FOOTNOTES:

[26] She was related to the President, General Jackson.

CHAPTER XXIII
“MY OLDEST AND KINDEST FRIEND.”

“Nature has given us two ears, but only one mouth—why do not we take the hint?” was a sentence which Macready wrote in his Diary when suffering the consequences of some ill-advised, hasty utterance. If only Miss Mitford, with her impulsiveness, had seen this sentence and could have realized how wise was the advice contained in it, she would have been a happier woman in many respects. Too often her eagerness to champion the cause of one of her friends led her to embitter and estrange another. Among her neighbours was a family of the name of Merry, and one day, while Talfourd was on a visit to the Mitford Cottage, Mr. Merry called and in some way affronted the other. This vexed the hostess considerably at the time, and was referred to later, when she and the Merrys met at an afternoon function at Bearwood, the residence of Mr. Walter, of the Times. There was a heated argument, and Miss Mitford took up a resentful attitude, “certainly with too much violence,” as she afterwards explained. The occasion was ill-chosen for such an altercation, and Mr. Merry was deeply offended. Repenting at leisure, Miss Mitford wrote him an apology, which he would not accept. For six weeks he nursed his grievance, spreading the tale of Miss Mitford’s offence among mutual friends. Realizing at last how deeply she had offended, Miss Mitford sent her old friend the following letter, which we quote as an instance of her wholehearted contrition.

“I cannot suffer you to leave our neighbourhood for weeks, perhaps for months, without making one more effort to soften a displeasure too justly excited—without once more acknowledging my fault, and entreating your forgiveness. Do not again repulse me—pray do not! Life is too short, too full of calamity, for an alienation indefinitely prolonged—a pardon so long suspended. I know you better, perhaps, than you know yourself, and am sure that, were I at this moment suffering under any great affliction, you would be the first—ay, the very first—to soothe and to succour me. If my father (which may God in his mercy avert!) were dead; if I myself were on a sick bed, or in prison, or in a workhouse (and you well know that this is the destiny to which I always look forward), then you would come to me—I am sure of it. You would be as ready to fly to my assistance then as the angel of peace and mercy at your side”—

“At all events, do not go without a few words of peace and of kindness. I send you the last flowers of my garden. Your flower seems to have continued in blossom on purpose to assist in the work of reconciliation. Do not scorn its sweet breath, or resist its mute pleadings, but give me in exchange one bunch of the laurustinus for which I used to ask you last winter, and let it be a token of the full and perfect reconciliation for which I am a suppliant; and then I shall cherish it—oh, I cannot tell you how much! Once again, forgive me—and farewell.”

It is pleasant to record that this touching appeal had, as of course it would, the desired effect, and the old happy relationship was renewed.

The year was 1833 and, like many a previous one, it was full of pecuniary worries and embarrassments. Dr. Mitford was again giving trouble, seeking to augment his income by some doubtful investment for which he had, as usual, the tip of some unscrupulous schemer, to whose class he fell an easy prey. The matter fortunately came to Miss Mitford’s knowledge, and she wrote off in great haste to William Harness “to caution you in case you should receive any authority, from any quarter, to sell out our money in the Funds, not to do so without communicating with me. I have no doubt of my father’s integrity, but I think him likely to be imposed on.”

This was a more serious matter than it at first appears. The money in the Funds was left by Dr. Russell for his daughter and her offspring and could not therefore be touched without authority from Miss Mitford, who was her mother’s sole heir. How then did Dr. Mitford propose to obtain its use? There is only one answer and it is one which involves the integrity which Miss Mitford did not question. Harness’s reply was plain and to the point. “Depend upon it the money shall never be touched with my consent. It was consideration for your future welfare which prevented my father’s consenting to its being sold out some years ago, when you had been persuaded, and wished to persuade him, to your own utter ruin.” [This was during the stressful time at Bertram House when, with the consent of her mother, Miss Mitford wrote to Dr. Harness imploring him to sell out and give her father the use of the money.] “That £3,000 I consider as the sheet-anchor of your independence, if age should ever render literature irksome to you, or infirmity incapacitate you for exertion; and, while your father lives, it shall never stir from its present post in the Funds. After he has ceased (as all fathers must cease) to live, my first object will be to consult with you and my most intelligent money-managing friends, and discover the mode of making the stock most profitable to your comfort, either by annuity or any other mode that may be thought most advisable. Till then—from whatever quarter the proposition may come—I have but one black, blank, unqualified No for my answer. I do not doubt Dr. Mitford’s integrity, but I have not the slightest confidence in his prudence; and I am fully satisfied that if these three thousand and odd hundreds of pounds were placed at his disposal to-day, they would fly the way so many other thousands have gone before them, to-morrow. Excuse me saying this; but I cannot help it.”

This letter stands to the lasting credit of its writer and affords ample proof of his steadfast and unflinching devotion to his trust, failing which the tragedy of Miss Mitford’s life would have been deeper than it was. He alone had the power of drawing out the best that was in Miss Mitford, in getting her to express the moral and spiritual side of her nature. Art, literature, the Drama she could talk and write upon to other people, but it was to William Harness that she would pour out her convictions on the deeper things of life. He sent her a book of his sermons, and although it reached her at midnight (having been conveyed from her friend by Dr. Milman to her father, whom he met at a dinner-party), she sat far into the night, reading and studying it, and inditing a reply at three o’clock in the morning while the mood was hot upon her.

“I have read it through—the second part twice through. That second sermon would have done honour to Shakespeare, and I half expected to find you quoting him. There would be a tacit hypocrisy, a moral cowardice, if I were to stop here, and not to confess, what I think you must suspect, although by no chance do I ever talk about it—that I do not, or rather cannot, believe all that the Church requires. I humbly hope that it is not necessary to do so, and that a devout sense of the mercy of God, and an endeavour, however imperfectly and feebly, to obey the great precepts of justice and kindness, may be accepted in lieu of that entire faith which, in me, will not be commanded. You will not suspect me of thoughtlessness in this matter; neither, I trust, does it spring from intellectual pride. Few persons have a deeper sense of their own weakness; few, indeed, can have so much weakness of character to deplore and to strive against. Do not answer this part of my letter. It has cost me a strong effort to say this to you; but it would have been a concealment amounting to a falsity if I had not, and falsehood must be wrong. Do not notice it; a correspondence of controversy could only end in alienation, and I could not afford to lose my oldest and kindest friend—to break up the close intimacy in which I am so happy and of which I am so proud.” This was in 1829. In the Spring of 1834 her old friend sent another of his printed sermons, which again she read and studied and which drew from her some pronouncements on Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church and on questions of Social Reform which cannot but be read with interest to-day.

“It is a very able and conciliatory plea for the Church. My opinion (if an insignificant woman may presume to give one) is, that certain reforms ought to be; that very gross cases of pluralities should be abolished (it is too sweeping, I think, to say all pluralities); that some few of the clergy are too rich, and that a great many are too poor; but (although not holding all her doctrines) I heartily agree with you that, as an establishment, the Church ought to remain; for, to say nothing of the frightful precedent of sweeping away property, a precedent which would not stop there, the country would be over-run with fanatics, and, in the rural districts especially, a clergyman (provided he be not a magistrate) is generally, in worldly, as well as spiritual matters, a great comfort to the poor. But our wise legislators never think of the rural districts—never. They legislate against gin-shops, which are the evil of great towns, and encourage beer-shops, which are the pest of the country, the cause of half the poverty and three-fourths of the demoralization. But the Church must be (as many of her members are) wisely tolerant; bishops must not wage war with theatres, nor rectors with a Sunday evening game of cricket. If they take up the arms of the Puritans, the Puritans will beat them.”

The reference in this letter to rectors and Sunday cricket is most interesting in view of the fact that only a few miles away, in the village of Eversley, there had just arrived a new curate who, as time went on, became the rector; and who, among other things, shocked some of his clerical brethren by actually encouraging manly sports, such as cricket and quoits, on the village green in the intervals between the Sunday services. His name was Charles Kingsley and he was destined to be numbered among the very dear friends of Miss Mitford in her declining days.

The refusal—the just refusal—of William Harness to entertain Dr. Mitford’s idea regarding money matters, somewhat upset the latter’s calculations, besides causing him to be more importunate in his demands on his daughter. There were, of course, certain sums coming in regularly from the various magazines, but these were not sufficient, and so both father and daughter decided to take a bold risk and endeavour to produce the prohibited play of Charles the First at some theatre where the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain did not operate.

Dr. Mitford took the manuscript with him to London in the May of 1834, where, by the kindness of Mr. T. J. Serle—a noted playwright and actor—he was introduced to Mr. Abbott, who, having left Covent Garden Theatre and become Manager of the Victoria Theatre in the Waterloo Road, was a likely person to take up the project. Mr. Abbott immediately accepted the play and was extremely liberal in his terms—£200 to be paid down and a fourth share of the profits if the play ran for a certain number of nights. The negotiations were somewhat prolonged, but by the end of June the whole matter had been arranged and Miss Mitford went to town to superintend the rehearsals. The play was produced in July, with Mr. Cathcart in the cast and with the prologue both written and spoken by Mr. Serle. It was a great success, despite the drawbacks attendant on its production in a minor theatre on the Surrey side of the Thames. Writing to her friend Miss Jephson, the delighted author said:—“The papers will of course have told you that both I and my actor have been successful ... the thing is admirably got up, the theatre beautiful, and Cathcart’s acting refined, intellectual, powerful and commanding beyond anything I ever witnessed.... They make a real queen of me, and would certainly demolish my humility, if I were happy enough to be humble, though I feel that over-praise, over-estimation, is a far more humbling thing—a thing that sends you back on your own mind to ask, ‘Have I deserved this?’ than anything else that can be. For the first ten days I spent on an average from four to six hours every morning in the Victoria Theatre, at hard scolding, for the play has been entirely got up by me; then I dined out amongst twenty or thirty eminent strangers every evening. Since that I have been to operas and to pictures, and held a sort of drawing-room every morning; so that I am so worn out, as to have, for three days out of the last four, fainted dead away between four and five o’clock, a fine-lady trick which I never played before, and which teaches me I must return, as soon as I can, into the country, to write another play and run again the same round of fatigue, excitement and pleasure. After all, my primary object is, and has been, to establish Mr. Cathcart.”

Mary Russell Mitford.
(From a drawing by F. R. Say, 1837.)

Although the Duke of Devonshire could not agree to licence the play, he was not averse to accepting its Dedication to himself, acknowledging it in a very gracious note to the author. Thus, set on their feet once more, the little household pursued a normal course of existence. The Doctor went to London and his daughter plodded, exhausted and overdone, at her new book, which was to be called Belford Regis and be descriptive of life and character in a country town—Belford Regis being, of course, none other than the adjacent town of Reading.

It was a project originally undertaken by its author for no other purpose than to try her hand at delineating the scenery and characteristics of a town in the same way that she had treated the country in Our Village. The original scheme was for one volume, but the thing grew and the characters afforded such scope to the writer that, by the time it was published, it had extended to three volumes.

While Dr. Mitford was in town—he went up in the early part of 1835—he opened up negotiations on the subject with Richard Bentley, the publisher, and secured very good terms, with the result that Bentley published Belford Regis: or Sketches of a Country Town, late in the same year. Charming and valuable as the book may be for its picture of life in the Reading of that day, it cannot compare in the slightest degree with the similar work which preceded it. It is slipshod as to style and is full of repetitions, bearing all too plainly the marks of hurried compilation and the harassed, overworked mind of its author. Miss Mitford, recognized these faults, but attributed them to another cause, viz., “its having been sent up at different times; having been first intended to appear in one volume, then in two, and now in three volumes.”

It had a certain success; that was inevitable with a book from Miss Mitford’s pen now that her reputation had been established; but the success was not maintained, and now Belford Regis is looked upon as a literary curiosity by students and with affection by all who claim a more than passing interest in the town which it describes. The critics of the day were divided in their opinions; some preferred it to Our Village, but most found fault with it in that it pictured life as too bright and sunny. The author’s own estimate was conveyed in a letter to Miss Jephson.

“In my opinion it is overloaded with civil notes, and too full of carelessnesses and trifling repetitions.... Nevertheless, I myself prefer it to my other prose works, both as bolder and more various and deeper in sentiment, and as containing one character (a sort of embodiment of the strong sense and right feeling which I believe to be common in the middling classes, emphatically the people) which appears and reappears in several of the stories, giving comfortable proof of the power to carry on a strongly distinguished character through three volumes which, if I do not comply (as I suppose I must) with Mr. Bentley’s desire for a novel, will be very valuable.”

This project of a novel was one which Miss Mitford thought upon as a sort of nightmare. Longmans had proposed it years before but had been met with a refusal, and now Bentley was renewing the attack, though he did not succeed.

Altogether the year was one which should have been regarded as prosperous. It saw the issue of the fourteenth edition of the first volume of Our Village and the issue of a two-volume edition (five vols. in two), illustrated with woodcuts by George Baxter, who visited Three Mile Cross early in the year to take sketches under the author’s supervision. It also saw the production of the opera Sadak and Kalasrade at the Lyceum, but this can hardly be accounted a success as its performance was restricted to one night.

The publication of Belford Regis naturally inspired the writing of many congratulatory letters to its author and brought shoals of visitors to the little cottage to see the author and her flowers—the latter she had described in great detail in the work. Among the visitors were William and Mary Howitt, both of whom went away charmed with all they had seen. Mary Howitt told Miss Mitford that her study of the development of intellect in the heroine of “The Dissenting Minister,” might pass for the history of her own mind, and that the author must have lived much amongst rigid Dissenters to give so exact a picture of the goings-on in the interior of their families.

William Howitt paid his tribute in a delightful account of his visit which appeared in the Athenæum of August of that same year. It was entitled, A Visit to our Village, and, although Miss Mitford thought the praise was overdone, she yet hoped her old friend, Sir William Elford, would read it:—“It is at once so pretty and so kind; the praise does not describe me as I am, because I fall far short of the picture; but it is just how I should wish to be—and how very seldom does that happen!”

And, in addition to all this, the September brought a commission from the editors of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal. “It is one of the signs of the times, that a periodical selling for three-halfpence should engage so high-priced a writer as myself; but they have a circulation of 200,000 or 300,000.” This was Miss Mitford’s passing comment on the transaction, but it was to be of far more lasting importance than she anticipated, resulting as it did in a close friendship with William Chambers and in a scheme of collaboration in which she took a prominent part.

CHAPTER XXIV
VARIOUS FRIENDSHIPS

With the publication of Belford Regis there came slight periods of rest—rest, that is, from the strenuous and wearing labour of writing against time in the fulfilment of contracts. During these temporary lulls in output Miss Mitford wandered about in her small garden, watching and tending her flowers as would a mother her children. Her especial delight was in the raising of seedlings, always a source of keen pleasure to an enthusiastic gardener. To print a catalogue of all her flowers would fill a large chapter, they were so many and varied, for scarcely a letter went to any of her flower-loving friends but it contained some request for a slip of this, or a cutting from that plant, or else a word of thanks for a floral gift just received. The popularity of the author of Our Village was so universal and extended to so many classes of the community that, to quote one evidence alone, it was no rare thing to find a new rose or a new dahlia figuring in contemporary florists’ lists as the “Miss Mitford” or the “Our Village,” a pretty proof, as the author herself said, “of the way in which gardeners estimate my love of flowers, that they are constantly calling plants after me, and sending me one of the first cuttings as presents. There is a dahlia now selling at ten guineas a root under my name; I have not seen the flower, but have just had one sent me (a cutting) which will of course blow in the autumn.” A delightful fancy, this, and one which obtains to this day, as witness any of the modern horticulturists’ lists.

It was to the culture of geraniums, however, that she principally devoted herself, “and,” said she, “it is lucky that I do, since they are comparatively easy to rear and manage, and do not lay one under any tremendous obligation to receive, for I never buy any.” She was writing to her friend, Miss Emily Jephson, in Ireland, with whom she was in fairly regular correspondence, although Miss Jephson had to share with Sir William Elford the long periods of silence which betokened their mutual friend’s slavery with the pen at the little cottage. Referring to these beloved geraniums, Miss Mitford wrote:—“All my varieties (amounting to at least three hundred different sorts) have been either presents, or exchanges, or my own seedlings—chiefly exchanges; for when once one has a good collection, that becomes an easy mode of enlarging it; and it is one pleasant to all parties, for it is a very great pleasure to have a flower in a friend’s garden. You, my own Emily, gave me my first plants of the potentilla, and very often as I look at them, I think of you.” One especially fine seedling geranium she named the “Ion,” a floral tribute to Serjeant Talfourd’s play, upon which he was then working.

A portrait of Miss Mitford in 1837.
(From Chorley’s Authors of England.)

What a wonderful garden it was!—a veritable garden of friendship wherein, as the quaint little figure in her calico sun-bonnet pottered about, picking off dead leaves and stained petals, she actually communed with her friends whose representatives they were. This was a pleasure her father could not take from her, indeed, to his credit be it recorded, it was a pleasure in which he shared.

Talfourd’s play, of which mention was made just now, was a work upon which he devoted odd moments of leisure snatched from his busy life of professional duties as one of the leading men of his day at the Bar. Pope’s lines: “I left no calling for this idle trade, no duty broke,” is the fitting motto with which he headed his Preface when the play was published in book form, for, as he said, it was composed for the most part on journeys while on Circuit, and afterwards committed to paper, a process of composition which, it may be readily conceived, extended over a lengthy period. When published it was dedicated to his old schoolmaster, the Rev. Richard Valpy, D.D., as “a slender token of gratitude for benefits which cannot be expressed in words,” and in the course of the Preface there were felicitous references to “the delightful artist,” Mr. Macready, and to the “power and beauty” of, among others, “the play of Rienzi.”

In Macready’s Diary, under date March 15, 1835, is the entry:—“Forster told me of Talfourd having completed a tragedy called Ion. What an extraordinary, what an indefatigable man!” He was greatly pleased by the kind mention of himself in the Preface, and on May 7 made this significant entry in his Diary:—“Read Talfourd’s tragedy of Ion; pleased with the opening scenes and, as I proceeded, arrested and held by the interest of the story and the characters, as well as by the very beautiful thoughts, and the very noble ones, with which the play is interspersed. How delightful to read his dedication to his master and benefactor, Dr. Valpy, and the gentle outpourings of his affectionate heart towards his friends and associates; if one did not love, one would envy such a use of one’s abilities.”

The play was produced on May 26, 1836, and was a great success, Macready admitting that he had done better in the performance than he had been able to attain for some time. May 26 was, curiously enough, Talfourd’s birthday, and Miss Mitford was among the great host of friends, invited to do honour to the play and its writer. She went to town some days previous to the event and was the guest of the Talfourds at their house at 56, Russell Square. Her letters home to her father, whom she had left there, are full of the delights of her visit—the dinners and the diners, among whom were the poets Wordsworth, Rogers and Robert Browning (the last then but a young and comparatively unknown man), Stanfield the artist, Landor, Lucas and William Harness.

After the performance the principal actors repaired to Talfourd’s house, there to partake of a sumptuous repast to which over fifty people—leading lights in Art, Letters and the Sciences—sat down. It was a great function, marked by many complimentary speeches, as the occasion demanded. Macready, of course, shared the honours with Talfourd, and, in a moment of exaltation, turned to Miss Mitford and asked her whether the present occasion did not stimulate her to write a play. It was an ill-chosen remark, for she was then at the very height of popularity as the author of the successful Rienzi, but she quickly replied, “Will you act it?” Macready did not answer, and Harness, who was close by, chaffingly remarked to Miss Mitford, “Aye, hold him to that.” “When I heard that that was Harness, the man who, I believe, inflicted such a deep and assassin-like wound upon me—through Blackwood’s Magazine—I could not repress the expression of indignant contempt which found its way to my face, and over-gloomed the happy feeling that had before been there.” This was Macready’s written comment on the incident, but how he had misjudged Harness throughout this unpleasant affair has been dealt with by us in a previous chapter.

Miss Mitford knew nothing of the bitterness which her innocent reply had engendered and fully enjoyed the round of festivities to which she was invited. On the day following the first performance of Ion, her friend Mr. Kenyon called to take her to see the giraffes—they were then being exhibited for the first time in this country at the Zoological Gardens—and on the way suggested they should call at Gloucester Place for a young friend of his, “a sweet young woman—a Miss Barrett—who reads Greek as I do French, and has published some translations from Æschylus and some most striking poems. She is a delightful young creature; shy, and timid and modest. Nothing but her desire to see me got her out at all, but now she is coming to us to-morrow night also.”

This occasion marks an important event in Miss Mitford’s life—her introduction to Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, which from that moment grew and strengthened, a fragrant friendship which lasted through life, much prized by both.

“She is so sweet and gentle,” wrote Miss Mitford to her father, “and so pretty, that one looks at her as if she were some bright flower; and she says it is like a dream that she should be talking to me, whose works she knows by heart.”

Writing next year to her friend Mrs. Martin, Miss Barrett said of her literary friend: “She stands higher as the authoress of Our Village than of Rienzi, and writes prose better than poetry, and transcends rather in Dutch minuteness and higher finishing than in Italian ideality and passion.”

Truth to tell, this visit to London was having the effect of slightly exalting our gentle village author; she found herself the very centre of attraction, every one paying her homage. Talfourd’s house was besieged by callers—not on Talfourd—but on his guest. Wordsworth was calling every day, chanting the praises of Rienzi and the abilities of its author; the Duke of Devonshire brought her “a splendid nosegay of lilies of the valley—a thousand flowers without leaves,” and begged her never to come again to London without informing him and giving him the opportunity of enjoying a similar pleasure. Mr. and Mrs. Talfourd grew indignant; they had not bargained for this when they invited their quaintly-clad, old-fashioned friend from Three Mile Cross to witness the triumph of Talfourd and Ion! Talfourd was jealous, positively jealous, and openly showed it by a marked coolness towards his old friend, a coolness which she pretended not to notice, although it hurt her very much. “They are much displeased with Miss Mitford,” wrote Macready of his friends the Talfourds. “She seems to be showing herself well up.” “William Harness says he never saw any one received with such a mixture of enthusiasm and respect as I have been—not even Madame de Staël. Wordsworth, dear old man! aids it by his warm and approving kindness”—was Miss Mitford’s report to her father.

It was arranged that she should stay in London in order to witness the second performance of Ion, fixed for June 1, but on the morning preceding this, while sitting at breakfast, Talfourd bitterly complained of some depreciating comments on his play which he had just read in one of the morning papers. To soothe him Miss Mitford suggested that he need not take such things too seriously, adding that she thought the critics had been far more favourable to his play than to her own; at which he flamed out: “Your Rienzi, indeed; I dare say not—you forget the difference!” and behaved with such scorn and anger that his guest was shocked, packed up her boxes and fled to William Harness. “We have had no quarrel”—was the report home—“no coolness on my part. I behaved at first with the warmest and truest sympathy until it was chilled by his bitter scorn; and since, thank Heaven! I have never lost my self-command—never ceased to behave to him with the most perfect politeness. He must change very much indeed before the old feeling will come back to me.”

Mary Russell Mitford.
(From a painting by John Lucas, in the National Portrait Gallery.)

It was through Miss Mitford that William Harness was first introduced to Talfourd, although, judging by certain circumstances which arose from time to time, we hold the opinion that William Harness, who demanded more from his friends than did Miss Mitford, never really appreciated the acquaintance. Harness was for ever questioning the other’s motives, and more than once hinted his suspicions to Miss Mitford who at once defended the other—as was her wont. Talfourd’s jealousy was, let us say, pardonable, but when it turned to venom, as it did, we dare not condone. Meeting Macready one evening of the following November, the conversation turned on Miss Mitford and a new play she was projecting and which Mr. Forrest,[27] a rival to Macready, was to produce. “I have no faith in her power of writing a play, and to that opinion Talfourd subscribed to-night—concurring in all I thought of her falsehood and baseness!” These are Macready’s own words, but fortunately Miss Mitford died without knowledge of them, otherwise her faith in her old idol would have been rudely shattered. Talfourd, of whom she had ever spoken kindly; whose career she had watched, glorying in his successes; who had himself praised her talent for the Drama and urged her to forsake all else for it, and now concurred in another’s disparaging references to that same talent—“concurring in all I thought of her falsehood and baseness!”

This London visit closed with a dinner-party at Lord and Lady Dacre’s—Lady Dacre was a relative of the Ogles and therefore distantly connected with the Mitfords. “It is a small house, with a round table that only holds eight,” wrote Miss Mitford, and, as she proceeded to relate that fifty people assembled, and offers no further explanation, we wonder how they were accommodated. The company included Edwin Landseer, “who invited himself to come and paint Dash”—the favourite spaniel—“Pray tell Dash.”

Mr. Kenyon was also there—he had just brought about the introduction to Miss Barrett, and was consequently in high esteem—of whom Miss Mitford told her friend Harness that he had written a fine poem, “Upper Austria,” to be found in that year’s Keepsake, as a test of his sanity. “From feelings of giddiness, he feared his head was attacked. He composed these verses (not writing them until the poem of four hundred or five hundred lines was complete) as a test. It turned out that the stomach was deranged, and he was set to rights in no time.”

A wonderful fortnight this, with its introductions to all the notables—“Jane Porter, Joanna Baillie, and I know not how many other females of eminence, to say nothing of all the artists, poets, prosers, talkers and actors of the day.”

“And now I am come home to work hard, if the people will let me; for the swarms of visitors, and the countless packets of notes and letters which I receive surpass belief.”

With the introduction to Miss Barrett a new correspondent was added to the already large list with whom Miss Mitford kept in touch, and from the middle of the year 1836 the letters between the two friends were frequent and voluminous. The early ones from Three Mile Cross display an amusing motherliness on the part of their writer, containing frequent references to the necessity of cultivating style and clearness of expression, all of which Miss Barrett took in good part and promised to bear in mind. But in this matter of letter-writing Miss Mitford was really expending herself too much—it was a weakness which she could never overcome—and the consequence was that she either neglected her work or performed it when the household was asleep. Then, still further obstacles to a steady output arrived in the person of the painter Lucas, who wanted to paint another portrait of his friend, and was only put off by being allowed to paint the Doctor, the sittings for which were given at Bertram House, then in the occupation of Captain Gore, a genial friend of the Mitfords. The portrait was a great success, every one praising it. “It is as like as the looking-glass,” wrote the delighted daughter to Miss Jephson. “Beautiful old man that he is! and is the pleasantest likeness, the finest combination of power, and beauty, and sweetness, and spirit, that ever you saw. Such a piece of colour, too! The painter used all his carmine the first day, and was forced to go into Reading for a fresh supply. He says that my father’s complexion is exactly like the sunny side of a peach, and so is his picture. Imagine how grateful I am! He has come all the way from London to paint this picture as a present to me.”

Following Lucas, came Edmund Havell, a young and rising artist from Reading, a lithographer of great ability. He came to paint Dash—Landseer being unable to fulfil his promise because of an accident. “Dash makes an excellent sitter—very grave and dignified, and a little conscious—peeping stealthily at the portrait, as if afraid of being thought vain if he looked at it too long.”

These were the diversions which Miss Mitford permitted herself, and when they were over and the approach of winter caused a natural cessation of the hosts of visitors who thronged the cottage during the fine weather, she devoted herself with energy to a new book, to be entitled Country Stories, for which Messrs. Saunders & Otley were in negotiation.