Our Village | Page 4

up at all the rest of the world with a kind round face and
sparkling eyes fringed with thick lashes. Mary Mitford was indeed
happy in her friends, as happy as she was unfortunate in her nearer
relations.
With much that is sad, there is a great deal of beauty and enjoyment in
Miss Mitford's life. For her the absence of material happiness was made
up for by the presence of warm-hearted sensibility, of enthusiasm, by
her devotion to her parents. Her long endurance and filial piety are very
remarkable, her loving heart carried her safely to the end, and she
found comfort in her unreasoning life's devotion. She had none of the
restlessness which is so apt to spoil much that might be harmonious; all
the charm of a certain unity and simplicity of motive is hers, 'the single
eye,' of which Charles Kingsley wrote so sweetly. She loved her home,
her trees, her surrounding lanes and commons. She loved her friends.
Her books and flowers are real and important events in her life,
soothing and distracting her from the contemplation of its constant
anxieties. 'I may truly say,' she once writes to Miss Barrett, 'that ever
since I was a very young girl, I have never (although for some years
living apparently in affluence) been without pecuniary care,--the care
that pressed upon my thoughts the last thing at night, and woke in the
morning with a dreary sense of pain and pressure, of something which
weighed me to the earth.'
Mary Russell Mitford was born on the 16th of December 1787. She
was the only child of her parents, who were well connected; her mother
was an heiress. Her father belonged to the Mitfords of the North. She

describes herself as 'a puny child, with an affluence of curls which
made her look as if she were twin sister to her own great doll.' She
could read at three years old; she learnt the Percy ballads by heart
almost before she could read. Long after, she used to describe how she
first studied her beloved ballads in the breakfast-room lined with books,
warmly spread with its Turkey carpet, with its bright fire, easy chairs,
and the windows opening to a garden full of flowers,--stocks,
honeysuckles, and pinks. It is touching to note how, all through her
difficult life, her path was (literally) lined with flowers, and how the
love of them comforted and cheered her from the first to the very last.
In her saddest hours, the passing fragrance and beauty of her favourite
geraniums cheered and revived her. Even when her mother died she
found comfort in the plants they had tended together, and at the very
last breaks into delighted descriptions of them.
She was sent to school in the year 1798 to No. 22 Hans Place, to a Mrs.
St. Quintin's. It seems to have been an excellent establishment. Mary
learnt the harp and astronomy; her taste for literature was encouraged.
The young ladies, attired as shepherdesses, were also taught to skip
through many mazy movements, but she never distinguished herself as
a shepherdess. She had greater success in her literary efforts, and her
composition 'on balloons' was much applauded. She returned to her
home in 18O2. 'Plain in figure and in face, she was never
common-looking,' says Mr. Harness. He gives a pretty description of
her as 'no ordinary child, her sweet smiles, her animated conversation,
her keen enjoyment of life, and her gentle voice won the love and
admiration of her friends, whether young or old.' Mr. Harness has
chiefly told Miss Mitford's story in her own words by quotations from
her letters, and, as one reads, one can almost follow her moods as they
succeed each other, and these moods are her real history. The assiduity
of childhood, the bright enthusiasm and gaiety of her early days, the
growing anxiety of her later life, the maturer judgments, the occasional
despairing terrors which came to try her bright nature, but along with it
all, that innocent and enduring hopefulness which never really deserted
her. Her elastic spirit she owed to her father, that incorrigible old
Skimpole. 'I am generally happy everywhere,' she writes in her
youth--and then later on: 'It is a great pleasure to me to love and to
admire, this is a faculty which has survived many frosts and storms.' It

is true that she adds a query somewhere else, 'Did you ever remark how
superior old gaiety is to new?' she asks.
Her handsome father, her plain and long-enduring mother, are both
unconsciously described in her correspondence. 'The Doctor's manners
were easy, natural, cordial, and apparently extremely frank,' says Mr.
Harness, 'but he nevertheless met the world on its own terms, and was
prepared to allow himself any insincerity which seemed expedient.