There she sits in the large chair, not quite so young as she was when she charmed all homesteads and hearth-stones with pictures of her own quiet Berkshire village, before railroads came to destroy the pretty wayside inns, where travelers used to be so snug and comfortable in tiny carpeted rooms with dimity curtains and glass cupboards full of antediluvian china: when little Red-riding-hoods were as plenty as blackberries, and the gipsies were never at a loss for secluded nooks and dells, where they could camp and cook, and tell stories under the hedge-rows, with a feeling of solitude and security they can never enjoy again in merry England. That was a long, long time ago; yet Mary Russell Mitford looks as ready as she was in her brightest days to enter with a relishing zest into the garden delights and book pleasures that have formed the occupation and happiness of her life, and made her name known and welcome wherever natural description and unaffected feeling are truly appreciated.
There she sits, with as homely and good-humored an air as if, instead of writing books and holding correspondence with half the celebrities of her time, she had no other vocation in this world than to attend to domestic affairs, prune shrubs on the lawn, dispense flannels at Christmas to the poor, and look after a neighboring school. Beside her chair stands her constant companion, a remarkable stick, with an odd sort of a head to it; and to make her actual presence the more palpable she should be surrounded by her inseparable friends—Fanchon, her little dog, that might be crouched at her feet, with its sensitive ears lifting and falling at every sound; her neat maid, Nancy, watching her on a low stool, and her boy, Henry—(we hope he is still a boy,) and that he will contrive, for her sake, to continue so—standing behind her chair.
That stick has a biography all to itself, and a very curious one it is. Sixty years ago it was a stick of quality, and belonged to some Dowager Duchess of Athol, who has no more reality for us than one of the embroidered ladies in an old piece of tapestry. So far as its original owner is concerned, the stick, for aught we know to the contrary, may be a phantom-stick, or a witch-stick; but, be that as it may, Miss Mitford’s father bought it at the sale of Berkshire House, where it was huddled by the auctioneer into a lot of old umbrellas, watering-pots, and flower-stands. It was then light, straight, and slender, nearly four feet high, polished, veined, and of a yellowish color, and of the order called a crook, such, says Miss Mitford, who is evidently very particular about it, as may be seen upon a chimney-piece figuring in the hand of some trim shepherdess of Dresden china. First, the housekeeper carried this stick—then, when the housekeeper died, Miss Mitford’s mother took possession of it; and from her it descended to Miss Mitford, herself, who, first out of whim, and afterward from habit and necessity, made it her trusty supporter on all occasions. The adventures of that stick are as full of perils and hair-breadth escapes as ever befell a South Sea whaler, or a Hudson’s bay trapper. Once it was lost in a fair, once forgotten in a marquee at a cricket match, and at another time stolen by a little boy, which cost its mistress a ten miles walk for its recovery. But the worst calamity that befell it was, when in the act of drawing down a rich branch of woodbine from the top of a hedge, its ivory crook came off, falling into a muddy ditch, and sinking so irretrievably that it was never recovered. The crook, it seems, was very handsome, and was bound with a silver rim, imparting a lady-like appearance to the stick, which at the first sight, gave you a hint of its aristocratic origin. In this extremity it was sent to a parasol shop to have a new crook put on, but the stupid people first docked many inches of its height, and then put on a bone umbrella-top, that fell off of its own accord in a few days. A good-natured friend remedied the second loss by fastening on an ebony top, which looks, after four or five years’ wear, a little graver, “and more fit for the poor old mistress, who having at first taken to a staff in sport, is now so lame as to be unable to walk without one.” The memoirs of a walking-stick may strike our readers as a mere waste of words and paper; but it is surprising what slight incidents rise into importance and interest in a country life, and how much the reality of its portraiture is indebted to trivial, but by no means unessential features. At all events, Miss Mitford’s stick is a stick of note, and should no more be passed over in silence than the ruff of Queen Elizabeth, or the flowing ringlets of Congreve.
Miss Mitford’s life seems to have opened upon her in that page of the old quarto edition of “Percy’s Reliques,” where the ballad of the “Children in the Wood” is to be found. It is the first book, almost the first event she remembers. They used to put her upon a table before she was three years old, when she was, as she says, only a sort of twin-sister to her own doll, to make her read leading articles out of the morning papers; and the reward for this terrible penance was to hear her mother recite the “Children in the Wood,” just as children are rewarded for taking nauseous things by a promise of a lump of sugar. At last, she got possession of the volumes themselves, and made acquaintance with the rest of the ballads, which possess as great a charm for her now as they did then; and she never looks upon the old books—the very same edition Dr. Johnson used to treat with a very learned and unwise superciliousness—that the days of her childhood, or doll-hood, do not come vividly back upon her.
She still keeps to the Percy collection. She does not seem to care about the lore that has been dug up since, or the antiquarian research that has come to the illustration of our old English poetry. Even the first edition contents her—she will have no other—she has an affection for it—it is enough for her purpose—it recalls the happy time when its pages disclosed a new world of enchantments to her—and she holds it in reverence amongst her literary penates. There is nothing in her reminiscences to show that she troubles herself about Percy societies, or Shakspeare societies, that she has ever dipped into Notes and Queries, or would think herself obliged to the officious critic who should detect a flaw in her two precious quarto volumes. The faith and the enthusiasm of childhood still cling to the well-known book, and would be very much put out by being disturbed at their devotions. And this is the character of Miss Mitford’s mind. She would rather believe in an old tradition than have it dispelled by the detective police that go about exploring chronicles and ferreting out damaging facts. She thinks a pleasant delusion better than a disagreeable truth; and it is to this fondness for old books, and old places, and the old stories that have grown up into a popular creed about them, that we may trace the paramount charm of simplicity and trustfulness, the cheerful spirit and the teeming good-nature which abound in her writings.
To us, we must acknowledge, this freshness of the heart and entire freedom of the imagination, is very delightful. Miss Mitford is not a critic; but she is something a great deal better and more agreeable. She is of too enjoyable a temperament for a critic; she has not a tinge of the malice or perversity of criticism in her genial nature. For this reason, her opinions are sometimes slightly heterodox, but it is always on the side of a good-will, and a hearty admiration of some gracious or gentle quality which she has been at the pains to discover, and which few people would take the trouble to look for. She speaks rapturously of Davis’ “Life of Curran;” has such innocent rural views of literature, that she thinks nobody reads Pope and Dryden now, and that George Darley is unknown as a poet to the English public; detects a close resemblance between the Irish novels of Banim and the romanticist creations of Victor Hugo, Sue, Dumas, and the rest of that school; thinks that few works are better worth reading than Moncton Milnes’ “Life of Keats,” not only for the sake of Keats, but of his “generous benefactors, Sir James Clarke and Mr. Severn;” regrets that certain works have fallen into oblivion, from which no effort of fashionable or literary patronage can redeem them; considers Willis, Lowell and Poe the great American poets; and hopes that Richardson’s novels and Walpole’s letters will never come to an end. Nobody’s judgment can suffer any damage from such amiable notions; and the world is always sure to derive benefit from the kindly spirit that overlooks a hundred defects and follies for the sake of a single virtue it finds hidden beneath them. We wish there were more Miss Mitfords, with her intellect, to set us so influential an example of toleration and a willingness to be pleased.
She confesses that she was a spoilt child, and that papa spoilt her. It is evident, from what we have just said, that sudden and high as was the growth of her reputation, the public have not spoilt her. What the applause of critics and the admiration of her readers failed to do, papa did. “Not content with spoiling me in-doors, he spoilt me out. How well I remember his carrying me round the orchard on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-old feet, whilst the little hands hung on to his pig-tail, which I called my bridle—those were days of pig-tails—hung so fast, and lugged so heartily, that sometimes the ribbon would come off between my fingers, and send his hair floating, and the powder flying down his back.” The papa who thus made her first acquainted with the orchard, occupies a still more prominent space in her subsequent reminiscences. From him to whom she was indebted for her early love of nature, and the happy hours of childhood, she also derived the heaviest sorrow of her life. The story is strange and melancholy.
A young physician, clever, handsome, gay, in a small town in Hampshire, Miss Mitford’s father won the hand of an heiress with a property of eight-and-twenty thousand pounds. With the exception of two hundred a year, settled on her as pin-money, the whole of this fortune was injudiciously placed at the free use of Dr. Mitford, who seems to have possessed every quality to make his wife happy—except prudence. Being an eager Whig, he plunged into election politics and made enemies; being very hospitable, he spent more money than he could afford; and, endeavoring to retrieve the waste by cards and speculation, he sank nearly the whole of his resources. In this extremity, he thought he would do better in a fresh place, and so the family removed to Lyme Regis, where they had a fine house, which twenty years before had been rented by the great Lord Chatham for the use of his sons. Here they led a very gay life for two or three seasons—balls, excursions, dinners; yet in the midst of it, Miss Mitford says, she felt a secret conviction that something was wrong—“such a foreshowing as makes the quicksilver in the barometer sink while the weather is still bright and clear.” Her father went ominously to London, and lost more money—she does not say how—all was now gone except the pin-money: friends departed one by one, and there was great hurry and confusion, and then everything was to be parted with, and everybody to be paid, and the family made a forced journey to London, part of which was performed in a tilted cart without springs, for lack of better conveyance.
Settled in a dingy, comfortless lodging in one of the suburbs beyond Westminster Bridge, Dr. Mitford’s constitutional vivacity returned. He used to take his little girl, then ten years old, in his hand about town to show her the sights; and one day they stopped at an Irish lottery-office, and showing her certain mysterious bits of paper with numbers on them, he desired her to choose one. She selected No. 2,224; but as this was only a quarter, and papa wanted to purchase a whole ticket, he desired her to choose again. But her heart was set on No. 2,224, because the numbers added together made up ten, and that day happened to be her tenth birth-day. Fortunately, the lottery-office man had the whole number in shares, and so the ticket was bought. She must relate the sequel in her own words.
“The whole affair was a secret between us, and my father, whenever he got me to himself, talked over our future twenty thousand pounds, just like Almaschar over his basket of eggs.