other qualities this unattainable one of elegance is that which I most admire and would rather possess than any other in the whole catalogue of literary merits. I would give a whole pound of fancy (and fancy weighs light), for one ounce of polish (and polish weighs heavy). To be tall, pale, thin, to have dark eyes and write gracefully in prose, is my ambition; and when I am tall, and pale, and thin, and have dark eyes, then, and not till then, will my prose be graceful.”

In this outline of qualifications for the writing of graceful prose Miss Mitford did herself scant justice, as time has proved; for while her verse is forgotten, it is her prose alone which has lived and by which she is remembered. Had personal bulk been the deciding factor, then, assuredly she would have been ruled out, for in a previous letter to Sir William—with whom, by the way, she was now on such intimate terms that personal matters of this sort were freely discussed—she had informed him of the “deplorable increase of my beautiful person. Papa talks of taking down the doors, and widening the chairs, and new hanging the five-barred gates, and plagues me so, that any one but myself would get thin with fretting. But I can’t fret; I only laugh, and that makes it worse. I beg you will get a recipe for diminishing people, and I will follow it; provided always it be not to get up early, or to ride on horseback, or to dance all night, or to drink vinegar, or to cry, or to be ‘lady-like and melancholy,’ or not to eat, or laugh, or sit, or do what I like; because all these prescriptions have already been delivered by divers old women of both sexes, and constantly rejected by their contumacious patient.” And this she supplemented by likening herself to “a dumpling of a person tumbling about like a cricket ball on uneven ground, or a bowl rolling among nine-pins.”

Of her prose, we shall find that her earliest descriptive pieces were contained in the letters sent to Sir William and, although they may lack the grace of the later finished work written for publication, they do, at least, prove their author’s possession of “the seeing eye.”

“I am just returned from one of those field rambles which in the first balmy days of spring are so enchanting. And yet the meadows, in which I have been walking, are nothing less than picturesque. To a painter they would offer no attraction—to a poet they would want none. Read and judge for yourself in both capacities. It is a meadow, or rather a long string of meadows, irregularly divided by a shallow, winding stream, swollen by the late rains to unusual beauty, and bounded on the one side by a ragged copse, of which the outline is perpetually broken by sheep walks and more beaten paths, which here and there admit a glimpse of low white cottages, and on the other by tall hedgerows, abounding in timber, and strewn like a carpet with white violets, primroses, and oxlips. Except that occasionally over the simple gates you catch a view of the soft and woody valleys, the village churches and the fine seats which distinguish this part of Berkshire, excepting this short and unfrequent peep at the world, you seem quite shut into these smiling meads.

“Oh, how beautiful they were to-day, with all their train of callow goslings and frisking lambs, and laughing children chasing the butterflies that floated like animated flowers in the air, or hunting for birds’ nests among the golden-blossomed furze! How full of fragrance and of melody! It is when walking in such scenes, listening to the mingled notes of a thousand birds, and inhaling the mingled perfume of a thousand flowers, that I feel the real joy of existence. To live; to share with the birds and the insects the delights of this beautiful world; to have the mere consciousness of being, is happiness.”

That was her picture of Spring. She improved as the year rolled on, and the next January gave play for her pen in a description of hoar-frost.

“A world formed of something much whiter than ivory—as white, indeed, as snow—but carved with a delicacy, a lightness, a precision to which the massy, ungraceful, tottering snow could never pretend. Rime was the architect; every tree, every shrub, every blade of grass was clothed with its pure incrustations; but so thinly, so delicately clothed, that every twig, every fibre, every ramification remained perfect; alike indeed in colour, but displaying in form to the fullest extent the endless, infinite variety of nature. This diversity of form never appeared so striking as when all the difference of colour was at an end—never so lovely as when breaking with its soft yet well-defined outline on a sky rather grey than blue. It was a scene which really defies description.”

It was during this period, notably in 1812, that Miss Mitford must, metaphorically speaking, have begun “to feel her feet” in literary matters. The adulation of her father’s friends in London, backed up by the reviews, which were, generally, favourable to her work, were sufficient proof that she had a public and that, in time, she might hope to secure something like a regular and even handsome income from her pen. In this she was encouraged by Sir William Elford, who did all that was possible to impress upon her the necessity for studied and polished work. To this end he informed her that he was carefully saving her letters, playfully hinting that they might prove valuable some day. This may account for the “high, cold, polish” which William Harness deprecated. The hint was not lost on her and drew from her an amusing and, as events have proved, prophetic reply: “I am highly flattered, my dear Sir William, to find that you think my letters worth preserving. I keep yours as choice as the monks were wont to keep the relics of their saints; and about sixty years hence your grandson or great grandson will discover in the family archives some notice of such a collection, and will send to the grandson of my dear cousin Mary (for as I intend to die an old maid, I shall make her heiress to all my property, i.e. my MSS.) for these inestimable remains of his venerable ancestor. And then, you know, my letters will be rummaged out, and the whole correspondence be sorted and transcribed, and sent to the press, adorned with portraits, and facsimiles, and illustrated by lives of the authors, beginning with the register of their birth, and ending with their epitaphs. Then it will come forth into the world, and set all the men a-crowing and talking over their old nonsense (with more show of reason, however, than ordinary) about the superiority of the sex. What a fine job the transcriber of my letters will have! I hope the booksellers of those days will be liberal and allow the poor man a good price for his trouble; no one but an unraveller of state cyphers can possibly accomplish it,”—this in allusion to the occasional illegibility of her handwriting which elsewhere she described as “hieroglyphics, which the most expert expounders of manuscripts fail to decipher.”

Reference to her manuscripts recalls the trouble some of them entailed on young Valpy, the printer—really a long-suffering and estimable young man—and his staff. For a writer so fully aware of her shortcomings in this matter, as was Miss Mitford, she was extraordinarily impatient and exacting. Poor Valpy did his best according to his lights—and these were not inconsiderable—and was more than usually anxious in the setting-up of Miss Mitford’s work, seeing that, as she remarked in one of her letters, he had “dandled me as an infant, romped with me as a child, and danced with me as a young woman,” but by reason of which, she unkindly concluded, he “finds it quite impossible to treat me or my works with the respect due to authorship.”

Judging by the hundreds of Miss Mitford’s letters which we have handled, full of closely-written and often indecipherable characters, we are of opinion that she was singularly fortunate in finding a printer able and willing to ascertain their meaning. Her condolences with her friend, Sir William, on his “press-correcting miseries” are, though extravagant, very diverting and, in these days of trade-unionism, throw an interesting light on the personnel of Valpy’s little establishment in Tooke’s Court. “I am well entitled to condole with you, for I have often suffered the same calamity. It is true that my little fop of a learned printer has in his employ three regularly-bred Oxonians, who, rather than starve as curates, condescend to marshal commas and colons, and the little magical signs which make the twenty-four letters, as compositors; and it is likewise true, that the aforesaid little fop sayeth—nay, I am not sure that he doth not swear—that he always gives my works to his best hands. Now, as it is not mannerly for a lady to say ‘you fib,’ I never contradict this assertion, but content myself with affirming that it is morally impossible that the aforesaid hands can have that connection with a head which is commonly found to subsist between those useful members. Some great man or other—Erasmus, I believe—says that ‘Composing is Heaven, preparing for publication Purgatory, and correcting for the press’—what, must not be mentioned to ‘ears polite.’ And truly, in my mind, the man was right. From these disasters I have, however, gained something:—‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’; and my misfortunes have supplied me with an inexhaustible fund of small charity towards my unfortunate brethren, the mal-printed authors. For, whereas I used to be a most desperate and formidable critic on plural or singular, definite and indefinite, commas and capitals, interrogations and apostrophes, I have now learnt to lay all blunders to the score of the compositor, and even carry my Christian benevolence so far that, if I meet with divers pages of stark, staring nonsense (and really one does meet with such sometimes), instead of crying, ‘What a fool this man must be—I’ll read no more of his writing!’ I only say, ‘How unlucky this man has been in a compositor! I can’t possibly read him until he changes his printer.’” Nevertheless, and although there might be an occasional author glad to shelter himself behind such an excuse, the fact remains that the work which emanated from Valpy’s press is entitled to the highest encomiums—despite his three Oxonians who, choosing the better part, preferred to compose type rather than sermons.

There is no record that Miss Mitford published anything from the year 1812—when Watlington Hill appeared—until 1819, the interval being occupied with various short trips to London, most of which were, however, only undertaken at the urgent request of friends who were keen on offering hospitality and entertainment. But for this hospitality and the assurance that the visits would entail little or no expense, it is evident that they could not have been indulged in. The Chancery suit still dragged its weary length along and the Doctor continued his lengthy jaunts to town, each trip being followed by the infliction of fresh privation on his wife and daughter. The large retinue of servants which had been installed when the family took possession of Bertram House, had dwindled gradually, until at last it was represented by one, or, at most, two. There was no lady’s maid, and the footman had been replaced by a village lad who, when not waiting at table, had to make himself useful in the garden or stable—the jobs he was really only fitted for. The carriage-horses had gone and were replaced by animals which could be commandeered for farm-work; the result being that, as they were oftenest on the farm, they were rarely available for use in the carriage, thus curtailing the pleasure of the ladies, both of whom greatly enjoyed this form of exercise. Finally, when the carriage required to be repaired and painted, it was found that there was no money in hand, so it was sold and never replaced.

Mrs. Mitford had the greatest difficulty in getting sufficient housekeeping money wherewith to meet their quite modest expenses, until at last the tradesmen refused to supply goods unless previous accounts were settled and ready money paid for the goods then ordered. They were really in the most desperate straits for money—the daughter actually contemplated the opening of a shop—and in one letter we are told that Mrs. Mitford begged her husband to send her a one-pound note, as they were in need of bread! This represented actual want, and yet, through it all, there was scarcely any diminution in the kennel, the occupants of which were a source of the greatest anxiety to Mrs. Mitford, who frequently did not know whither to turn in order to obtain food for them.

In perusing the letters which were written to the various friends of the family during this period, it is astonishing to find little or no evidence of the distress under which the writer suffered. Miss Mitford’s optimism was remarkable, whilst her belief in her father was so strong that even when she found that their miserable condition was due to his losses at the gaming-tables, she only commiserated him and blamed others for cheating and wronging so admirable a man, an attitude of mind which her mother shared!

It was towards the end of the year 1818 that she seriously thought of turning her attention to prose, encouraged by Sir William Elford, who had been struck by her descriptions of the neighbourhood in which she lived. She conceived the idea of writing short sketches illustrative of country scenes and manners, and when she had executed a few of these to her own and mamma’s satisfaction, they were submitted to Thomas Campbell as possible contributions to the New Monthly Magazine, of which he was then the Editor. He would have nothing to do with them, nor did he encourage the writer to try them elsewhere. Nothing daunted, she offered them to one or two other Editors, but still met with refusal until she tried the Lady’s Magazine, the editor of which had the good sense not only to accept them but asked for more. The result to the magazine was that its circulation went up by leaps and bounds, and the name of Mary Russell Mitford, hitherto known only to a limited circle, became almost a household word.

CHAPTER XIII
LITERARY FRIENDS AND LAST DAYS AT BERTRAM HOUSE

“What have you been doing, my dear friend, this beautiful autumn?” wrote Miss Mitford to Sir William Elford, towards the end of 1817. “Farming? Shooting? Painting? I have been hearing and seeing a good deal of pictures lately, for we have had down at Reading Mr. Hofland, an artist whom I admire very much (am I right?), and his wife, whom, as a woman and an authoress, I equally love and admire. It was that notable fool, His Grace of Marlborough, who imported these delightful people into our Bœotian town. He—the possessor of Blenheim—is employing Mr. Hofland to take views at Whiteknights—where there are no views; and Mrs. Hofland to write a description of Whiteknights—where there is nothing to describe.[18] I have been a great deal with them and have helped Mrs. Hofland to one page of her imperial quarto volume; and to make amends for flattering the scenery in verse, I comfort myself by abusing it in prose to whoever will listen.” The Hoflands were an interesting couple, and Mrs. Hofland, in particular, became one of Miss Mitford’s dearest friends and most regular correspondents. She was already an author of some repute and an extremely prolific writer. In the year 1812 she wrote and published some five works, including The Son of a Genius, which had a considerable vogue. Previous to her marriage with Hofland she had been married to a Mr. Hoole, a merchant of Sheffield, who died two years after their marriage, leaving her with an infant four months old and a goodly provision in funds invested. Owing to the failure of the firm which was handling her money, she was left on the verge of poverty and had a bitter struggle to secure enough to live upon. A volume of poems which she published in 1805 brought her a little capital, with which she was enabled to open a boarding-school at Harrogate; but in this venture she failed, and then took to writing for a living. In 1808 she married Mr. Hofland, an event which crowned her troubles for, although outwardly there was no sign of it, there is every certainty that the overbearing selfishness of Hofland and his lack of consideration for any but himself, made their home-life almost unendurable. It will, therefore, be understood why so much sympathy came to exist between Miss Mitford and her friend, seeing that they were both suffering from an almost similar trouble, although the matter was seldom mentioned between them.

Mrs. Hofland was an extremely pious woman, and she was also something of a busybody, though possibly one whose interest in the affairs of others was never unpleasant enough to cause trouble. Hearing of the Elford correspondence, she twitted Miss Mitford with having matrimonial designs in that quarter, which drew from the latter the clever retort: “The man is too wise; he has an outrageous fancy for my letters (no great proof of wisdom that, you’ll say), and marrying a favourite correspondent would be something like killing the goose with the golden eggs.”

Another of the notables who came prominently into Miss Mitford’s life at this period was young Thomas Noon Talfourd, the son of a Reading brewer. He had been educated at the Reading Grammar School under Dr. Valpy, and “began to display his genius by publishing a volume of most stupid poems before he was sixteen.” The description is, of course, Miss Mitford’s. Nevertheless, he who wrote such detestable poetry, “wrote and talked the most exquisite prose.” Upon leaving school he was sent “to Mr. Chitty a-special-pleading; and now he has left Mr. Chitty and is special pleading for himself—working under the Bar, as the lawyers call it, for a year or two, when he will be called; and I hope, for the credit of my judgment, shine forth like the sun from behind a cloud. You should know that he has the very great advantage of having nothing to depend on but his own talents and industry; and those talents are, I assure you, of the very highest order. I know nothing so eloquent as his conversation, so powerful, so full; passing with equal ease from the plainest detail to the loftiest and most sustained flights of imagination; heaping with unrivalled fluency of words and of ideas, image upon image and illustration upon illustration. Never was conversation so dazzling, so glittering. Listening to Mr. Talfourd is like looking at the sun; it makes one’s mind ache with excessive brilliancy.”

Miss Mitford’s prophecy as to Talfourd’s future was more than fulfilled, and he came, at length, not only to illumine the legal profession but to shed a considerable lustre on literature and the drama.

A year or two after the writing of the eulogy just quoted, Talfourd was in Reading in a professional capacity and caused a mild sensation by his masterly and eloquent pleading. Miss Mitford went, with her father, to hear him, and was so moved that she wrote the following sonnet:—

“On Hearing Mr. Talfourd Plead in the Assize-Hall at Reading, on his first Circuit,

March, 1821.

Wherefore the stir? ’Tis but a common cause

Of cottage plunder: yet in every eye

Sits expectation;—murmuring whispers fly

Along the crowded court;—and then a pause;—

And then a clear, crisp voice invokes the laws,

With such a full and rapid mastery

Of sound and sense, such nice propriety,

Such pure and perfect taste, that scarce the applause

Can be to low triumphant words chained down

Or more triumphant smiles. Yes, this is he,

The young and eloquent spirit, whose renown

Makes proud his birth place! a high destiny

Is his; to climb to honour’s palmy crown

By the strait path of truth and honesty.”

During the year 1817, Sir William Elford lost his wife. She was a most estimable woman, and although her husband had, occasionally, called on the Mitfords—turning aside, for that purpose, from the main road which ran through Reading—in his journeys from the west to London, she had never made their acquaintance and only knew of them by repute and what she gathered from the voluminous correspondence which passed between her husband and his literary friend. News of this lady’s death drew from Miss Mitford a charming letter of condolence which must have proved to Sir William how large a place he held in her thoughts: “Your very touching letter, my dear friend, brought me the first intelligence of the dreadful loss you have experienced. I had not even any idea of danger, or surely, most surely, I should never have intruded on you those letters whose apparently heartless levity I am now shocked to remember. I write now, partly in pursuance of your own excellent system, to avoid, as much as may be, prolonging and renewing your sorrow, and partly to assure you of our sincere and unaffected sympathy. We had not, indeed, the happiness of a personal acquaintance with Lady Elford, but the virtues of the departed are best known in the grief of the survivors. To be so lamented is to have been most excellent. And the recollected virtue, which is now agony, will soon be consolation. God bless and comfort you all!

“I hope soon to hear a better account both of yourself and your daughters; but do not think of writing out of form or etiquette. Write when you will, and what you will, certain that few, very few, can be more interested in your health or happiness than your poor little friend.”

From this date the correspondence between the two underwent a considerable change in tone and feeling. It became less stilted, suggesting to the unbiassed reader the idea that the existence of Lady Elford had, hitherto, forced the young person at Bertram House to mind her P’s and Q’s, “which I detest having to do.” She may, possibly, have adopted this freer style of writing in the hope of diverting Sir William from thinking of his bereavement. In any case the happier style of writing thus begun was never abandoned, and the consequence was that, thereafter, they contained more of that life and spirit which her friend Harness thought so characteristic of her writings when she let her words drop without any premeditation, at the prompting of her emotions.

“I have lately heard a curious anecdote of Mr. Coleridge,” she writes, “which, at the risk—at the certainty—of spoiling it in the telling, I cannot forbear sending you. He had for some time relinquished his English mode of intoxication by brandy and water for the Turkish fashion of intoxication by opium; but at length the earnest remonstrance of his friends, aided by his own sense of right, prevailed on him to attempt to conquer this destructive habit. He put himself under watch and ward; went to lodge at an apothecary’s at Highgate, whom he cautioned to lock up his opiates; gave his money to a friend to keep; and desired his druggist not to trust him. For some days all went on well. Our poet was ready to hang himself; could not write, could not eat, could not—incredible as it may seem—could not talk. The stimulus was wanting, and the apothecary contented. Suddenly, however, he began to mend; he wrote, he read, he talked, he harangued; Coleridge was himself again! And the apothecary began to watch within doors and without. The next day the culprit was detected; for the next day came a second supply of laudanum from Murray’s, well wrapped up in proof sheets of the Quarterly Review.”

As a foil to this she tells, in the next letter, a story of Haydon the painter—poor, embittered disappointed Haydon, who, later, killed himself—which she had just heard from Mrs. Hofland. “He was engaged to spend the day at Hampstead, one Sunday, with some of the cleverest unbelievers of the age ... and being reproached with coming so late, said with his usual simplicity, ‘I could not come sooner—I have been to church.’ You may imagine the torrent of ridicule that was raised upon him. When it had subsided, ‘I’ll tell ye what, gentlemen,’ said he, ‘I knew when I came amongst ye—and knowing this it is not, perhaps, much to my credit that I came—that I was the only Christian of the party; but I think you know that I will not bear insult, and I now tell you all that I shall look upon it as a personal affront if ever this subject be mentioned by you in my hearing; and now to literature, or what you will!’”

During 1818 Miss Mitford paid another short visit to the Perrys at Tavistock House in Tavistock Square, evidently arranged with the idea of keeping their young friend well before the public. “The party to-day consists of the Duke of Sussex, Lord Erskine, and some more. I don’t want to dine with them and most sincerely hope we shall not, for there is no one of literary note; but I am afraid we shall not be able to get off.” They did not get off, and Miss Mitford “had the honour of being handed into the dining-room by that royal porpoise, the Duke of Sussex, who complained much of want of appetite, but partook of nearly every dish on the table.” Concerning this lack of appetite, she subsequently wrote to Sir William Elford: “Never surely did man eat, drink, or swear so much, or talk such bad English. He is a fine exemplification of the difference between speaking and talking; for his speeches, except that they are mouthy and wordy and commonplace, and entirely without ideas, are really not much amiss.” While on this visit she must have heard from some candid friend of Mr. Perry’s the following story of Hazlitt’s revenge and, later, detailed it with great delight—for she dearly loved a joke, even at the expense of her friends.

Hazlitt had been contributing a series of articles, on the English Stage, to various newspapers, particularly to the Morning Chronicle, of which, it will be remembered, Perry was the Editor. Unfortunately Hazlitt’s “copy” came pouring in at the very height of the advertisement season, much to Perry’s disgust, who used “to execrate the d—d fellow’s d—d stuff.” But it was good “copy,” although the Editor had no idea that its writer was a man of genius, and having “hired him as you’d hire your footman, turned him off with as little or less ceremony than you would use in discharging the aforesaid worthy personage,” because he wrote a masterly but damaging critique on Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of Perry’s friends. “Last winter, when his Characters of Shakespeare and his lectures had brought him into fashion, Mr. Perry remembered him as an old acquaintance and asked him to dinner, and a large party to meet him, to hear him talk, and show him off as the lion of the day. The lion came—smiled and bowed—handed Miss Bentley to the dining-room—asked Miss Perry to take wine—said once ‘Yes’ and twice ‘No’—and never uttered another word the whole evening. The most provoking part of this scene was, that he was gracious and polite past all expression—a perfect pattern of mute elegance—a silent Lord Chesterfield; and his unlucky host had the misfortune to be very thoroughly enraged without anything to complain of.”

Reading was a place of great excitement during the year 1818, the resignation of the Member, Sir John Simeon, necessitating a general election. This brought Dr. Mitford back from Town post-haste, for he counted electioneering among his special delights, as we have previously noted. The occasion furnishes us with one of the few recorded instances of Mrs. Mitford shaking herself free from the cares of the household in order to be with and carefully watch her haphazard spouse. “Papa is going to stay in Reading the whole election, and mamma is going to take care of him. Very good in her, isn’t it? But papa does not seem to me at all grateful for this kind resolution, and mutters—when she is quite out of hearing—something about ‘petticoat government.’”

The candidate was Fyshe Palmer, who not only won the election but continued in the representation of Reading for eighteen years. “He is,” wrote Miss Mitford, “vastly like a mop-stick, or rather, a tall hop-pole, or an extremely long fishing-rod, or anything that is all length and no substance; three or four yards of brown thread would be as like him as anything, if one could contrive to make it stand upright. He and papa were riding through the town together, and one of the voters cried out, ‘Fish and Flesh for ever!’ Wit is privileged just now.”

Mr. Palmer’s wife was the Lady Madelina, a daughter of the Duke of Gordon, and she and Miss Mitford became very good friends. Miss Mitford’s anxiety for Palmer’s success was due not so much because of his politics as for the promise he had given her of following in the footsteps of his predecessor and keeping her well supplied with “franks,” if elected. His promise he, doubtless, intended to keep, but as Miss Mitford despairingly wrote: “he has the worst fault a franker can have: he is un-come-at-able. One never knows where to catch him. I don’t believe he is ever two days in a place—always jiggeting about from one great house to another. And such strides as he takes, too! Oh! for the good days of poor Sir John Simeon! He was the franker for me! Stationary as Southampton Buildings, solid as the doorpost, and legible as the letters on the brass-plate! I shall never see his fellow.”

Some time after the election, when, indeed, it was a thing forgotten, Dr. Valpy, the head-master of the Grammar School, decided to have a Greek play performed by the boys, and to this function the Mitfords were invited. The play was the Hercules Furens of Euripides and, of course, Miss Mitford made fun of the whole performance, especially of the last scene when, to slow music, the curtain dropped on “Theseus and Hercules in the midst of a hug which assuredly no Greek poet, painter or sculptor ever dreamt of. That hug was purely Readingtonian—conceived, born and bred in the Forbury.” However, the play was well received and became an annual fixture, with Miss Mitford as the official reporter or, as she put it, the “official puffer for the Reading paper.”

The year was also notable for the arrival in Reading of Henry Hart Milman as Vicar of St. Mary’s, and of the Duke of Wellington, who came in order to look over Strathfieldsaye, Lord Rivers’ estate, some distance beyond that of the Mitfords along the Basingstoke Road, which the Nation proposed he should accept as a tribute of its gratitude. “His Grace comes to look at it sometimes,” wrote Miss Mitford, “and whirls back the same day. He is a terrible horse-killer.”

Towards the close of the year 1819 the Chancery suit came to an end. Mr. Elliott—the Doctor’s opponent and a Bond Street upholsterer—visited Bertram House, saw Dr. Mitford, had a straight talk with him and, as Miss Mitford recorded, “this long affair of eight years was settled in eight minutes.”

With the settlement an accomplished fact, the Mitfords began to look about for an abode of humbler pretentions. London was suggested and promptly vetoed, as was also the idea of settling in Reading. Finally they selected a cottage at Three Mile Cross, situated by the side of the Basingstoke Road and distant about a mile from their old home. It was a wrench to the ladies to leave Bertram House, despite the fact that it had been the scene of so much distress and want. “I shall certainly break my heart when I leave these old walls and trees,” wrote Miss Mitford, but the blow was softened by the thought that she would still be able to wander about the fields and lanes which were so familiar and so dear to her, and, as was her wont on such occasions, gave vent to her feelings in a little sonnet:—

“Adieu, beloved and lovely home! Adieu,

Thou pleasant mansion, and ye waters bright,

Ye lawns, ye aged elms, ye shrubberies light

(My own cotemporary trees, that grew

Even with my growth); ye flowers of orient hue,

A long farewell to all! Ere fair to sight

In summer-shine ye bloom with beauty dight,

Your halls we leave for scenes untried and new.

Oh, shades endeared by memory’s magic power,

With strange reluctance from your paths I roam!

But home lives not in lawn, or tree, or flower,

Nor dwells tenacious in one only dome.

Where smiling friends adorn the social hour,

Where they, the dearest are, there will be home.”

Bertram House is a thing of the past, for there is little left of the building which the Mitfords knew. Another mansion occupies the site, and only the trees and shrubberies remain as evidence of Dr. Mitford’s folly; while the name, which marked the Doctor’s proud descent, has been erased in favour of the older title, Grazeley Court.