“Meanwhile time passed on, and one Sunday morning we were all preparing to go to church, when a face that I had forgotten, but my father had not, made its appearance. It was the clerk of the lottery-office. An express had just arrived from Dublin, announcing that No. 2,224 had drawn a prize of twenty thousand pounds, and he had hastened to communicate the good news.
“Ah, me! in less than twenty years what was left of the produce of the ticket so strangely chosen? What? except the Wedgwood dinner service that my father had had made to commemorate the event, with the Irish harp within the border on one side, and his family crest on the other. That fragile and perishable ware long outlasted the more perishable money!”
Miss Mitford relates these painful recollections with a serenity and patience that yield a lesson from which her readers may profit as largely as from the example of extravagance and recklessness which made so severe a demand on her feelings and her philosophy; and it is pleasant, after all her vicissitudes and jolting over the rough ways of the world, to find her in a tranquil cottage, in the midst of the scenery she loves, with her dog and her maid, her stick and her pony, enjoying as much felicity as can be reasonably looked for in the sunset of a chequered life.
Scattered over the volumes without much heed of chronology or sequence, are many little personal scraps that will hereafter enter into her biography, from the light which they throw upon the cast and color of her training. The papa, who was so indifferent to money, who was addicted to such ruinous habits, and who in his general relations with society, seems to have sacrificed the comfort and repose of his home, was, nevertheless, the most devoted of fathers. From her earliest childhood to the last hour of his life, he treated her with an affectionate and caressing tenderness that, in spite of his manifest errors, leaves an amiable impression of his character behind. One of the incidents on which she dwells with the greatest satisfaction was her first visit to London; and the mode of it is not only illustrative of the comparatively primitive habits of the time, but of the simplicity of the man in his domestic life. Having occasion to come to London in the middle of July, he suddenly announced his intention of taking her up with him in his gig; and at this open fashion they started, stopping to dine at Crauford Bridge in a little inn—then a very famous posting-house—whose pretty garden and Portugal laurels she still remembers; and then on to Hatchett’s Hotel in Piccadilly, where she stood looking out of the window and wondering when the crowd would go by; and in the evening she was so unconscious of fatigue from this exciting journey that papa took her to the Haymarket to see a comedy—one of the comedies, she says, that George III. used to enjoy so heartily, although what sort of comedy it was we know not, unless, which we shrewdly suspect, it was a specimen of Colman the Younger, or of the Morton and Reynolds school. She had seen plays before in a barn—but never such a play as this. The whole description of this trip to London is as good in its way as anything Fielding himself could have done.
“Dear papa,” in the pride of his heart, insisted upon making an accomplished musician of her, and would “stick her up” to the piano, although she had neither ear, taste, nor application. Her master was Hook, the father of the facetious Theodore, and she was taught in the schoolroom where Miss Landon passed the greater part of her life. Luckily they shut her up in a room to make her practise the harp, and as it was full of books she fell to reading, and under these auspicious circumstances made her first acquaintance with the plays of Voltaire and Molière. She was caught in the fact of laughing till the tears ran down her cheeks over that passage in the “Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” where the angry father apostrophises the galley, “Que diable alloit-il faire dans cette galère!” As her good stars had it, she was detected in her delinquency by the husband of the schoolmistress, who happened to be a Frenchman, an adorer of Molière, and a hater of music, and who, instead of chiding her for her neglect of the instrument, dismissed the harp-mistress, and made the young student a present of a cheap edition of Molière, for her own reading, which she has to this hour, in twelve unbound, foreign-looking, little volumes.
After these scenes, we find her in a cottage, at Taplow—at this time a grown-up lady—looking over a garden of honeysuckles, lilies, and roses, making excursions to Windsor, to Gray’s Lawn at Stoke Poges, to Burke’s at Beaconsfield, and to the College at Chalfont, where Milton found a refuge during the plague. We always associate Miss Mitford with cottages. We cannot imagine her living in a slated house, three stories high, with a carriage sweep, and steps up to the door—we cannot suffer her in our imagination to have any of the comforts and solidity of a well-built mansion about her; it must be a cottage, with its ivy creepers, its portico and latticed windows, and everything round it looking as green and rural as a wilderness of trees and shrubs, growing up luxuriantly in a warm, languid climate can make it. In short, we must smother her in flowers, or she is not the Miss Mitford that we know so well in the pastoral books she has written.
Turning from the autobiographical passages which form so interesting a part of these volumes, there are a variety of literary sketches of an equally attractive kind. Miss Mitford runs over a wide field of books and recollections; and from her extensive acquaintance with literary people, and the desultory character of her reading, she supplies an abundant store of anecdote and remark.
The following is new, and certainly very curious. The scene is an old, wooden, picturesque house, at Cambridge, in America, once the head quarters of Washington, but now the residence of Longfellow, the poet.
“One night the poet chanced to look out of his window, and saw by the vague starlight a figure riding slowly past the mansion. The face could not be distinguished; but the tall, erect person, the cocked hat, the traditional costume, the often-described white horse, all were present. Slowly he paced before the house, and then returned, and then again passed by, after which, neither horse nor rider were seen or heard of.”
Miss Mitford does not give us any authority for this anecdote; but the collectors of ghost stories are not very particular about authorities, and will be content to take it upon her own, as we do.