No one can have glanced at Our Village, or any of the charming sketches of Miss Mitford, without having been struck by the peculiar elegance, the raciness, the simplicity of her style. It is as free in all its movements as that pet of hers, the Italian greyhound she has made so familiar to us all—as free and as graceful. A beautiful style is no singularity in our days, and there are many orders of such beauty; nevertheless, Miss Mitford has a dialect of her own. It is a style gathered from familiarity with the classic, and especially the dramatic poets, and with whatever is most terse and elegant amongst our prose writers, and yet applied with perfect ease to the simplest details of life, to the real transaction and the daily scene before her. You would think every one was talking in the same manner; it is only Miss Mitford who speaks this dialect. It is as if any one should learn Italian from the works of Petrarch or Tasso, or any other of their classics, and be able to apply the language he had thus acquired without the least restraint to the common purposes of life; every Italian would understand him, and seem to speak like him, and yet he would remain in exclusive possession of his own Tuscan speech. Miss Mitford is one of those who have made the discovery that there is always a "California" under our feet, if we look for it. She detected, by her own independent sagacity, and before the truth was so generally known and so generally acted upon as it is at present, that what most interests in books is precisely that which is nearest to us in real life. She did not find it necessary to go to the Alps or the Pyrenees for her landscape, nor to Spain or Constantinople for her men and women; she looked down the lane that led from her own cottage-door; she saw the children in it, and the loaded hay-cart; she saw Arabia with all her tents in that gipsy encampment where the same kettle seems to swing for ever between the same three poles—nomadic race, eternally wandering and never progressing. She looked out of her own window, and within it her own home—always cheerful, or always deserving to be such, from the cheerful spirit of its owner; and she found in all these things, near and dear to her, sufficient subjects for her pencil. And very faithfully she paints the village scene—with, at least, as much fidelity to truth as a graceful womanly spirit could summon up resolution enough to practise. A light something too golden falls uniformly over the picture. A work professing to be the Recollections of a Literary Life, and that literary life Miss Mitford's, could not fail to attract us. The subject is one of the most interesting an author could select; for, in addition to whatever charm it may acquire from personal narrative, the recollections in which it deals are in themselves thoughts, in themselves literature. They must always have this twofold interest—whatever they gain from the reminiscent, and whatever they possess themselves of sterling value. The subject is excellent, and we are persuaded that Miss Mitford is capable of doing ample justice to it; all we have to regret here is that she has not thrown herself completely and unreservedly into her subject; she never seems, indeed, quite to have determined what should be the distinct scope and purpose of her work. This apparent indecision or hesitation on her part is, we suspect, the sole cause of any disappointment which some of its readers may possibly feel. Our authoress has been unwilling to launch herself on the full stream or current of her own personal reminiscences and feelings, to write what would be, in fact, little else than an autobiography; she has shrunk back, afraid of the charge of being too personal, too egotistical. A delicacy and sensitiveness very natural; and yet the very nature of her subject required that she should brave this charge. It was not a mere selection of extracts and quotations, accompanied by a few critical remarks, which she intended to give us. If this had been her sole, original, and specific purpose, we venture to say that it would have been, in many respects, a very different series of extracts she would have brought together. Now, if Miss Mitford had boldly recalled her own intellectual history—giving us the favourite passages of her favourite authors, as they were still living in her memory and affections, (for of that which has ceased to be admired the faintest glance is sufficient)—she would have produced a far superior work to that which lies before us. Or if, discarding altogether her own personal history, she had merely gone into her library, and, pulling down from the shelves a certain number of favourite authors, had selected from each what she most approved, accompanying her quotations with some critical and biographical notices, and arranging them in something like harmonious order, so that we should not be tossed too abruptly from one author to another of quite different age and character, she could not have failed, here also, of producing a work complete of its kind. In the first case, we should have had the unity and the interest of a continuous and personal narrative; in the second case, we should have had a higher order of selections and criticisms; the beauty of the quotation would have been the sole motive for inserting it; and her clear critical faculty would have been unbiassed by the amiable partialities of friendship. As we cannot tell, however, with what anticipations the reader may open a book of this description, (which, in its premises, must be always more or less vague,) we are perhaps altogether wrong in supposing that he is likely to feel any disappointment whatever. There is much in it which cannot fall to interest him. But if he does experience to any degree this feeling of disappointment, it will be traceable to the simple fact we have been pointing out—the want of a settled plan or purpose in the work itself. No one knows better than Miss Mitford that, if a writer is not quite determined in the scope and object of his own book, he is pretty sure to leave a certain indistinct and unsatisfactory impression on his reader. Having said thus much in the absence of a definite purpose, we ought to permit the authoress to explain herself upon this head. "The title of this book," she says in the preface, "gives a very imperfect idea of the contents. Perhaps it would be difficult to find a short phrase that would accurately describe a work so miscellaneous and so wayward; a work where there is far too much of personal gossip and of local scene-painting for the grave pretension of critical essays, and far too much of criticism and extract for anything approaching in the slightest degree to autobiography. The courteous reader must take it for what it is." We hope to rank amongst "courteous readers," and will "take it for what it is." Recollections of a Literary Life was a title which promised too much; but there was no help for it: a title the book must have, and we can easily understand that, under certain circumstances, the choice of a name may be a very difficult matter. Whatever name may best become it, the book is, without doubt, full of pleasant and agreeable reading. A better companion for the summer's afternoon we could not recommend. That "personal gossip" of which the preface speaks, is written in the most charming manner imaginable; and it will be impossible, we think, for any one, however familiar with our literature, not to meet, amongst the quotations, with some which he will sincerely thank the authoress for having brought before him. Having thus discharged our critical conscience by insisting, perhaps with a more severe impartiality than the case demanded, on the one apparent defect in the very structure and design of this book, we have now only to retrace our steps through it, pausing where the matter prompts an observation, or where it affords an apt example of the kind of interest which pervades it. And first we must revert to that "personal gossip," to which we have a decided predilection, and in which Miss Mitford pre-eminently excels: in her hands it becomes an art. Here is something about "Woodcock Lane." She is about to introduce her old favourites, Beaumont and Fletcher, and carries us first to a certain pleasant retreat where she was accustomed to read these dramatists. "I pore over them," she says, "in the silence and solitude of a certain green lane, about half a mile from home; sometimes seated on the roots of an old fantastic beech, sometimes on the trunk of a felled oak, or sometimes on the ground itself, with my back propped lazily against a rugged elm."
After describing this camp of gipsies, and how the men carry on a sort of "trade in forest ponies," and how the women make and sell baskets "at about double the price at which they
After this little excursion into Woodcock Lane, we are introduced to Messrs Beaumont and Fletcher. The quotations from these authors we should have no object in reproducing here. One thing we cannot help noticing. Both on this and on some other occasions we are struck by an omission, by a silence. Though she may think fit to represent these dramatists as her favourite companions, we are morally certain that it was a far greater than either of them who was generally her delight and her study in that shady solitude. Could we have looked over the page as she sate there leaning so amiably against that "rugged elm," we are sure that it would have been Shakspeare that we should have found in her hands. But why no word of Shakspeare? We think we can conjecture the cause of this omission; and, if our surmise is correct, we quite sympathise with the feeling that led to it. Miss Mitford is a sincere and ardent admirer of Shakspeare; she must be so—in common with every intelligent person who reads poetry at all. But Miss Mitford likes to keep her senses; has a shrewd, quiet intelligence; has little love for what is vague or violent in criticism any more than in poetry; and she has felt that the extravagant, rhodomontade style of panegyric now prevalent upon our greatest of poets, reduced her to silence. She could not out-Herod Herod; she could not outbid these violent declaimers who speak of Shakspeare as if he were a god, who admire all they read which bears his name—the helter-skelter entangled confusion and obscurity, the wretched conceit, the occasional bombast—admire all, and thereby prove they have no right to any admiration whatever. She was, therefore, like many others who love and reverence him most, reduced to silence. Some years hence a sensible word may be written of Shakspeare. At present, he who would praise with discrimination must apparently place himself in the rank of his detractors. Miss Mitford's critical taste leads her to an especial preference of what is distinct and intelligible in all the departments of literature. To some it may appear that she is more capable of doing justice to poetry of the secondary than of the higher and more spiritual order. However that may be, we, for our own part, congratulated ourselves on an escape from We go back to Woodcock Lane. We rather cruelly abridged our last extract, on purpose that we might have space for one other of the same description. We make no apology for clinging to this "personal gossip." Very few of the poetical quotations throughout the work have more of beauty and of pathos than the concluding paragraph of the next extract we shall give. Apropos of Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia, she makes us participators in her country rambles; and apropos of these she introduces us to an old friend, a walking-stick—"pretty nearly as well known as ourselves in our Berkshire village." Some sixty years ago it was "a stick of quality," having belonged to a certain Duchess-Dowager of Atholl; but the circumstance that her own mother had taken to using it, during her latter days, had especially endeared it to her.
This is very beautifully expressed, and it is the tone of right sentiment; truthful, natural, the unaffected sadness that tempers into a sweet and pleasant memory.
The staff had met with its share of misadventures and accidents; "one misfortune, so to say personal, which befel it, was the loss of its own head;" but its loss from the pony-chaise, its fall from the chaise into a brook which had been passed through the day before, is the especial calamity here celebrated. By this time we learn with regret that the stick has become more than a whim—has grown into a useful and necessary friend:—
But for the fate of the stick, and how it was found, and what was done that day with Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia, we must refer the reader to the book itself. We must now proceed to take some general survey of the far larger portion of the work, which consists of extracts, with some biographical and critical notices. The series of quotations does not open very auspiciously: we are presented with some Irish ballads of Mr Thomas Davis, which we do not think will excite in many readers the same amount of admiration they appear to have done in Miss Mitford. We must prefer the song she has given, as by Mr Banim, the author of the Tales of the O'Hara Family. It is simple and graceful:— "'Tis not for love of gold I go, 'Tis not for love of fame; Though Fortune may her smile bestow, And I may win a name, Ailleen; And I may win a name. "And yet it is for gold I go, And yet it is for fame— That they may deck another brow, And bless another name, Ailleen; And bless another name. ...... "Oh! when the bays are all my own, I know a heart will care! Oh! when the gold is sought and won, I know a brow will wear, Ailleen; I know a brow will wear. "And when with both returned again, My native land I see, I know a smile will meet me then, And a hand will welcome me, Ailleen; And a hand will welcome me." There is a brief notice of another writer, a countryman of Mr Banim's, which is very touching. Gerald Griffin seems to have sounded every note of that gay and sad and mournful destiny which the young poet has to endure, who, with a proud, aspiring, sensitive nature, fronts the We have another contemporary instance brought before us, where the poetic fervour or ambition led to a far sadder retreat than this Society, whatever it may be, of Christian Brethren. John Clare, while following the plough, had looked on nature with the eye of a poet. Pity that he could not have written his poetry, and still clung to his plough. But he left the fields for life in cities, and, instead of singing for the song's sake, commenced singing for the support of wife and family. Hence came madness—in this instance, that actual insanity which the physician can catalogue and describe. It is worth noticing that his first patron, Lord Exeter, had really entertained the design of so assisting the rustic poet that he should be able to unite his favourite pursuit with his early, healthy, invigorating occupations of husbandry. Surely there is nothing incompatible between them. "Lord Exeter," we are told, "sent for him to Burleigh, and hearing that he earned thirty pounds per annum by field-labour, settled an annuity of fifteen pounds upon him, with a view to his devoting half his time to agricultural pursuits, and half to literary pursuits." We like this idea of his noble patron; it bespeaks, we think, a very reflective as well as a generous mind. But there were patrons of a very different stamp, or rather, according to the account we have here, a number of officious, vulgar admirers of poor John Clare, who rendered the design abortive; who had nothing to offer to the village poet, but who disturbed his quiet, intelligent, safe, unostentatious, and healthy existence, by their absurd and idle curiosity. He was called away from his fields—to be looked at! "He was frequently interrupted, as often as three times a-day, during his labours in the harvest-field, to gratify the curiosity of admiring visitors." We cannot blame poor John Clare for leaving his labours in the harvest-field; it has always been the weakness of the poet to love praise too much; without this weakness he would hardly have been a poet, at least he would have been a very careless one; but we think those "admiring visitors" showed their taste and their love of poetry in a most extraordinary manner. Whatever else they felt, they felt no respect for the dignity of the man. They ought to have understood that visits of such a kind, for such an idle purpose, whatever flattering shape they may have assumed, were insults. Miss Mitford terminates the painful history by the following singular account:—
As might have been expected, and is both graceful and natural, the poets of her own sex occupy a considerable space in Miss Mitford's selections. In some cases the names were new to us, but the extracts given made us feel that they ought not to have been so. An Englishman may be very proud, we think, when he reflects how many highly cultivated minds there are amongst his countrywomen, minds so gentle and so intelligent, whose cultivation goes hand in hand with the truest refinement of character. Here in one chapter we have four names strung together, most of which, we suspect, will be new to the majority of readers—"Mrs Clive, Mrs Acton Tindal, Miss Day, Mrs Robert Dering"—yet the extracts in this chapter will bear comparison with those of any other part of the work. A little poem called "The Infant Bridal," is, as Miss Mitford describes it to be, one of the most perfect paintings we ever read. Its subject is the marriage of Richard Duke of York, second son of Edward IV., with Anne Mowbray, Duchess of Norfolk. The bridegroom was not five years old, and the bride scarcely three. The procession, where, at the head of "belted barons" and courtly dames, "Two blooming children led the way With short and doubtful tread;" the ceremony, where the venerable prelate gives his blessing to this infant bride and bridegroom, and "Their steady gaze these children meek Upon the old man bent, As earnestly they seemed to seek The solemn words intent." Every part of the narrative is so charmingly told that we cannot consent to mar the effect by any broken quotation. It is too long to be extracted entirely. From the poem which follows, of Miss Day's, it will be easier to break off a fragment.
"Stately and beautiful and chaste, Forth went the dauntless maid, Her blood to yield, her youth to waste, That carnage might be stayed. This solemn purpose filled her soul, There was no room for fear; She heard the cry of vengeance roll Prophetic on her ear. "She thought to stem the course of crime By one appalling deed; She knew to perish in her prime Alone would be her meed. No tremor shook her woman's breast, No terror blanched her brow; She spoke, she smiled, she took her rest, And hidden held her vow. "She mused upon her country's wrong, Upon the tyrant's guilt; Her settled purpose grew more strong As blood was freshly spilt. What though the fair, smooth hand were slight! It grasped the sharpened steel; A triumph flashed before her sight— The death that it should deal. "She sought her victim in his den— The tiger in his lair; And though she found him feeble then, There was no thought to spare. Fast through his dying, guilty heart, That pity yet withstood, She made her gleaming weapon dart, And stained her soul with blood." In another chapter of her work Miss Mitford gives us a slight biographical sketch of one who needs no introduction here or elsewhere—of the now celebrated Mrs Browning. The sketch is very interesting, but the extract given from her poems is not very happily selected. Miss Mitford does not seem to have ventured to trust herself among the more daring beauties—the bolder and more spiritual flights of her friend Mrs Browning. Her taste clings, as we have said, to what is distinct and definite. Of this we have rather an amusing instance in the criticism she passes on Shelley's Alastor. There is good sense and some truth in the criticism, and yet it is not all that ought to have been said of such a poem:—
Now, if, instead of the magnificent presentation copy, read in the great library of Tavistock House, where visitors were coming in and going out, Miss Mitford had taken a little homely manageable volume down Woodcock Lane, and there read Alastor, undisturbed, beneath the shadow of the trees, she must, we think, have had to record a very different impression of the poem. She would have needed no "marker." Perhaps there would have lived in her memory an hour of intellectual pleasure as great as any that the page of the poet had ever procured for her. Though not the highest effort of Shelley's genius, Alastor is probably the most pleasing. There is no tortuosity of thought to pardon or to forget; it is one unbroken interwoven strain of music, of imagery, of sentiment. Those who have defined poetry as the luxury of thought, could nowhere find a better example to illustrate their meaning—it is all music, imagination, feeling. Oh, when the summer months come round, let us entreat Miss Mitford to try it in Woodcock Lane! How could she trust to anything she had read out of a magnificent presentation copy, in the great library at Tavistock House? The quotation from Keats is very skilfully selected; it must please the most fastidious taste, and is yet sufficiently peculiar to suggest that no one but Keats could have written it. From the writings of W. S. Landor she might have gathered much better, and without devoting to them any larger space than she has done. If she had turned to the miscellaneous poems which conclude his collected works, she might have extracted two or three of the most polished and perfect lyrics in our language, and which have the precise qualification, in this case so indispensable, of being very brief. Mr Landor, by the way, will be much amused to find himself praised—for what will our readers think?—for modesty! "I prefer," says Miss Mitford, "to select from the Hellenics, that charming volume, because very few have given such present life to classical subjects. I begin with the preface, so full of grace and modesty." In the lady's mind, grace and modesty are no doubt inseparable companions; and, finding abundance of the one in Mr Landor's style, she concluded that the other must be there also. Of that other there is not an atom in all his writings, and there never was intended to be. It is a maidenly quality which he never had the remotest design of laying claim to. The very preface which she quotes is a piece of undisguised sarcasm. We doubt if there is much grace in it, certainly there is no modesty. Here is the commencement of this modest preface. "It is hardly to be expected that ladies and gentlemen will leave on a sudden their daily promenade, skirted by Turks, and shepherds, and knights, and plumes, and palfreys of the finest Tunbridge manufacture, to look at these rude frescoes, delineated on an old wall, high up, and sadly weak in colouring. As in duty bound, we can wait." If Miss Mitford should ever read this preface again, she will pass her hand over her brow, a little puzzled where it was she saw the "modesty." She will appeal to Fanchon, who will be sitting in her lap, looking very intently over the page, and ask him what he thinks of the matter. Fanchon will laugh out obstreperously, will bark delighted, at the amiable blunder of his mistress. We remarked that we had been occasionally struck with an omission, or a silence. It seems to us a characteristic circumstance that we hear no mention made of Lord Byron. Wordsworth and Southey, Coleridge and Shelley, get some space allotted to them, larger or smaller; but he who occupied so conspicuous a position among these very contemporaries has none whatever. It is not because he still holds a very high rank amongst our poets—though by no means the same eminence that was once assigned to him—that we notice this omission; but because his writings had so strong and peculiar an influence on most minds open to the influence of poetry, that we naturally expect to meet with his name in the literary recollections of one who, we way venture to say without any ungallant reference to chronology, must have lived in that period when Lord Byron was in the ascendant. There are few persons who, in acknowledging the happy influence of Wordsworth's poetry, would not have to commence their confession by some account of the very opposite influence of Lord Byron's. We should have said that the Byronic fever was a malady which hardly any of our contemporaries, who are liable to catch a fever of any kind from books, had entirely escaped. Miss Mitford, however, hints at no such calamity. Her excellent constitution seems to have preserved her from it. She bore a charm against all such plagues, in her clear sense and cheerful temper. She was thereby preserved from some very absurd misery—very absurd, but most indisputable misery; and she also lost some experience of a not unprofitable nature—certain lessons of wisdom which, being burnt into one, are never afterwards to be obliterated from the mind. If the subject were but one shade more attractive, or less repulsive than it is, we would, for the benefit of such exempted persons as Miss Mitford, describe the course and the symptoms of this Byronic fever. We would describe how, some luckless day, the youth who ought to be busy with his Greek or his Euclid plays truant over the poetry of Childe Harold and Manfred; how it makes him brimful of unaccountable misery; how, as is most natural, he reads on the faster—reads on insatiate and insensate. But what tossings and throbbings and anguish the patient endures we have no wish to depict. The one thing worth noticing is this, that although the sufferer is perfectly convinced that the whole world is, or ought to be, as wretched as himself, he has not, in all his compositions, one jot of compassion left—not one jot for any species of misery, not even that which resembles and re-echoes his own. Some calamities are said to teach us sympathy with the calamities of others—so sings Virgil, we remember—but this misery has the property of hardening the heart against any human sympathy whatever. One of these imaginary misanthropes cannot even tolerate the lamentations of another. You may listen to his outcries and denunciations if you will, but if, in your turn, you wish to bellow ever so little, you must go into the next field—go many fields off. Very curious is the hardness of heart bred out of a morbid passion of meditative discontent. Why does he live? why does he continue his miserable existence? is the only reflection which the sufferings of another man excite in our moody philosopher. For every lamenting wretch he has daggers, bowels of poison—no pity. If mankind could commit one simultaneous, universal act of suicide, it would be a most sublime deed—perhaps the only real act of wisdom and sublimity mankind has it in its power to perform. Well, this absurd and horrible, this very ridiculous and most afflictive of morbid conditions, our clear-minded authoress never seems to have passed through. She never gave the beggar a shilling, muttering some advice to buy a rope withal. If the money The happiest step made by those whose temper and mode of thinking were likely to be formed by practical literature, was when they deserted Byron for Wordsworth, the Childe Harold for the Excursion. If we were to indulge in "Recollections" of our own, we should have much to say—and to say with pleasure—of this second epoch, this Wordsworthian era. A very beautiful Flora appeared upon the earth during this period. Life smiled again; nature and humanity were no longer divorced; one might love the solitude and beauty of hill and valley, lake and river, without hating man, or breathing any other sentiment than that of gratitude to Him who gave this life, who gave this nature. Wordsworth was peculiarly fitted to be the successor of Byron. He had himself shared in the dark and desponding spirit of the age just so much as enabled him to understand and portray it, to assail or to alleviate. He had scanned the abyss looking down from the precipice, but his feet were well planted on the jutting rock. He threw his vision down; he stood firm himself. He drew many an inspiration from the dark gulf below; but nothing betrays that he had ever plunged into the abyss. His poetry will at all times have a genial influence, but it can never again exert the same power, or, as a consequence, excite the same enthusiastic plaudits, which it did amongst the generation who have now advanced to manhood. It then fell upon the ear of the tired pupil of doubt and discontent. It had a healing power; it was sweet music, and it was more—it was a charm that allayed a troubled spirit. Why should any poet, it may be asked, capable of moving the human heart, exert so much more power at one period than another? He has but his book to conjure with; his book is still, and always, with us. The answer is very simple, and yet may be worth recalling to mind. The book is with us, but it is only when it first comes forth that we are all reading it at once. When numbers are reading this same book at the same time, the poet shares in the advantages of the orator: he adresses an audience who kindle each other's passions, each one of whom contributes something to the enthusiasm of the multitude, and receives back in his bosom the gathering enthusiasm of the crowd. When novelty, or any other circumstance, directs all eyes to the same page, that page is no longer read with the same calmness, the same perspicuity and judgment, that we bring to any other composition. The enthusiasm of friends, of neighbours, of the whole country, is added to our own. And thus the genuine poet may descend somewhat in public estimation, and yet retain a lasting claim upon our admiration. It was one thing to read him when all the world were reading too, talking of him, and applauding him; and quite another when the solitary student takes down his book from the shelf and reads it in its turn, and reads it separately—he and the author alone together. One advantage of works of the description we are now reviewing, is that they bring together popular specimens of the poetry of very different ages. Miss Mitford gives us a few from Cowley, and still earlier writers. The impression they made upon us led to some trains of thought upon the manifest progress of taste, which we have not space here to pursue, and which would be wearisome on the present occasion, if we were to attempt to follow them out. But we cannot help observing that even quite secondary writers are daily producing amongst us far better verses, in every respect, than many of those which have acquired, and seem still to retain, a high traditional celebrity. We are not altogether blind, we think, to the literary foibles "Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good!" But you must read it alone: the next line ruins it— "Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good! Having written the word "patrician," it followed, as a rule, that he must look about for something to be called "plebeian!" Miss Mitford has placed amongst her extracts the song by Richard Lovelace, supposed to be written when in prison, in which the well-known lines occur:— The mind being free, there is true liberty. A very excellent theme for the poet. In the first verse, speaking of his "divine AlthÆa," he says, "When I lie tangled in her hair, And fettered with her eye, The birds, that wanton in the air, Know no such liberty." This is pretty; but unfortunately the birds in the air suggest the fishes in the sea. So the next verse concludes thus:— "When thirsty grief in wine we steep, When healths and draughts go free, Fishes, that tipple in the deep, Know no such liberty." We meet here also with that poem attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, called "The Lie," which seems to have a hereditary right to a place in all poetical collections. Miss Mitford speaks of "its extraordinary beauty." It is a very extraordinary delusion that any one, with such poetry before him as the English language now possesses, should call it beautiful. It is composed of the mere commonplaces of satire, very rudely put together. The soul of the speaker is sent forth to charge all the world with corruption; the world defends itself, and then the soul gives it the lie—in other words, repeats the charge in a manner which has been felt, it seems, by many readers, to be peculiarly pungent. The first verse is by far the best, and every subsequent verse seems to grow more loose and jejune as the composition proceeds. "Go, soul, the body's guest, Upon a thankless errand; Fear not to touch the best, The truth shall be thy warrant. Go, since I needs must die, And give the world the lie. "Go tell the court it glows, And shines like rotten wood; Go tell the church it shows Men's good, and doth no good: If church and court reply, Then give them both the lie." And so it goes on through thirteen wrangling, jangling verses. In some of them this virtuous soul makes a strange medley of complaints:— "Tell them that brave it most They beg for more by spending, Who in their greatest cost Lack nothing but commanding: And if they make reply, Spare not to give the lie. "Tell zeal it lacks devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust: And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie." There must have been surely a great charm in this "giving the lie," But we are in danger of forgetting that Miss Mitford's selections consist of prose as well as of poetry; and yet, though these occupy a large space in her volumes, they cannot detain us long. We have little room either for quotation or for comment. There is, however, one extract from this portion of the work, which we have all along promised ourselves the pleasure of giving to our readers. When we saw the name of Richardson, the author of Sir Charles Grandison, heading one of the chapters, our only impulse was to hurry on as fast as possible. We have no other association with his name but that of a mortal weariness, the result of a conscientious but fruitless effort to read his novels. We laboured conscientiously, and might been have labouring to this hour, if a kind friend had not relieved us from our self-imposed task, by his solemn assurance "that no living man had read them!" It was a feat that had not been accomplished for years. When, therefore, we saw the name of Samuel Richardson at the head of a chapter, we ran for it—we skipped; but, in turning over the pages, the name of Klopstock caught our eye, and we found ourselves reading some letters of the wife of the poet Klopstock which had been addressed to Richardson. They are the most charming of letters. The foreigner's imperfect English could not be replaced with advantage by the most classical elegance. One of these, we resolved, should lend its interest to our own critical notice. Here it is—
There are several of these letters, and all distinguished by the same tenderness and charming simplicity; and the sad fate and early death of the writer of them are brought home to us very touchingly. We have shown enough to justify our opinion, that every reader, whatever his peculiar taste may be, will find something to interest him in these volumes; and if, we repeat, he feels the least degree of disappointment, it will only be because he compares them with that imaginary work which he believes Miss Mitford might have written. |