There used to be, and there no doubt still is, if I had but the courage to go and look at it, a small, old-fashioned cottage at Three Mile Cross, near Reading, which stood in a garden close to the road. A strip of garden was on one side, a little pony-stable on the other, and the larger part of the garden at the back. It was a comfortable-looking, but still a real village cottage, with no town or suburb-look whatever about it. Small lattice windows, below and above, with roses and jasmine creeping round them all, established its rural character; and there was a great buttress of a chimney rising from the ground at the garden-strip side, which was completely covered with a very ancient and very fine apricot tree. There the birds delighted to sit and sing among the leaves, and build too, in several snug nooks, and there in early autumn the wasps used to bite and bore into the rich ripe brown cracks of the largest apricots, and would issue forth in rage when any one of the sweetest of their property was brought down to the earth by the aid of a clothes-prop, guided under the superintending instructions of a venerable little gentlewoman in a garden-bonnet and shawl, with silver hair, very bright hazel eyes, and a rose-red smiling countenance. Altogether, it was one of the brightest faces any one ever saw.

“Now, my dear friend,” would she say, “if you will only attend to my advice, you will get that apricot up there, which is quite in perfection. I have had my eye upon it these last three weeks, wondering nobody stole it. The boys often get over into the garden before any of us are up. There now, collect all those leaves, if you will be so good—and those too—and lay them all in a heap just underneath, so that the apricot may fall upon them. If you don’t do that, it will burst open with a thump. There! now push the prop up slowly, so as to break the apricot from the stalk; and when it is down, do not be in too great a hurry to take it up, as it’s sure to have a good large wasp or two inside. Wasps are capital judges of ripe wall-fruit, as my dear father used to say. A little lower with the prop! more to the left—now just push the prong upwards, and gently lift—again—down it comes! Mind the wasps! three, four—mind! perhaps that’s not all—five! I told you so!”... “How angry they are!”

“Not more, my dear, than you and I would have been under similar circumstances.”

I had not known Miss Mitford very long at this time; but it was her habit to address all those with whom she was on intimate terms, by some affectionate expression. For several years, however, I used to pay a visit of a week or ten days to Miss Mitford’s cottage during the strawberry season, and again during the middle of summer, when her show of geraniums (she resisted all new nomenclatures) was at its height, and sometimes later, when the wonderful old fruit-trees just retained some half-dozen of their choicest treasures. It would be impossible for any engraving or photograph, however excellent as to features, to convey a true likeness of Mary Russell Mitford. During one of these visits, Miss Charlotte Cushman was also staying at the cottage, and exclaimed the first time Miss Mitford left the room, “What a bright face it is!” The effect of summer brightness over all the countenance was quite remarkable. A floral flush overspread the whole face, which seemed to carry its own light with it, for it was the same indoors as out. The silver hair shone, the forehead shone, the cheeks shone, and above all, the eyes shone. The expression was entirely genial, cognoscitive, beneficent. The outline of the face was an oblate round, of no very marked significance beyond that of an apple, or other rural “character”; in fact, it was very like a rosy apple in the sun. Always excepting the forehead and chin. The forehead was not only massive, but built in a way that sculpture only could adequately delineate.... This build of head, and strong outline of head and face, will go far to explain the strength of character displayed by Miss Mitford during the early and most trying periods of her life, with her extravagant and selfish father. It may also account for her general composure and presence of mind, both on great occasions and others, trifling enough to talk and write about, but of a kind to test the nerves of most ladies. For instance, in driving Miss Mitford one day in her little pony-chaise on a visit, she so riveted my attention on the special point of a story, that I allowed one wheel to run into a dry ditch at the roadside, and the pony-chaise must, of course, have turned over, but that we were “brought up” by the hedge. “Hillo! my dear friend!” said Miss Mitford; “we must get out.” We did so; the little trap was at once put on its proper course, and, without one word of comment, the bright-faced old lady took up the thread of her story.

R. H. Horne: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, addressed to Richard Hengist Horne.’ (With a Preface and Memoir by R. H. Stoddard.) New York: James Miller, 1877.

The cottage where I found her was situated on the high road between Basingstoke and Reading; and the village street on which she was then living contained the public-house and several small shops near by. There was also close at hand the village pond full of ducks and geese, and I noticed several young rogues on their way to school were occupied in worrying their feathered friends. The windows of the cottage were filled with flowers, and cowslips and violets were plentifully scattered about the little garden. Miss Mitford liked to have one dog, at least, at her heels, and this day her pet seemed to be constantly under foot. I remember the room into which I was shown was sanded, and a quaint old clock behind the door was marking off the hour in small but very loud pieces. The cheerful old lady called to me from the head of the stairs to come up into her sitting-room. I sat down by the open window to converse with her, and it was pleasant to see how the village children, as they went by, stopped to bow and courtesy. One curly-headed urchin made bold to take off his well-worn cap, and wait to be recognized as “little Johnny.” “No great scholar,” said the kind-hearted old lady to me, “but a sad rogue among our flock of geese. Only yesterday the young marauder was detected by my maid with a plump gosling stuffed half-way into his pocket!” While she was thus discoursing of Johnny’s peccadilloes, the little fellow looked up with a knowing expression, and very soon caught in his cap a ginger-bread dog, which the old lady threw to him from the window. “I wish he loved his book as well as he relishes sweetcake,” sighed she, as the boy kicked up his heels and disappeared down the lane.

James T. Fields: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’

The poor cottage was crumbling around us, and if we had stayed much longer we should have been buried in the ruins. And yet it was great grief to go. Besides my general aversion to new habitations, I had associations with those old walls which endeared them to me more than I can tell. There I had toiled and striven, and tasted of bitter anxiety.... There in the fulness of age, I had lost those whose love had made my home sweet and precious.... Other recollections, less dear and less sad, added their interest to the place. Friends many and kind; strangers, whose names were an honor, had come to that bright garden, and that garden room.... It was a heart-tug to leave that garden.

I walked from the one cottage to the other on an autumn evening, when the vagrant birds, whose habit of assembling here for their annual departure, gives, I suppose, the name of Swallowfield to the village, were circling and twittering over my head.... Here I am in the prettiest village, in the snuggest and cosiest of all snug cabins; a trim cottage garden, divided by a hawthorn hedge from a little field guarded by grand old trees; a cheerful glimpse of the high-road in front, just to hint that there is such a thing as a peopled world; and on either side the deep silent lanes that form the distinctive character of English scenery.

Mary Russell Mitford: ‘Recollections of a Literary Life.’

I must say that personally I did not like her so well as I liked her works. The charming bonhomie of her writings appeared at first in her conversation and manners; but there were other things which presently sadly impaired its charm. It is no part of my business to pass judgment on her views and modes of life. What concerned me was her habit of flattery, and the twin habit of disparagement of others. I never knew her respond to any act or course of conduct which was morally lofty. She could not believe in it, nor, of course, enjoy it; and she seldom failed to “see through” it, and to delight in her superiority to admiration. She was a devoted daughter, where the duty was none of the easiest; and servants and neighbors were sincerely attached to her. The little intercourse I had with her was spoiled by her habit of flattery; but I always fell back on my old admiration of her as soon as she was out of sight, and her ‘Village’ rose up in my memory.

Harriet Martineau: ‘Autobiography.’ Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877.

I never say one word more than appears to me to be true. To be sure, there is an atmosphere of love—a sunshine of fancy—in which objects appear clearer and brighter; and from such I may sometimes paint; but that is not flattery prepense, is it, my dear friend? I never mean to flatter—no, never! But it is a great pleasure to me to love and admire, and it is a faculty which has survived many frosts and storms.

Mary Russell Mitford: Letter to Sir William Elford in the former’s ‘Life,’ by L’Estrange.

I suppose she was one of the earliest English authors who was “interviewed” by the Americans. She was far from democratic, but always spoke of that nation with great respect. What impressed me much more was her admiration for Louis Napoleon; upon which point, as on many others, we soon agreed to differ. She even approved of the coup d’état, concerning which she writes to me, a little apologetically, “My enthusiasm is always ready laid, you know, like a housemaid’s fire”; which was very true.

James Payn: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

Carlyle tells us, “Nothing so lifts a man from all his men imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration”; and Miss Mitford admired to such an extent that she must have been lifted in this way nearly all her lifetime. Indeed she erred, if she erred at all, on this side, and over-praised and over-admired everything and everybody whom she regarded. When she spoke of Beranger, or Dumas, or Hazlitt, or Holmes, she exhausted every term of worship and panegyric. Louis Napoleon was one of her most potent crazes.... Although she had been prostrated by the hard work and increasing anxieties of forty years of authorship, when I saw her she was as fresh and independent as a skylark. She was a good hater as well as a good praiser, and she left nothing worth saving in an obnoxious reputation.... I have heard her go on in her fine way, giving preference to certain modern poems far above the works of the great masters of song. Pascal says that “the heart has reasons that reason does not know”; and Miss Mitford was a charming exemplification of this wise saying.

James T. Fields: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’

Nothing ever destroyed her faith in those she loved. If I had not known all about him (from my own folks of another generation who had known him well), I should have thought her father had been a patriot and a martyr. She spoke of him as if there had never been such a father—which in a sense was true. He had spent his wife’s fortune, and then another, and then the £10,000 [sic] which “little Mary” herself had got for him by hitting on the lucky number in a lottery, and was rapidly getting through her own modest earnings in the same free-handed manner, when good fortune removed him; but she always deemed it an irreparable loss. “I used to contrive to keep our house in order,” she would say, speaking of her literary gains, “and a little pony-carriage, and my dear, dear father.” To my mind he seemed like a Mr. Turveydrop, but he had really been a most accomplished and agreeable person, though with nothing sublime about him except his selfishness.

She had the same exaggerated notions of the virtues and talents of her friends (including myself); nay, her sympathies even extended to their friends, whom she did not know. Of course she had her prejudices by way of complement; and when she spoke of those who did not please her, her tongue played about their reputations like sheet-lightning—for there was much more flash than fork in it.

James Payn: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

She was a “country lady,” and if she caught any author growing a snowdrop and crocus at the wrong time of the year, he never recovered a place in her memory. On a certain occasion she had been speaking of the rabbit-shooting at Bear Wood; and afterwards happening to propose a visit there, I inadvertently remarked that I should be very happy to accompany her, but that of late years I had taken to gymnastic exercises, and quite given up all field-sports—besides, “I didn’t care for rabbit-shooting.” It was the wrong season!—and the look and exclamation that followed showed me that I had lost something of my position in her mind forever.

Richard Hengist Horne: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’

I think I should have recognized her anywhere. The short, plump body, the round, cheerful old face, with cheeks still as rosy as a girl’s, the kindly blue eyes, the broad, placid brow, and bands of silver hair peeping from beneath the quaint frilled cap, seemed to be all features of the picture which I had previously drawn in my mind. But for a gay touch in the ribbons, and the absence of the book-muslin handkerchief over the bosom, she might have been taken for one of those dear old Quaker ladies, whose presence, in its cheerful serenity, is an atmosphere of contentment and peace. Her voice was sweet, round, and racy, with a delicious archness at times. Sitting in deep arm-chairs, on opposite sides of the warm grate, while the rain lashed the panes and the autumn leaves drifted outside, we passed the afternoon in genial talk.

Bayard Taylor: ‘At Home and Abroad.’ New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862.

She was always cheerful, and her talk is delightful to remember. From girlhood she had known and had been intimate with most of the prominent writers of her time, and her observations and reminiscences were so shrewd and pertinent that I have scarcely known her equal. Her voice had a peculiar ringing sweetness in it, rippling out sometimes like a beautiful chime of silver bells; and when she told a comic story, hitting off some one of her acquaintances, she joined in with the laugh at the end with great heartiness and naïveté. When listening to anything that interested her, she had a way of coming into the narrative with “Dear me, dear me, dear me,” three times repeated, which it was very pleasant to hear.

James T. Fields: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’

I seem to see the dear little old lady now, looking like a venerable fairy, with bright sparkling eyes, a clear, incisive voice, and a laugh that carried you away with it. I never saw a woman with such an enjoyment of—I was about to say a joke, but the word is too coarse for her—of a pleasantry.

James Payn: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

The remark has often been made that we meet with no romance in Miss Mitford’s history—no trace of even a passing predilection or an unfortunate attachment. In her earlier years she was sometimes twitted about partialities for her cousin, Bertram Mitford, and others, but no impression seems to have been made. That she was heart-whole was evident, for she could be jocose on the subject.

Rev. A. G. L’Estrange: ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

She was constantly saying good words for unfledged authors who were struggling forward to gain recognition. No one ever lent such a helping hand as she did to the young writers of her country.

James T. Fields: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’

I can never forget the little figure rolled up in two chairs in the little Swallowfield room, packed round with books up to the ceiling, on to the floor—the little figure with clothes on, of course, but of no recognized or recognizable pattern; and somewhere out of the upper end of the heap, gleaming under a great, deep, globular brow, two such eyes as I never, perhaps, saw in any other Englishwoman—though I believe she must have had French blood in her veins to breed such eyes, and such a tongue; for the beautiful speech which came out of that ugly (it was that) face, and the glitter and depth too of the eyes, like live coals—perfectly honest the while, both lips and eyes—these seemed to me to be attributes of the highest French, or rather Gallic, not of the highest Englishwoman. In any case, she was a triumph of mind over matter, of spirit over flesh.

Charles Kingsley: Letter to James Payn, quoted in ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

She was much more proud of her plays (which had even then been well-nigh forgotten) than of the works by which she was so well known, and which at that time brought people from the ends of the earth to see her.

James Payn: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

I was early fond of her tales and descriptions, and have always regarded her as the originator of that new style of “graphic description” to which literature owes a great deal, however weary we may sometimes have felt of the excess in to which the practice of detail has run. Miss Austen has claims to other and greater honors; but she and Miss Mitford deserve no small gratitude for rescuing us from the folly and bad taste of slovenly indefiniteness in delineation. Miss Mitford’s tales appealed to a new sense, as it were, in a multitude of minds—greatly to the amazement of the whole circle of publishers who had rejected, in her works, as good a bargain as is often offered to publishers. Miss Mitford showed me at once that she undervalued her tales, and rested her claims on her plays. I suppose everybody who writes a successful tragedy must inevitably do this. Miss Mitford must have possessed some dramatic requisites, or her success could not have been so decided as it was; but my own opinion always was that her mind wanted the breadth, and her character the depth, necessary for genuine achievement in the highest enterprise of literature.

Harriet Martineau: ‘Autobiography.’

Her ‘Belford Regis’ should probably take rank as her best work; it has most power and most character; and is somewhat less uniformly soft and green than ‘Our Village’ is. The ‘Village,’ however, is, by association, my favorite. If read by snatches, it comes on the mind as the summer air and the sweet hum of rural sounds would float upon the senses through an open window in the country, and leaves with you for the whole day a tradition of fragrance and dew. She is in fact a sort of prose Crabbe in the sun, but with more grace and less strength; and also with a more steadfast look upon scenic nature—never going higher than the earth to look for the beautiful, but always finding it as surely as if she went higher. She is “matter-of-fact,” she says, which may be so, but then she idealizes matter of fact before she touches it, and thus her matter of fact is as beautiful as the matter of fantasy of other people.

In my own mind—and Mr. Kenyon agrees with me—she herself is better and stronger than any of her books; and her letters and conversation show more grasp of intellect and general power than would be inferable from her finished compositions. In her works, however, through all the beauty there is a clear vein of sense, and a quickness of observation which takes the character of a refined shrewdness. Do you not think so? And is she not besides most intensely a woman, and an Englishwoman?

Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’ New York: James Miller, 1877.

I think you will like ‘Our Village.’... Charles Lamb (the matchless ‘Elia’ of the London Magazine) says that nothing so fresh and characteristic has appeared for a long while. It is not over-modest to say this; but who would not be proud of the praise of such a proser?

Mary Russell Mitford: Letter to Sir Wm. Elford, in the former’s ‘Life,’ by L’Estrange.

I am very indulgent towards such borrowings in general, knowing how extraordinary is the manner in which memory and invention are sometimes mixed up, especially where the first faculty is weak. With me it is singularly so, and for years I was tormented by constant fear that every line of tragedy less bad than the next was stolen from my letters. It was a miserable feeling.

M. R. Mitford: Letter to Mr. D. Starkey, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

All that vile design of doing good, or making out this to be wrong and that to be right, ... I hold ... to be the most fatal fault of all fiction nowadays.... It was the one fault of Miss Edgeworth that she wrote to a text. How much better she wrote without one she showed in ‘Belinda.’ All the greatest writers of fiction are pure of that sin—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Jane Austen; and are not these precisely the writers who do most good as well as give most pleasure?

M. R. Mitford: Letter to Mr. D. Starkey, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

There would be a tacit hypocrisy, a moral cowardice, if I were to stop here, and not to confess, what I think you must suspect, although by no chance do I ever talk about it—that I do not, or rather cannot, believe all that the Church requires. I humbly hope that it is not necessary to do so, and that a devout sense of the mercy of God, and an endeavor, however imperfectly and feebly, to obey the great precepts of justice and kindness, may be accepted in lieu of that entire faith which, in me, will not be commanded. You will not suspect me of thoughtlessness in this matter; neither, I trust, does it spring from intellectual pride. Few persons have a deeper sense of their own weakness; few, indeed, can have so much weakness of character to deplore and strive against.

M. R. Mitford: Letter to Rev. Wm. Harness, in the former’s ‘Life,’ by L’Estrange.

I am still very lame, carried, or rather lifted, step by step up and down stairs and into bed, and unable to stir when recumbent, almost to move when seated. Besides this, I am all over as sore as if I were pounded in a mortar, and, although quite as cheerful as ever, yet paying for temporary excitement by exceeding weakness afterwards. In short, I am as infirm, as feeble, and as lively as it is well possible for a woman to be. I am got into the air, and I enjoy it so much, that I cannot but hope that it must eventually do me good. It seems to me that never was the marriage of May and June, which is always the loveliest moment of the year, so beautiful as now. The richness of the foliage in our deep-wooded lanes, the perfume of the bean-fields, the luxuriant blossoming of all sorts of flowering trees. I have some lilacs of both colors, especially the white, which I would match against those of which Horace Walpole was so fond at Strawberry Hill.

M. R. Mitford: Letter to Mr. D. Starkey, June 2nd, 1853, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

I must tell you what has three times befallen me this last week. My maid K., in putting me to bed, burst into a storm of exclamations, all referring to the candlestick; I looked, and saw nothing but a dingy caterpillar about half an inch long. It moved, and a little bright star of bluish greenish light was reflected on the silver. It was a glow-worm! We extinguished the candle, and the candlestick was sent to one of the grass-plots in the front of the house, and in about ten minutes the beautiful insect had crawled out upon the turf. Four nights after, exactly same thing occurred, and another glow-worm was found on one of the lower windows. We can only account for these visits to the candlestick by the circumstance of there being both nights a little jar of fresh-gathered pinks upon the table.... K., who is full of pretty sayings, will have it that, now that I—always so fond of those stars of the earth—can no longer go to see them, they come to visit me.

M. R. Mitford: Letter to Mr. D. Starkey, July, 1853, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

The head is mercifully spared, but for above six months I have been steadily growing worse and worse, and weaker and weaker. It is sad to write so to you, but it is the truth. Champagne and nourishing food keep me alive, and stimulating medicine. To-day is fine, and I sit by my open window enjoying the balmy air, altogether too much sunk in the chair to see more than the trees and the sky, and a bit of distant road, but still enjoying that. My roses are very beautiful, and I have many of the old moss, which are delicately sweet; and common white pinks, almost like cloves in their fragrance.

M. R. Mitford: Letter to Emily Jephson, July 20, 1854, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

The goodness shown to me often draws tears into my eyes. People whom all the world knows, and yet more, people of whom I have never heard, send to me whatever they think I shall like, call at my door, ... come at any hour that I may appoint, if I be well enough to see them, and never take offence at a refusal. There is a reality about this when it has lasted above two years.... It has pleased Providence to preserve to me my calmness of mind and clearness of intellect, and also my powers of reading by day and by night, and, which is still more, my love of poetry and literature, my cheerfulness and my enjoyment of little things. This very day, not only my common pensioners the dear robins, but a saucy troop of sparrows and a little shining bird of passage, whose name I forget, have all been pecking at once at their tray of bread-crumbs outside the window. Poor, pretty things! How much delight there is in these common objects, if people would learn to enjoy them!

M. R. Mitford: Letter to Mrs. Crowther, January 1, 1855,[13] in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’