There is a sketch of Elizabeth Barrett, and a little biography attached to it, which will be read with interest. Miss Mitford’s acquaintance with her commenced fifteen years ago.
“Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face large, tender eyes richly fringed by dark eye-lashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness, that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translator of the ‘Prometheus of Æschylus,’ the authoress of the ‘Essay on Mind,’ was old enough to be introduced into company, or, in technical language, was out.”
It was in the following year that Miss Barrett broke a blood-vessel in the lungs, which consigned her to a long illness, during which she lost a favorite brother by one of those melancholy accidents which leave ineffaceable memories in the hearts of the survivors. He was drowned, with two companions, in sight of her windows at Torquay, whither she was ordered for change of air. This tragedy nearly killed her; and more than a year afterward, when she was removed to London by easy journeys, she told Miss Mitford that, “during that whole winter, the sound of the waves rang in her ears like the moans of one dying.”
William Cobbett was one of the notabilities to whom Miss Mitford was introduced by her father, whose intimacy with him was brought about through their mutual attachment to field sports. She describes him in his own house as a man of unfailing good humor and great heartiness; tall, stout and athletic, with a bright smile, and an air compounded of the soldier and the farmer, to which his habitual red waistcoat contributed not a little. His activity was something to be remembered, for he would begin the day by mowing his own lawn, a laborious pastime in which he beat his gardener, who was esteemed, except himself, the best mower in the parish.
Upon one occasion, Dr. Mitford and his daughter were invited to Cobbett’s to meet the wife and daughters of a certain Dr. Blamire; and as it appeared that Dr. Mitford had formerly flirted with Mrs. Blamire, some amusement was expected from seeing how they would meet after a lapse of twenty years, both of them having shaken off the old liaison, and married in the meanwhile.
“The most diverting part of this scene, very amusing to a bystander, was, that my father, the only real culprit, was the only person who throughout maintained the appearance and demeanor of the most unconscious innocence. He complimented Mrs. Blamire on her daughters—two very fine girls—inquired after his old friend, the doctor, and laughed and talked over by-gone stories with the one lady, just as if he had not jilted her, and played the kind and attentive husband to the other, just as if he had never in all his days made love to anybody except his own dear wife.”
Formerly, we frequently met with physicians who belonged to this class, and who were indebted for their professional success mainly to their social tactics and invincible pleasantry; but although you still occasionally fall in with a medical man who considers it as necessary to cultivate popularity amongst ladies as to attend to the practice of his art, the age of the flirt-physicians, we are happy to believe, has passed away.
Miss Mitford’s literary “recollections” bear rather more upon books than upon the authors of them. The book-gossip to which she invites us, traverses a considerable round of poets, novelists, and miscellaneous writers, and the specimens of their works over which she lingers with delight, make a body of extracts which enhance the value and variety of the publication. Her notes upon these selected passages discover a geniality and earnestness which will be grateful even to the reader who may sometimes have occasion to think that her praise is a little in excess, or who may doubt the judgment that has been shown in particular selections.
This tendency to a good-natured estimate of her favorite authors, shows itself most conspicuously in her admiration of certain poets, whose merits the world has not hitherto rated so highly. We are not sorry, nevertheless, to meet snatches of such people as Mr. Spencer and Miss Catharine Fanshawe—whose chief claim to notice is, that she was the author of the Enigma on the letter H, which used to be ascribed to Byron—for, except through the flattering medium of books like these, we are not very likely to see the vers de société that were in such request some fifty years ago, disinterred for our special delectation. They are abundantly curious, and discover a certain verbal facility and gayety of the thinnest and airiest kind, which will at least amuse, if not instruct the reader, by setting him thinking of the extinct modes and tastes to which they were addressed, and out of which they extracted their fugitive popularity. But poetasters of this order, however cheerfully and successfully they help to shed a grace on private life, and to give a sort of intellectual vivacity to social intercourse, can never be made to survive their hour in print. They must perish with the occasion that gave them birth; and you might as well hope to procure for the acted charade, if it were taken down in short-hand and published, the same success in the closet that it received on its impromptu delivery, as to procure for the graceful trifles thrown off for the amusement of a coterie, the honors of a permanent place in the library. They never aimed at such a destiny, and can never achieve it; and it may be doubted whether their fragile existence should be risked in print at all.
Of all the neglected, forgotten, or unknown books Miss Mitford has brought to life again, the Autobiography of Holcroft is the most deserving of resuscitation. We know no memoir of its kind—excepting the only one forbidden book in French literature—that possesses its charm of frankness, truthfulness of detail, and quiet development of character. Unfortunately it is nothing more than a fragment, consisting of seventeen chapters, dictated by Holcroft—a prolific author and translator—in his last illness; stopping short at an interesting point in his career, and furnishing such evidences of clear-sighted judgment, and happy skill in relation and portraiture, as to leave an indelible regret upon the mind of the reader at finding himself cast upon the grander diction of Hazlitt for the continuation of the narrative. The contrast is painful. The brilliancy and paradoxical genius of Hazlitt, rendered him of all men the most unfit to follow up the unpretending strength and simplicity of Holcroft; and the transition is something like being transported from the fresh air and pastoral beauty of a natural landscape into a severe Italian garden. There was but one point in common between them—and that was the most contracted and least characteristic of all—their agreement in politics. Holcroft was a man of larger powers, and a wider range of tastes than might be predicated from that party martyrdom which gave him so distressing a notoriety in the latter days of his life, to the partial eclipse of his literary reputation. But the subject is not likely to be revived now, nor would it repay the labors of a more competent editor. Miss Mitford, however, has done well in drawing attention to Holcroft’s book, and the extracts she has given from it will be read with interest; but it is only from the memoir itself, as a whole, tracing the course of the self-educated boy from his origin upward, that an adequate notion can be formed of the enthralling charm of that singular narrative.