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Title: Mary Russell Mitford and her surroundings
Author: Constance Hill
Illustrator: Ellen G. Hill
Release date: July 13, 2025 [eBook #76491]
Language: English
Original publication: London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1920
Credits: Fiona Holmes and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY RUSSELL MITFORD AND HER SURROUNDINGS ***
Transcriber’s Note
Footnotes have all been renumbered from 1 to 20.
Page 76 — bougeoises changed to bourgeoises.
Page 332 — biassed changed to biased.
The Advertisements “By Same Author”, have been placed at the back of
the project.
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD
[Illustration: _From a Portrait by A. Burt_ _taken in 1836._]
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD AND HER SURROUNDINGS
BY
CONSTANCE HILL
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELLEN G. HILL AND REPRODUCTIONS OF PORTRAITS
“There are few names which fall with a pleasanter sound upon the ears
of those who adopt authors as friends than the name of Mary Russell
Mitford.”
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXX
_The centre design in the binding represents a French gold enamelled
watch which belonged to Mrs. Mitford and was inherited by her daughter.
The original is in the possession of the Misses Lovejoy._
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
PREFACE
The more we study the life and character of Mary Russell Mitford the
more we become attached to her, for we come under the influence of a
nature that seems to radiate peace and good-will upon all who surround
her.
“The pleasant compelled enjoyment of her tales,” writes Harriet
Martineau, “is ascribable no doubt to the flow of good spirits and
kindliness that lighted up and warmed everything that her mind
produced.” And if we seek for a further reason, surely it is to be
found, as another writer observes, “in their strong rural flavour. They
breathe the air of the hay-fields and the scent of the hawthorn boughs.
There is nothing artificial about them, nothing of the conventional
pastoral. They are native and to the manner born.”
Here is an example that occurs in a letter to a friend, written long
before her printed works appeared. Speaking of a walk in the Berkshire
meadows on a spring morning, she says: “Oh, how beautiful they were
to-day, with all their train of callow goslings, and frisking lambs,
and laughing children chasing the butterflies that floated like
animated flowers in the air!... How full of fragrance and of melody!
It is when walking in such scenes, listening to the mingled notes of a
thousand birds and inhaling the mingled perfume of a thousand flowers
that I feel the real joy of existence.”
Many writers have imitated Miss Mitford’s style since the “tales” of
_Our Village_ first took the reading world by surprise nearly a hundred
years ago; but none of those writers, in my opinion, possess her potent
charm, nor do they possess her wonderful power of making her readers
see nature, as it were, through her eyes and grasp the beauty and
poetry of rural life.
Mary as a child was shy and silent before strangers, but withal very
observant. Writing of the impressions made upon her mind by some of the
French _émigré_ coteries with which she had come in contact, she says:
“In truth they formed a motley group [whose] contrasts and combinations
were too ludicrous not to strike irresistibly the fancy of an acute
observing girl whose perception of the ludicrous was rendered keener
by the invincible shyness which confined the enjoyment entirely to her
own breast.”
But is it not to the experiences gained by such quiet, shy children as
herself and Charlotte Brontë that we owe much of our knowledge of life
and its surroundings? It is the listeners not the talkers that can hand
down this knowledge to us.
Miss Mitford’s talents were varied, and we owe to her pen some stirring
dramas which were performed with much éclat on the London stage, and
in which John Kemble and Macready took the leading parts. The public
were astonished to learn that it was a gentle lady living in a remote
Berkshire village who was thus moving the great London audiences.
A shrewd American critic of the day remarks: “In all these plays there
is strong, vigorous writing—masculine in the free unhashed use of
language—but wholly womanly in its purity from coarseness or licence
and in the inter-mixture of those incidental touches of softest feeling
and finest observation which are peculiar to the gentler sex.”
It has been said of Miss Mitford by one who knew her that “as
a letter-writer she has rarely been surpassed, and that her
correspondence, so full as it is of point in allusions, so full of
anecdote and of recollections, will be considered among her finest
writings.” Even her hasty notes, we are told, “had a relish about
them quite their own.” It is interesting to find the views she
herself entertained on the subject of letter-writing as given in her
_Recollections of a Literary Life_. It runs as follows: “Such is the
reality and identity belonging to letters written at the moment and
intended only for the eye of a favourite friend, that probably any
genuine series of epistles were the writer ever so little distinguished
would ... possess the invaluable quality of individuality which so
often causes us to linger before an old portrait of which we know no
more than that it is a Burgomaster by Rembrandt or a Venetian Senator
by Titian. The least skilful pen when flowing from the fulness of the
heart ... shall often paint with as faithful and life-like a touch as
either of those great masters.”
Mary Russell Mitford’s friends were numerous, both here in England and
on the other side of the Atlantic, and her sympathies were as wide as
the great ocean that lies between us. She writes in later life: “I love
poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen, and can never
be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to retain the
two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy by which we are
enabled to escape from the consciousness of our own infirmities into
the great works of all ages and the joys and sorrows of our immediate
friends.”
This sunny nature which was unembittered by severe trials speaks to us
in all the stories of _Our Village_, and it spread such a halo about
the scenes therein described that little Three Mile Cross—the prototype
of _Our Village_—became in time a resort of pilgrims from far and near,
among whom were some of the finest spirits of the age. All longed to
gaze upon the cottage in which Mary Russell Mitford had dwelt, and
to sit in the small parlour whose window looks down upon the village
street, where she had written the stories so dear to her readers.
Happily the cottage itself, with the little general shop on one side
and the village inn on the other, are still so much what they were in
her day that the long space of time that has rolled by since her room
was left vacant seems to vanish, and as we enter the front door we
almost expect to see the small figure of the “lady of _Our Village_”
coming down the narrow stairs to welcome us.
* * * * *
Before closing this Preface I would express my gratitude to Lord
Treowen, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Palmer, Mr. F. Cowslade, Mr. W. May, the
Misses Lovejoy, and Mr. J. J. Cooper, for permission to reproduce
valuable portraits and relics, and for other kind help.
CONSTANCE HILL.
GROVE COTTAGE, FROGNAL, HAMPSTEAD, _August, 1919_.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. AN AUTHOR’S BIRTHPLACE 1
II. HAPPY MEMORIES 9
III. VILLAGE NEIGHBOURS 15
IV. EARLY LIFE IN READING 22
V. LYME REGIS 29
VI. A STORMY COAST 40
VII. A FLIGHT 52
VIII. RETURN TO READING 56
IX. THE SCHOOL IN HANS PLACE 66
X. A GLIMPSE OF OLD FRENCH SOCIETY 74
XI. THE GAY REALITIES OF MOLIÈRE 82
XII. RECOLLECTIONS OF OLD READING 92
XIII. A NORTHERN TOUR 101
XIV. A ROYAL VISIT 110
XV. PLAYS AND POETRY 119
XVI. A CHOSEN CORRESPONDENT 126
XVII. THE MARCH OF MIND 134
XVIII. VERSATILITY AND PLAYFULNESS 144
XIX. FROM MANSION TO COTTAGE 156
XX. THREE MILE CROSS 161
XXI. THE NEW HOME 179
XXII. A LOQUACIOUS VISITOR 190
XXIII. THE PUBLICATION OF “OUR VILLAGE” 203
XXIV. A COUNTRY-SIDE ROMANCE 212
XXV. A NEW PLAYWRIGHT 221
XXVI. “RIENZI” 230
XXVII. FOREIGN NEIGHBOURS 241
XXVIII. AGREEABLE JAUNTS 250
XXIX. UFTON COURT 260
XXX. A FURTHER GLANCE AT OUR VILLAGE 271
XXXI. ECCENTRIC NEIGHBOURS 283
XXXII. THE MAY-HOUSES 292
XXXIII. WALKS IN THE COUNTRY 302
XXXIV. A CENTRE OF INTEREST 315
XXXV. A LONDON WELCOME 328
XXXVI. A BRAVE HEART 339
XXXVII. FAREWELL TO THREE MILE CROSS 350
XXXVIII. SWALLOWFIELD 360
XXXIX. PEACEFUL CLOSING YEARS 372
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Portrait of Mary Russell Mitford. (_By A. Burt, taken in 1836_)
_Frontispiece_
Grove Cottage, Frognal, Hampstead _Preface_ x
The Mitfords’ house in Broad Street, Alresford 3
Antique girandole 8
Mary Russell Mitford’s birthplace 11
Mary Russell Mitford at the age of four years. (_After a miniature_)
_To face_ 16
The Cross-house 21
Southampton Street, Reading 24
The “Walk” by the sea, Lyme Regis 31
The Great House, Lyme Regis 35
Old ironwork 39
The panelled chamber 41
The drawing-room 47
Blackfriars Bridge in 1796 52
Dr. Mitford’s house in the London Road, Reading _To face_ 58
Antique ironwork 65
Hans Place in 1798 69
Ceiling decoration (1714) 81
A purse-bag 91
A skit on the “Pink of the mode” _To face_ 92
A quaint tea-set 100
Gosfield Hall _To face_ 110
Le Comte d’Artois (afterwards Charles X) _To face_ 112
The Dining-room in the Deanery, Bocking 115
Dr. Valpy’s school _To face_ 122
Country cottages 143
Bertram House 147
Inlaid tea-caddy 160
The Mitfords’ cottage in Three Mile Cross 163
The village shop 169
The Swan Inn 173
A country wheelbarrow 178
Miss Mitford’s writing-parlour 181
The wheelwright’s workshop 185
Fragment of the Silchester Roman wall 189
Where the curate lodged 193
The curate’s parlour 197
An old Berkshire farm 213
Frith Street, Soho Square 225
Old houses in Great Queen Street 233
A French bonbonnière 249
The West Gate, Southampton 251
Pulteney Bridge, Bath 254
Arabella Fermor as a child. (_After a picture in the possession of
Frederick Cowslade, Esq._) 259
The Porch, Ufton Court 261
Arabella Fermor, the “Belinda” of the “Rape of the Lock,” afterwards
Mrs. Perkins. (_From a painting by W. Sykes in the possession of Lord
Treowen_) _To face_ 262
Francis Perkins. (_By W. Sykes, from a painting also in the possession
of Lord Treowen_) _To face_ 262
Belinda’s parlour 265
The garden steps 267
A dandy of the period 291
An old shoeing forge 297
A bridge on the Loddon 303
In Aberleigh (Arborfield) Park 307
Dr. Mitford. (_From a painting by John Lucas in the possession of W.
May, Esq._) _To face_ 330
Ironwork in the balcony of Sergeant Talfourd’s house 338
Verses by M. R. Mitford written in a friend’s album (_facsimile_) _To
face_ 344
Old house near Swallowfield 355
A teapot which belonged to M. R. Mitford 359
M. R. Mitford’s last home at Swallowfield 363
Swallowfield Church 380
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD
CHAPTER I
AN AUTHOR’S BIRTHPLACE
In a sunny corner of Hampshire there lies the tiny historic town
of Alresford on the gentle slopes of a hill, at whose feet flows
the little river Arle which gives its name to the place. “A town so
small that but for an ancient market very slenderly attended, nobody
would have dreamt of calling it anything but a village.” And yet,
oddly enough, in this same place great dignity was united with rustic
simplicity, for the living of “Old” Alresford was one of the richest
in England, and was held by the Bishop of Exeter in conjunction with
his very poor see. The Post Office was formerly installed in a very
small room with nothing but a letter-box in the window; still, it had
its importance, being at the head of many others scattered over the
country-side.
Alresford was the birthplace of one who loved nature as few have loved
her, and whose writings “breathe the air of the hay-fields and the
scent of the hawthorn boughs,” and seem to waft to us “the sweet
breezes that blow over ripened, cornfields or daisied meadows.”
The name of Mary Russell Mitford—the author of _Our Village_—is dear to
thousands of readers, both English and American, for she has enabled
them to see nature with her eyes and to enter into the very spirit of
rural life.
Alresford is built on the plan of the letter T, at the top of which
stands the old church; Broad Street being the perpendicular stem,
traversed by East Street and West Street, which form the cross-bar.
Supposing that we are coming up from the valley below where we have
left behind us the winding river with its old mill, we enter the lower
end of Broad Street—that picturesque street with its raised footpaths
on either side bordered by trees, and its low, irregular houses,
dominated at the upper end by the grey tower of the old church. That
dignified looking house on the right-hand side, with its hooded doorway
and its tall windows, belonged to Dr. Mitford.
Here it was that the doctor started a practice soon after his marriage
with Miss Russell, the only child and heiress of the late Dr. Russell,
Rector of Ashe, and here, on the 16th December, 1787, Mary, also an
only child, was born.
[Illustration: THE HOUSE IN BROAD STREET]
“A pleasant house in truth it was,” she writes. “The breakfast-room
... was a lofty and spacious apartment literally lined with books,
which, with its Turkey carpet, its glowing fire, its sofas and its
easy-chairs, seemed, what indeed it was, a very nest of English
comfort. The windows opened on a large old-fashioned garden, full of
old-fashioned flowers—stocks, roses, honeysuckles and pinks; and that
again led into a grassy orchard, abounding with fruit trees....
“What a playground was that orchard! and what playfellows were mine!
My maid Nancy with her trim prettiness, my own dear father, handsomest
and cheerfullest of men, and the great Newfoundland dog Coe, who used
to lie down at my feet as if to invite me to mount him, and then to
prance off with his burthen, as if he enjoyed the fun as much as we
did!... How well I remember my father’s carrying me round the orchard
on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-old feet, whilst the
little hands hung on to his pig-tail, which I called my bridle; hung
so fast, and tugged so heartily, that sometimes the ribbon would come
off between my fingers and send his hair floating and the powder flying
down his back!... Happy, happy days! It is good to have the memory of
such a childhood!”
Miss Mitford writes on another occasion:—
“In common with many only children, I learnt to read at a very early
age. My father would perch me on the breakfast-table to exhibit my
only accomplishment to some admiring guest, who admired all the more
[from my being] a small puny child, gifted with an affluence of curls
[who] might have passed for the twin sister of my own great doll.
On the table was I perched to read some Foxite newspaper, _Courier_
or _Morning Chronicle_, the Whiggish oracles of the day.... I read
leading articles to please the company; and my dear mother recited ‘The
Children in the Wood’ to please me. This was my reward, and I looked
for my favourite ballad after every performance, just as the piping
bull-finch that hung in the window looked for his lump of sugar after
going through ‘God save the King.’ The two cases were exactly parallel.”
We have sat in the very room where this scene took place. Little is
changed there, and we stepped from its windows “opening down to the
ground” into the garden. A narrow footpath, bordered by greensward,
led to a small flagged courtyard, flanked on one side by a quaint
old brew-house, with its red-tiled roof and peaked windowed centre.
Then, passing through a wicket-gate, we found ourselves in the “large
old-fashioned garden,” itself gay with flowers as of yore.
An adjoining house has arisen, since the Mitfords lived in their house
more than a hundred years ago, but this building has in its turn grown
old, so that it does not mar the character of the place.
Beyond the garden lay the orchard, now used as a tennis lawn, but still
happily surrounded by trees, through whose boughs peeps of the sweet
surrounding country can be seen. Indeed Alresford is entirely encircled
by the country, and its three only streets—Broad Street, East Street,
and West Street—lead straight into it. Miss Mitford, describing the
views on either side of their grounds, says that to the south rose the
“picturesque church with its yews and lindens, and beyond it a down as
smooth as velvet, dotted with rich islands of coppice, hazel, woodbine
and hawthorn”; while down in the valley “gleamed a bright, clear
lakelet radiant with swans and water-lilies, which the simple townsfolk
were content to call the ‘Great Pond.’”
Dr. Mitford’s house must indeed have been a “pleasant home” for a
child, with its garden and orchard for a playground behind the house,
and, in front, its cheerful view of the village street with its
ever-changing scenes of passing horsemen and carts, or of herds of
sheep and cattle driven to market.
Here Mary first learnt, though unconsciously, to enjoy the beauties of
nature and to enter into the simple pleasures of village life.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II
HAPPY MEMORIES
The market of old days used to be held in an open space where East
Street and West Street meet, near to the Bell Inn, whose gilded sign,
in the form of a bas-relief, is displayed over its entrance.
Here we can fancy the little Mary being taken to see the gay booths
with their display of toys or of ginger-bread, and the sheep or pigs in
pens.
Miss Mitford was warmly attached to the place of her birth, and often
alludes to it, but usually under the pseudonym of “Cranley.”
“One of the noisiest inhabitants,” she writes, “of the small, irregular
town of Cranley, in which I had the honour to be born, was a certain
cobbler by name Jacob Giles. He lived exactly over-right our house in
a little appendage to the baker’s shop.... At his half-hatch might he
be seen stitching and stitching, with the peculiar, regular two-handed
jerk proper to the art of cobbling, from six in the morning to six at
night.... There he sat with a dirty red night-cap over his grizzled
hair, a dingy waistcoat and old blue coat, darned, patched and ragged,
and a greasy leathern apron....
“The face belonging to this costume was rough and weather-beaten,
deeply lined and deeply tinted of a right copper colour, with a nose
that would have done honour to Bardolph, and a certain indescribable
half-tipsy look, even when sober. Nevertheless the face, ugly and tipsy
as it was, had its merits.... There was good humour in the half-shut
eye, the pursed-up mouth and the whole jolly visage.... There he sat
in that small den, looking something like a thrush in a goldfinch’s
cage, and singing with as much power and far wider range—albeit his
notes were hardly as melodious—Jobson’s songs in the ‘Devil to Pay’ and
‘A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall, which served him for
parlour, for kitchen and hall’ being his favourites.
“... Poor as he was Jacob Giles had always something for those poorer
than himself; would share his scanty dinner with a starving beggar, and
his last quid of tobacco with a crippled sailor. The children came to
him for nuts and apples, for comical stories and droll songs; the very
curs of the street knew that they had a friend in the poor cobbler.
[Illustration: MARY RUSSELL MITFORD’S BIRTHPLACE.]
“For my own part I can recollect Jacob Giles as long as I can
recollect anything. He made the shoes for my first doll (pink I
remember they were)—a doll called Sophie, who had the misfortune to
break her neck by a fall from the nursery window. Jacob Giles mended
all the shoes of the family, with whom he was a universal favourite....
He used to mimic Punch for my amusement, and I once greatly offended
the real Punch by preferring the cobbler’s performance of the closing
scene.”
Writing in after years, Miss Mitford remarks: “Where my passion for
plays began it is difficult to say. Perhaps at the little town of
Alresford, when I was somewhat short of four years old, and was taken
by my dear father to see one of the greatest tragedies of the world set
forth in a barn. Even now I have a dim recollection of a glimmering row
of candles dividing the end which was called the stage from the part
which did duty as pit and boxes, of the black face and the spangled
turban, of my wondering admiration, and the breathless interest of the
rustic audience.”
Among some of her happiest recollections of early childhood were her
rides on horseback with her father. “This dear papa of mine,” she
writes, “whose gay and careless temper all the professional etiquette
of the world could never tame into the staid gravity proper to a
doctor of medicine, happened to be a capital horseman, and abandoning
the close carriage almost wholly to my mother used to pay his country
visits on a favourite blood mare, whose extreme docility and gentleness
tempted him into having a pad constructed, perched upon which I might
occasionally accompany him, when the weather was favourable and the
distance not too great.
“A groom, who had been bred up in my grandfather’s family, always
attended us, and I do think that both Brown Bess and George liked to
have me with them almost as well as my father did. The old servant,
proud, as grooms always are, of a fleet and beautiful horse, was almost
as proud of my horsemanship, for I, cowardly enough, Heaven knows, in
after years, was then too young and too ignorant for fear—if it could
have been possible to have any sense of danger when strapped so tightly
to my father’s saddle, and enclosed so fondly by his strong and loving
arm. Very delightful were those rides across the breezy Hampshire downs
on a sunny summer morning!”
CHAPTER III
VILLAGE NEIGHBOURS
In one of Miss Mitford’s tales entitled _A Country Barber_ she
describes a humble neighbour whose tiny shop adjoined their own
“handsome and commodious dwelling.” This tiny shop has long since
disappeared, having given place to the “adjoining house” already
mentioned.
“The barber’s shop,” we are told, “consisted of a low-browed cottage
with a pole before it, and a half-hatch always open, through which
was visible a little dusty hole where a few wigs, on battered
wooden blocks, were ranged round a comfortable shaving chair. There
was a legend, over the door in which ‘William Skinner, wig-maker,
hairdresser, and barber’ was set forth in yellow letters on a blue
ground.”
After speaking of her happy early recollections of “Will Skinner,”
Miss Mitford remarks: “So agreeable indeed is the impression which he
has left in my memory that I cannot help regretting the decline and
extinction of a race which, besides figuring so notably in the old
novels and comedies, formed so genial a link between the higher orders
of society, supplying to the rich the most familiar of followers and
most harmless of gossips.”
How vividly these words recall to our mind Sir Walter Scott’s old Caxon
the barber and familiar follower of Mr. Oldbuck, “who was accustomed to
bring to his patron each morning along with the powder and pomatum his
version of the politics or the gossip of the neighbourhood.
“‘Heeh, sirs!’ he exclaims, ‘nae wonder the commons will be discontent,
when they see magistrates, and bailies, and deacons, and the provost
himsell wi’ heads as bald and as bare as one o’ my blocks!’
“It certainly was not Will Skinner’s beauty,” writes Mary Mitford,
“that caught my fancy. His person was hardly of the kind to win
a lady’s favour, even although that lady were only four years of
age.... Good old man! I see him in my mind’s eye at this moment: lean,
wrinkled, shabby, poor, slow of speech, and ungainly of aspect, yet
pleasant to look at and delightful to recollect. It was the overflowing
kindness of his temper that rendered Will Skinner so general a
favourite. Poor he was certainly and lonely, for he had been crossed
in love in his youth, and lived alone in his little tenement, with
no other companions than his wig blocks and a tame starling. ‘Pretty
company’ he used to call them.
[Illustration: MARY RUSSELL MITFORD
_From a miniature_]
“His fortunes had at one time assumed a more flourishing aspect when
the Bishop of Exeter and Rector of Alresford had employed him to
superintend the ‘posting’ of his wig, and had also promoted him to
the posts of sexton and of deputy parish clerk. But on the death of
the Bishop, and on the advent of the French Revolution, when cropped
heads came into fashion and powder and hairdressing went out, poor Will
found himself nearly at his wit’s end. In this dilemma he resolved to
turn his hand to other employments, and, living in the neighbourhood
of a famous trout stream, he applied himself to the construction of
artificial flies.
“This occupation he usually followed in his territory the churchyard,
a place ... occupying a gentle eminence by the side of Cranley Down—a
down on which the cricketers of that cricketing country used to muster
two elevens for practice, almost every fine evening, from Easter to
Michaelmas. Thither Will, who had been a cricketer himself in his
youth, and still loved the wind of a ball, used to resort on summer
afternoons, perching himself on a large square raised monument, a
spreading lime tree above his head, Izaak Walton before him, and his
implements of trade at his side. There he sat, now manufacturing a
cannon-fly, and now watching Tom Taylor’s unparagoned bowling.
“On this spot our intimacy commenced. A spoilt child and an only child,
it was my delight to escape from nurse and nursery and to follow
everywhere the dear papa, [even] to the cricket ground, in spite of
all remonstrance, causing him no small perplexity as to how to bestow
me in safety during the game. Will and the monument seemed to offer
exactly the desired refuge, and our good neighbour readily consented
to fill the post of deputy nursery-maid for the time, assisted in his
superintendence by our very beautiful and sagacious black Newfoundland
dog called Coe....
“Poor dear old man, what a life I led him!—now playing at bo-peep on
one side of the great monument and now on the other; now crawling away
amongst the green graves; now gliding round before him, and laughing
up in his face as he sat.... How he would catch me away from the very
shadow of danger if a ball came near; and how often did he interrupt
his own labours to forward my amusement, sliding from his perch to
gather lime branches to stick in Coe’s collar, or to collect daisies,
buttercups, or ragged-robins to make what I used to call daisy-beds for
my doll.”
Here is another pretty incident of the Alresford life recorded by Miss
Mitford.
“Before we left Hampshire,” she writes, “my maid Nancy married a young
farmer, and nothing would serve her but I must be bridesmaid. And so it
was settled.
“I remember the whole scene as if it were yesterday! How my father
took me himself to the churchyard gate, where the procession was
formed, and how I walked next to the young couple hand-in-hand with the
bridegroom’s man, no other than the village blacksmith, a giant of six
feet three, who might have served as a model for Hercules. Much trouble
had he to stoop low enough to reach down to my hand, and many were the
rustic jokes passed upon the disproportioned pair....
“In this order, followed by the parents on both sides, and a due number
of uncles, aunts and cousins, we entered the church, where I held the
glove with all the gravity and importance proper to my office; and
so contagious is emotion that when the bride cried, I could not help
crying for company. But it was a love-match, and between smiles and
blushes Nancy’s tears soon disappeared, and so did mine. The happy
husband helped his pretty wife into her own chaise-cart, my friend the
blacksmith lifted me in after her, and we drove gaily to the large,
comfortable farm-house where her future life was to be spent.
“The bride was [soon] taken to survey her new dominions by her proud
bridegroom, and the blacksmith, finding me, I suppose, easier to carry
than to lead, followed close upon their steps with me in his arms.
“Nothing could exceed the good nature of my country beau; he pointed
out bantams and pea-fowls, and took me to see a tame lamb and a tall,
staggering calf, born that morning; but for all that I do not think I
should have submitted to the indignity of being carried if it had not
been for the chastening influence of a little touch of fear. Entering
the poultry yard I had caught sight of a certain turkey-cock, who
erected that circular tail of his, and swelled out his deep red comb
and gills after a fashion familiar to that truculent bird, but which up
to the present hour I am far from admiring....
“[At last] we drew back to the hall, a large square bricked apartment,
with a beam across the ceiling and a wide yawning chimney, where many
young people being assembled, and one of them producing a fiddle, it
was agreed to have a country dance until dinner should be ready, the
bride and bridegroom leading off, and I following with the bridegroom’s
man.
“Oh! the blunders, the confusion, the merriment of that country dance!
No two people attempted the same figure; few aimed at any figure at
all; each went his own way; many stumbled, some fell, and everybody
capered, laughed and shouted at once!”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IV
EARLY LIFE IN READING
Towards the end of the year 1791, before the little Mary had become
quite four years old, a change came over the fortunes of the family.
Dr. Mitford, in spite of some really good qualities, was of a careless
and thoughtless disposition as regards money matters, and was,
unhappily, addicted to games of chance. “He had the misfortune,” writes
his daughter, “to be the best whist player in England,” and like the
celebrated Mr. Micawber and so many of his class, he had an unchanging
faith in his own “good luck,” and felt confident that however dark
the horizon might be something would turn up to his advantage.
“Dr. Mitford,” remarks a shrewd writer, “belonged to that class of
impecunious individuals who seem to have been born insolvent.”
He had come into possession of a large fortune on his marriage, for
his bride-elect had refused to have any settlement made concerning
property under her own control, and this fortune had already nearly
melted away.
In spite, however, of all his thoughtless extravagance, from which both
wife and child suffered severely, they remained at all times devoted
to him. As she grew older Mary could not shut her eyes to her father’s
faults; but she loved him in spite of them, dwelling constantly in her
writings upon his invariable kindness to her as a child, which claimed,
she considered, her lasting gratitude. “He possessed indeed,” she
remarks, “every manly and generous quality, excepting that which is so
necessary in this workaday world—the homely quality called prudence.”
On leaving Alresford, where many of their valued possessions had to
be sold, the little family removed to a house in Southampton Street,
Reading, where the doctor hoped to establish a practice. This street,
which crosses the river Kennet by a stone bridge, has still an
old-world appearance, with its modest-looking dwelling-houses and its
old-fashioned inns; while high above its roofs rises the spire of the
old church of St. Giles.
[Illustration: SOUTHAMPTON STREET]
It is in connection with this very church that we have a pleasant
glimpse of the little Mary from the pen of Mrs. Sherwood, then a young
girl living in Reading. “I remember,” she writes, “once going to a
church in the town, which we did not usually attend, and being taken
into Mrs. Mitford’s pew, where I saw the young authoress, Miss Mitford,
then about four years old. Miss Mitford was standing on the seat, and
so full of play that she set me on to laugh in a way which made me
thoroughly ashamed.”
Writing of this same period in after life, Mary Mitford says: “It is
now about forty years since I, a damsel scarcely so high as the table
on which I am writing, and somewhere about four years old, first became
an inhabitant of Belford Regis” (her name for Reading), “and really
I remember a great deal not worth remembering concerning the place,
especially our own garden and a certain dell on the Bristol road to
which I used to resort for primroses.”
It was during this first residence in Reading, when she was still a
small child, that she saw London for the first time.
“Business called my father thither in the middle of July,” she writes,
“and he suddenly announced his intention of driving me up in his gig
(a high open carriage holding two persons), unencumbered by any other
companion, male or female. George only, the old groom, was sent forward
with a spare horse over-night to Maidenhead Bridge, and, the dear papa
conforming to my nursery hours, we dined at Crauford Bridge ... and
reached Hatchett’s Hotel, Piccadilly (the New White Horse Cellar of the
old stage-coaches), early in the afternoon....
“I had enjoyed the drive past all expression, chattering all the way,
and falling into no other mistakes than those common to larger people
than myself of thinking that London began at Brentford, and wondering
in Piccadilly when the crowd would go by; and I was so little tired
when we arrived that, to lose no time, we betook ourselves that night
to the Haymarket Theatre, the only one then open. I had been at plays
in the country, in a barn in Hampshire ... but the country play was
nothing to the London play—a lively comedy with the rich caste of
those days—one of the comedies that George III enjoyed so heartily. I
enjoyed it as much as he, and laughed and clapped my hands and danced
on my father’s knee, and almost screamed with delight, so that a party
in the same box, who had begun by being half angry at my restlessness,
finished by being amused with my amusement.
“The next day, my father, having an appointment at the Bank, took the
opportunity of showing me St. Paul’s and the Tower.
“At St. Paul’s I saw all the wonders of the place, whispered in the
whispering gallery, and walked up the tottering wooden stairs, not into
the ball itself but to the circular balustrade of the highest gallery
beneath it. I have never been there since, but I can still recall most
vividly that wonderful panorama: the strange diminution produced by
the distance, the toy-like carriages and horses, and men and women
moving noiselessly through the toy-like streets.... Looking back to
that [scene] what strikes me most is the small dimensions to which
the capital of England was then confined. When I stood on the topmost
gallery of St. Paul’s I saw a compact city spreading along the river,
it is true, from Billingsgate to Westminster, but clearly defined to
the north and to the south, the West-End beginning at Hyde Park on the
one side and the Green Park on the other. Then Belgravia was a series
of pastures and Paddington a village.
“We proceeded to the Tower, that place so striking by force of contrast
... the jewels and the armoury glittering ... amidst the gloom of the
old fortress and the stories of great personages imprisoned, beheaded,
buried within its walls;—a dreary thing it seemed to be a queen! But at
night I went to Astley’s, and I forgot the sorrows of Lady Jane Grey
and Anne Boleyn in the wonders of the horsemanship and the tricks of
the clown.”
Into the last day were crowded visits to the Houses of Lords and
Commons, to Westminster Abbey, to Cox’s Museum in Spring Gardens, to
the Leverian Museum in the Blackfriars Road, and finally at night
to the theatre once more, returning home on the morrow “without a
moment’s weariness of mind or body.”
About this time Lord Charles Murray-Aynsley, a younger son of the Duke
of Athol, became engaged to be married to a cousin of the Mitfords.
“Lord Charles, as fine a young man as one should see in a summer’s
day, tall, well-made, with handsome features ... and charming temper,
had an infirmity which went nigh to render all [his] good gifts of no
avail; a shyness, a bashfulness, a timidity most painful to himself and
distressing to all about him.... That a man with such a temperament,
who could hardly summon courage to say ‘How d’ye do?’ should ever have
wrought himself up to the point of putting the great question was
wonderful.... I myself, a child not five years old, one day threw him
into an agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for
my papa. Now I was a shy child, a very shy child, and as soon as I
arrived in front of his lordship and found that I had been misled by a
resemblance of dress, by the blue coat and buff waistcoat, I first of
all crept under the table, and then flew to hide my face in my mother’s
lap; my poor fellow-sufferer, too big for one place of refuge, too old
for the other, had nothing for it but to run away, which, the door
being luckily open, he happily accomplished.”
CHAPTER V
LYME REGIS
Dr. Mitford had been gradually establishing a practice in Reading,
where a remarkable cure he had effected was already making his name
known, when, as his daughter tells us, he resolved to remove to Lyme,
“feeling with characteristic sanguineness that in a fresh place success
would be certain.”
Some of our readers will no doubt have visited Lyme Regis—that quaint
little seaport situated on the steep slope of a hill, whose main street
seems, as Jane Austen has remarked, “to be almost hurrying into the
water.” They will remember its harbour formed by the curved stone piers
of the old Cobb, from which can be seen the pretty bay with its sandy
beach bordered by the Parade, or “Walk” as it used to be called, which
runs at the foot of a grassy hillside. At the town end of this “Walk”
are to be seen some thatched cottages nestling under the shelter of the
hill, and beyond them on a small promontory, jutting out into the sea,
the old Assembly Rooms. A few miles east-ward lies the sunny little
bay of Charmouth, with a grand chain of hills beyond it, rising from
the water’s edge and terminating in the far distance in the Bill of
Portland.
Lyme Regis lies in the borderland of Dorset and Devonshire, “but the
character of the scenery,” writes Miss Mitford, “the boldness of the
coast, and the rich woodiness of the inland views belong entirely to
Devonshire—beautiful Devonshire.
“Our habitation,” she continues, “although situated not merely in
the town but in the principal street, had nothing in common with the
small and undistinguished houses on either side. It was a very large,
long-fronted stone mansion, terminated at either end by massive iron
gates, the pillars of which were surmounted by spread eagles. An old
stone porch, with benches on either side, projected from the centre,
covered, as was the whole front of the house, with tall, spreading,
wide-leafed myrtle, abounding in blossom, with moss-roses, jessamine
and passion-flowers.”
[Illustration: THE “WALK” BY THE SEA]
This old porch had its special historical association, for here William
Pitt as a child used to play at marbles when his father the great Lord
Chatham rented the Great House. Unhappily the porch has been altered
and injured since we visited Lyme some years ago. Other changes
have also been made at various periods, notably a storey added in the
northern or upper end of the building; but in spite of these changes
the Great House, as it is always called, still dominates the little
town like a feudal castle of old amongst its vassals, its massive walls
manfully resisting modern innovations.
The illustration represents the house as it appeared in Miss Mitford’s
day.
The southern portion of the building is of the most ancient date. Its
walls are of great thickness. The Great House is full of traditions of
past history, and its gloomy vaults and passages below ground must have
witnessed many a tragic scene at the time of the Monmouth Rebellion.
Here it was that Judge Jeffreys took up his quarters for a time when
he came to stamp out the Rebellion and to wreak the vengeance of James
II upon the unhappy followers of his rival. The owner of the house
in those days was a man named Jones—the squire of Lyme—who aided and
abetted Jeffreys in all his awful tyranny, spying upon the inhabitants
and reporting every idle word that might serve to incriminate them.
The memory of Jones is loathed to this day, and tradition declares the
house to be haunted by his ghost.
Happily the little girl, who came to live in this weird old mansion,
knew nothing of its tragic history, and could laugh and play with
childish mirth above its sombre vaults. In her _Recollections_, Mary
Mitford speaks of the “large, lofty rooms of the building, of its
noble oaken staircases, its marble hall, and its long galleries,” and
mentions “the book room,” where her grandfather Dr. Russell’s fine
library was arranged. “Behind the building,” she says, “which extended
round a paved quadrangle, was the drawing-room, a splendid apartment
looking upon a little lawn surrounded by choice evergreens,” beyond
which lay the spacious gardens.
The drawing-room still bears traces of its former dignity in its
lofty ceiling and handsome dentil cornice, and also in its three tall
recessed windows, whose side panels end in fine curled scrolls.
[Illustration: THE GREAT HOUSE]
“My own nurseries,” she says, “were spacious and airy, but the place
which I most affected was a dark panelled chamber on the first floor,
to which I descended through a private door by half a dozen stairs, so
steep that, still a very small and puny child between eight and a half
and nine and a half, and unable to run down them in the common way, I
used to jump from one step to the other.”
We have entered this small panelled room, which is lighted by a narrow
leaded window, and as we looked upon the steps leading down from the
upper room we fancied we saw the tiny figure jumping from step to step.
“This chamber,” continues Miss Mitford, “was filled with such
fossils as were then known ... some the cherished products of my own
discoveries, and some broken for me by my father’s little hammer from
portions of the rocks that lay beneath the cliffs, under which almost
every day we used to wander hand-in-hand.”
Beyond “the little lawn, surrounded by choice evergreens,” there was
“an old-fashioned greenhouse and a filbert-tree walk, from which again
three detached gardens sloped abruptly down to one of the clear,
dancing rivulets of that western country.” These three gardens are
still to be seen. A part of them is well cultivated, and abounds
in smooth lawns, majestic trees and flowers of all kinds; but that
part which belongs to the older portion of the mansion, deserted for
many years, is left wild and untended. It is, however, pathetically
beautiful in its mixture of garden flowers and showy weeds. The high
box-edgings to the borders prove that great care was once taken of the
place, and the tall rose bushes which still abound stretch out their
long branches of pink and white blossoms as if to hide what is mean and
unsightly.
“In the steep declivity of the central garden,” writes Mary, “which I
was permitted to call mine, was a grotto overarching a cool, sparkling
spring, never overflowing its small sandy basin, which yet was always
full.” “Years many and long,” she adds, “have passed since I sat beside
that tiny fountain, and yet never have I forgotten the pleasure which I
derived from watching its clear crystal wave.”
“The slopes on either side of the grotto,” she says, “were carpeted
with strawberries and dotted with fruit trees. One drooping medlar,
beneath whose pendent branches I have often hidden, I remember well.”
This spring is known in that country-side by the name of the “Lepers’
Well.” It is reached by a steep flight of rugged stone steps from the
terrace above, and is still surrounded by old gnarled fruit trees,
though the medlar seems to have disappeared. Beyond a low hedge at the
foot of the grounds flows the little river Lym, clear and sparkling as
ever.
Lyme is full of traditions, and this little river, at one spot, bears
the name of “Jordan,” so called by a colony of Baptists who took
refuge in the neighbourhood during the seventeenth century. It was in
“Jordan” that they immersed their converts, and the old Biblical names
given by them to the adjoining fields of Jericho and Paradise still
linger in that district.
“I used to disdain the [Devonshire] streamlets,” writes Mary, “with
such scorn as a small damsel fresh from the Thames and the Kennett
thinks herself privileged to display. ‘They call that a river here,
papa! Can’t you jump me over it?’ quoth I in my sauciness. About a
month ago I heard a young lady from New York talking in some such
strain of Father Thames. ‘It’s a pretty little stream,’ said she,
‘but to call it a river!’ And I half expected to hear a complete
reproduction of my own impertinence, and a request to be jumped from
one end to the other of Caversham Bridge!”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VI
A STORMY COAST
Writing of her sojourn at Lyme Regis Miss Mitford says:—
“That was my only opportunity of making acquaintance with the mighty
ocean in its winter sublimity of tempest and storm; and partly perhaps
from the striking and awful nature of the impression [upon the mind of]
a lonely, musing, visionary child, the recollection remains indelibly
fixed in my memory, fresh and vivid as if of yesterday....
“Once my father took me from my bed at midnight that I might see,
from the highest storey of our house, the grandeur and the glory of
the tempest; the spray rising to the very tops of the cliffs, pale
and ghastly in the lightning, and hear the roar of the sea, the
moaning of the wind, the roll of the thunder, and amongst them all
the fearful sound of the minute guns, telling of death and danger on
that iron-bound coast. Then in the morning I have seen the cold bright
wintry sun shining gaily on the dancing sea, still stirred by the
last breath of the tempest, and on the floating spars and parted
timbers of the wreck....
[Illustration: THE PANELLED CHAMBER]
“My walks,” she writes, “were confined to rambles on the shore
with my maid, or still more to my delight with my dear father, the
recollection of whose fond indulgence is connected with every pleasure
of my childhood.... Sometimes we would go towards Charmouth, with
its sweeping bay, passing below church and churchyard, perched high
above us, and already undermined by the tide. Another time we bent
our steps to the Pinny cliffs [that stretch away] on the western side
of the harbour; the beautiful Pinny cliffs, where an old landslip had
deposited a farm-house, with its outbuildings, its garden and its
orchard, tossed half-way down amongst the rocks, its look of home and
of comfort contrasting so strangely with the dark rugged masses above,
below and around.
“My father, a dabbler in science, with his hammer and basket was
engaged in breaking off fragments of rock, to search for curious spars
and fossil remains; I in picking up shells and sea-weed.... What
enjoyment it was to feel the pleasant sea-breeze, and see the sun
dancing on the waters, and wander as free as the sea-bird over my head
beneath those beetling cliffs! Now for a moment losing sight of the
dear papa, and now rejoining him with some delicate shell, or brightly
coloured sea-weed, or imperfect _coruna ammoris_, enquiring into the
success of his graver labours, and comparing our discoveries and
treasures.
“What pleasure too to rest at the well-known cottage, the general
termination of our walk, where old Simon the curiosity-monger picked up
a mongrel sort of livelihood by selling fossils and petrifactions to
one class of visitors, and cakes and fruit and cream to another. His
scientific bargains were not without suspicion of a little cheatery,
as my companion used laughingly to tell him ... but the fruit and
curds were honest, as I can well avouch; and the legends of petrified
sea-monsters, with which they were seasoned, bones of the mammoth, and
skeletons of the sea-serpent have always been amongst the pleasantest
of my seaside recollections.”
Perhaps these “legends” had a tinge of prophecy in them, as it was only
fifteen years later that Mary Anning, then a child of eleven years
old, discovered in the rocks of Lyme Regis the gigantic fossil bones
of the ichthyosaurus—a creature whose very jaw it seems exceeded six
feet in length, and whose existence had hitherto been unknown. She also
discovered later on the remains of the plesiosaurus.[1]
[Footnote 1: The entire skeletons of these actual creatures are now to
be seen in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington.]
Miss Anning kept a curiosity shop in a tiny house which is still to be
seen facing the upper gates of the Great House. The King of Saxony, who
visited Lyme in 1844, thus describes the place:—
“We had alighted from the carriage,” he writes, “and were proceeding
along on foot when we fell in with a shop in which the most remarkable
petrifactions and fossil remains—the head of an ichthyosaurus,
beautiful ammonites, etc.—were exhibited in the window. We entered and
found a little shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil
productions of the coast.... I was anxious [before leaving] to write
down the address of the place, and the woman who kept the shop with a
firm hand wrote her name ‘Mary Anning’ in my pocket-book, and added as
she returned the book into my hands: ‘I am well known throughout the
whole of Europe.’”
It is said that the King of Saxony paid a second visit to the fossil
shop, when he invited Miss Anning to accompany him in his travelling
coach and four to the scene of the great landslip at Pinny. On reaching
a small farm-house on the hillside they quitted the coach to roam
about the fallen rocks. On their return they found an old country woman
seated in the stately vehicle. She explained, with some confusion, that
she wanted to be able to boast hereafter that she had sat for once in
her life in a royal coach! The kindly monarch assured her that he was
in no way displeased, and he handed her out of the coach with courtly
politeness.
Miss Mitford in one of her letters remarks: “It is singular that the
name of Mary Anning crosses me often. One of my friend Mr. Kenyon’s
graceful poems is addressed to her, and Charmouth and Lyme are dear to
me as being full of my first recollections of the sea. I should like of
all things to go there again and make acquaintance with Mary Anning.”
Here are a few stanzas of the poem alluded to:—
“E’en poets shall by thee set store; For wonders feed the poet’s wish;
And is their mermaid wondrous more Than thy half-lizard and half-fish?
* * * * *
While Lyme’s dark-headed urchins grow Each in his turn to grey-haired
men, Yet, when grown old, this beach they walk, Some pensive breeze
their grey locks fanning, Their sons shall love to hear them talk Of
many a feat of Mary Anning.”
[Illustration: IN THE DRAWING-ROOM]
Writing of their residence in Lyme Mary says:—
“My dear mother had three or four young relations, misses in their
teens, staying with her and was sufficiently occupied in playing
the chaperone to the dull gaieties of the place.... Of course I was
too young to be admitted to the society, such as it was; but I had
even then a dim glimmering perception of its being anything but
exhilarating.”
Sometimes the company assembled in the Great House. “One incident that
occurred there,” writes Miss Mitford—“a frightful danger—a providential
escape—I shall never forget.
“There was to be a ball at the rooms, and a party of sixteen or
eighteen persons, dressed for the assembly, were sitting in the
dining-room at dessert. The ceiling was ornamented with a rich
running pattern of flowers in high relief, the shape of the wreath
corresponding pretty exactly with the company arranged round the oval
table. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, all that part of
the ceiling became detached and fell down in large masses upon the
table and the floor. It seems even now all but miraculous how such a
catastrophe could occur without danger to life or limb; but the only
things damaged were the flowers and feathers of the ladies and the
fruits and wines of the dessert. I myself, caught instantly in my
father’s arms, by whose side I was standing, had scarcely even time to
be frightened, although after the danger was over our fair visitors of
course began to scream.”
Towards the end of their year’s residence in Lyme Regis the fortunes of
the Mitford family were once more clouded over.
“Nobody told me,” writes Mary, “but I felt, I knew, I had an interior
conviction for which I could not have accounted ... that in spite of
the company, in spite of the gaiety, something was wrong. It was such a
foreshowing as makes the quicksilver in the barometer sink whilst the
weather is still bright and clear.
“And at last the change came. My father went again to London and lost—I
think, I have always thought so—more money.... Then one by one our
visitors departed; and my father, who had returned in haste again,
in equal haste left home, after short interviews with landlords, and
lawyers, and auctioneers; and I knew—I can’t tell how, but I did
know—that everything was to be parted with and everybody paid.
“That same night two or three large chests were carried away through
the garden by George and another old servant, and a day or two after
my mother and myself, with Mrs. Mosse, the good housekeeper who
lived with my grandfather, and the other maid-servant, left Lyme in a
hack-chaise.”
After various delays, due partly to the breaking up of a camp between
Bridport and Dorchester, the party pursued their journey in “a sort
of tilted cart without springs.” “Doubtless,” remarks Mary, “many a
fine lady would laugh at such a shift. But it was not as a temporary
discomfort that it came upon my poor mother. It was her first touch
of poverty. It seemed like the final parting from all the elegances
and all the accommodations to which she had been used. I shall never
forget her heart-broken look when she took her little girl upon her lap
in that jolting caravan, nor how the tears stood in her eyes when we
turned into our miserable bedroom when we reached the roadside alehouse
where we were to pass the night. The next day we resumed our journey,
and reached a dingy, comfortless lodging in one of the suburbs beyond
Westminster Bridge.”
CHAPTER VII
A FLIGHT
The “comfortless lodging” mentioned by Miss Mitford was on the Surrey
side of Blackfriars Bridge, where Dr. Mitford, it seems, was able to
find a refuge from his creditors within the rules of the King’s Bench.
“What my father’s plans were,” writes his daughter in later years, “I
do not exactly know; probably to gather together what disposable money
still remained after paying all debts from the sale of books, plate
and furniture at Lyme and thence to proceed ... to practise in some
distant town. At all events London was the best starting-place, and he
could consult his old fellow-pupil and life-long friend, Dr. Babington,
then one of the physicians to Guy’s Hospital, and refresh his medical
studies with experiments and lectures. In the meanwhile his spirits
returned as buoyant as ever, and so, now that fear had changed into
certainty, did mine.”
[Illustration: BLACKFRIARS BRIDGE (1796)]
But at this time, when the prospects of the family seemed to be
irretrievably overclouded and when dire poverty stared them in the
face, an extraordinary event occurred to raise them suddenly into
affluence!
“In the intervals of his professional pursuits,” writes Mary, “my
father walked about London with his little girl in his hand; and one
day (it was my birthday, and I was ten years old) he took me into a not
very tempting-looking place which was, as I speedily found, a lottery
office. An Irish lottery was upon the point of being drawn, and he
desired me to choose one out of several bits of printed paper (I did
not then know their significance) that lay upon the counter.
“‘Choose which number you like best,’ said the dear papa, ‘and that
shall be your birthday present.’
“I immediately selected one, and put it into his hand: No. 2224.
“‘Ah,’ said my father, examining it, ‘you must choose again. I want to
buy a whole ticket, and this is only a quarter. Choose again, my pet.’
“‘No, dear papa, I like this one best.’
“‘Here is the next number,’ interposed the lottery office keeper, ‘No.
2223.’
“‘Ay,’ said my father, ‘that will do just as well. Will it not, Mary?
We’ll take that.’
“‘No,’ returned I obstinately, ‘that won’t do. This is my birthday you
know, papa, and I am ten years old. Cast up _my_ number and you’ll find
that makes ten. The other is only nine.”
“My father, superstitious like all speculators, struck with my
pertinacity and with the reason I gave, resisted the attempt of the
office keeper to tempt me by different tickets, and we had nearly left
the shop without a purchase when the clerk who had been examining
different desks and drawers, said to his principal:
“‘I think, sir, the matter may be managed if the gentleman does not
mind paying a few shillings more. That ticket 2224 only came yesterday,
and we have still all the shares: one-half, one-quarter, one-eighth,
two-sixteenths. It will be just the same if the young lady is set upon
it.’
“The young lady was set upon it, and the shares were purchased.
“The whole affair was a secret between us, and my father, whenever he
got me to himself, talked over our future twenty thousand pounds—just
like Alnaschar over his basket of eggs.
“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. 2224 had
been drawn a prize of twenty thousand pounds, and he had hastened to
communicate the good news.”
“Ah, me!” writes Miss Mitford in later life. “In less than twenty
years what was left of the produce of the ticket so strangely chosen?
What? except a 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 outlasted the more perishable money.”
The writer of a graceful article entitled, “In Miss Mitford’s Country,”
which appeared in a magazine several years ago, saw at a friend’s house
in Reading some odd pieces of this very dinner-service. These consisted
of “a tureen of beautiful shape, two or three soup-plates and a couple
of butter-boats and stands in one, in Wedgwood fashion.” When handling
the china she observed “that the Mitford crest was stamped on one
side of the pieces while on the opposite side appeared a harp bearing
between the strings the mystic number 2224.”
She supposed this to be the Wedgwoods’ private number, and it was
not until she came upon the passage just quoted in Miss Mitford’s
_Recollections of a Literary Life_ that the mystery was solved.
CHAPTER VIII
RETURN TO READING
After the extraordinary event of the lottery ticket the Mitfords were
suddenly placed in a position of opulence, and they joyfully quitted
their dingy London lodgings and returned once more to Reading. The
doctor had taken a new red brick house in the London Road, a road which
in those days bordered the open country.
The house is still standing, and is probably much as it was in the
Mitfords’ day. It has a deep verandah in front, and behind stretches a
long piece of garden. A small room at the back of the house is pointed
out to visitors as Dr. Mitford’s dispensary.
Mary Russell Mitford loved the old town of Reading—Belford Regis, as
she always calls it in her stories—and the various descriptions of the
place, scattered throughout her writings, make the Reading of her day
to live again.
On one occasion she describes the view of the town as seen from
the jutting corner of Friar Street, where she had taken shelter
from a shower of rain. She speaks of “the fine church tower of St.
Nicholas,[2] with its picturesque piazza underneath” and its “old
vicarage house hard by, embowered in evergreens”; of “the old irregular
shops in the market-place, with the trees of the Forbury beyond just
peeping between them, with all their varieties of light and shadow.”
[Footnote 2: St. Lawrence.]
Another day, after mentioning “the huge monastic ruins of the Abbey;”
with all its monuments of ancient times, she goes on to say “or for
a modern scene what can surpass the High Bridge on a sunshiny day?
The bright river crowded with barges and small craft; the streets and
wharfs and quays, all alive with the busy and stirring population of
the country and the town—a combination of light and motion.”
Miss Mitford has described this same scene as it appeared on a cold
winter’s evening in a book written late in life entitled, _Atherton and
other Stories_, which we should like to quote here.
“From ... the High Bridge the Kennet now showed like a mirror
reflecting on its icy surface into a peculiar broad and bluish shine,
the arch of lamps surmounting the graceful airy bridge and the
twinkling lights that glanced here and there, from boat or barge or
wharf, or from some uncurtained window that overhung the river.”
But the chief beauty of the old town was to be seen in summer time
on a Saturday (market-day) at noon. “The old market-place, always
picturesque from the irregular architecture of the houses, and the
beautiful Gothic church by which it is terminated, is then all alive
with the busy hum of traffic.... Noise of every sort is to be heard,
from the heavy rumbling of so many loaded waggons over the paved
market-place to the crash of crockery ware in the narrow passage of
Princes Street. One of the noisiest and prettiest places is the Piazza
at the end of St. Nicholas Church appropriated by long usage to the
female vendors of fruit and vegetables.” The butter market was at
the back of the market proper, “where respectable farmers’ wives and
daughters sold eggs, butter and poultry.” Here too “straw-hats, caps
and ribbons were sold, also pet rabbits and guinea-pigs, together with
owls and linnets in cages.”
[Illustration: DR. MITFORD’S HOUSE IN THE LONDON ROAD]
Among the odd characters who turned up on the occasion of markets
or fairs Miss Mitford mentions a certain rat-catcher by name Sam
Page “whose own appearance was as venomous as that of his retinue,”
and “told his calling almost as plainly as the sharp heads of the
ferrets which protruded from the pockets of his dirty jean jacket,
or the bunch of dead rats with which he was wont to parade the streets
of B. on a market-day.” But before he had taken to this business,
she says, he had tried many other callings, amongst them those of “a
barrel-organ grinder, the manager of a celebrated company of dancing
dogs, and the leader of a bear and a very accomplished monkey. Suddenly
he reappeared one day at B. fair as showman of the Living Skeleton, and
also a performer [himself] in the Tragedy of the Edinburgh Murders, as
exhibited every half-hour at the price of a penny to each person.” Sam
confessed that he liked acting of all things, especially tragedy; “it
was such fun.”
Of the period with which we are dealing Mary writes: “I was a girl at
the time—a very young girl, and, what is more to the purpose, a very
shy one, so that I mixed in none of the gaieties of the place; but
speaking from observation and recollection I can fairly say that I
never saw any society more innocently cheerful.” She tells us of “the
old ladies and their tea visits, the gentlemen and their whist club,
and the merry Christmas parties with their round games and their social
suppers, their mirth and their jests.”
And now for Mary herself: how did she strike the new acquaintances
that her parents were making? One who knew her well tells us that “she
showed in her countenance, and in her mild self-possession, that she
was no ordinary child; and with her sweet smile, her gentle temper, her
animated conversation, her keen enjoyment of life, and her incomparable
voice—“that excellent thing in woman—there were few of the prettiest
children of her age who won so much love and admiration from their
friends young and old as little Mary Mitford.”
In one of Miss Mitford’s tales entitled _My Godmothers_ there is an
amusing account of a stiff maiden lady of the old school by name Mrs.
Patience Wither (the “Mrs.” being given her by brevet rank). “In point
of fact,” writes Mary, “she was not my godmother, having stood only as
proxy for her younger sister, Mrs. Mary, my mother’s intimate friend,
then falling into a lingering decline.
“Mrs. Patience was very masculine in person, tall, square, large-boned
and remarkably upright. Her features were sufficiently regular, and
would not have been unpleasing but for the keen, angry look of her
light blue eye ... and her fiery, wiry red hair, to which age did no
good,—it would not turn grey.... She lived in a large, tall, upright,
stately house in the largest street of a large town. It was a grave
looking mansion, defended from the pavement by iron palisades, a flight
of steps before the sober brown door, and every window curtained and
blinded by chintz and silk and muslin, crossing and jostling each
other. None of the rooms could be seen from the street, nor the street
from any of the rooms—so complete was the obscurity.
“On the death of her sister Mrs. Patience ... was pleased to lay
claim to me in right of inheritance, and succeeded to the title of
my godmother pretty much in the same way that she succeeded to the
possession of Flora, her poor sister’s favourite spaniel. I am afraid
that Flora proved the more grateful subject of the two. I never
saw Mrs. Patience but she took possession of me for the purpose of
lecturing and documenting me on some subject or other,—holding up my
head, shutting the door, working a sampler, making a shirt, learning
the pence table, or taking physic....
“She was assiduous in presents to me at home and at school; sent
me cakes with cautions against over-eating, and needle-cases with
admonitions to use them; she made over to me her own juvenile library,
consisting of a large collection of unreadable books ... nay, she even
rummaged out for me a pair of old battledores, curiously constructed
of netted pack-thread—the toys of her youth! But bribery is generally
thrown away upon children, especially on spoilt ones; the godmother
whom I loved never gave me anything, and every fresh present from Mrs.
Patience seemed to me a fresh grievance. I was obliged to make a call
and a curtsy, and to stammer out something which passed for a speech,
or, which was still worse, to write a letter of thanks—a stiff, formal,
precise letter! I would rather have gone without cakes or needle-cases,
books or battledores to my dying day. Such was my ingratitude from five
to fifteen.”
One of the most prominent figures in the Reading of those days was Dr.
Valpy, headmaster of the Reading Grammar School. The school consisted
of a group of buildings “standing,” writes Miss Mitford, “in a nook of
the pleasant green called the Forbury, and parted from the churchyard
of St. Nicholas by a row of tall old houses. It was in itself a pretty
object—at least I, who loved it almost as much as if I had been of the
sex that learns Greek and Latin, thought so.... There was a little
court before the door of the doctor’s house with four fir trees, and
at one end a projecting bay window belonging to a very long room [the
doctor’s study] lined with a noble collection of books.” The Forbury
was used as the boys’ playground.
Dr. Valpy was much reverenced by his fellow-townsmen and greatly loved
by his pupils, in spite of the stern discipline of those days which
he considered it his duty to administer to culprits. Among his pupils
was Sergeant Talfourd, who thus describes his character: “Envy, hatred
and malice were to him mere names—like the figures of speech in a
schoolboy’s theme, or the giants in a fairy-tale, phantoms which never
touched him with a sense of reality.... His system of education was
animated by a portion of his own spirit: it was framed to enkindle and
to quicken the best affections.”
Another contemporary who happened to be of a cynical turn of mind
remarks of Dr. Valpy: “Had he been more supple in his principles or
less open in their avowal he might have risen to the highest position
in his sacred profession. A mitre might have been the reward of
subserviency and the revenues of a diocese the bribe of tergiversation
and hypocrisy, [but] he left to others such paths to preferment ...
and lived in the enjoyment of an unblemished reputation and a clear
conscience.”
On the further side of the Forbury stood a large old-fashioned building
adjoining the Abbey Gateway and bearing the name of the Abbey School.
It was a school for “young ladies” of the ordinary type belonging to
the eighteenth century, but which, at the time we are writing of,
was gradually taking a higher position in general estimation. Three
authoresses of very different degrees of fame were pupils in this
establishment, namely: Jane Austen for a short time as a very young
child, in about the year 1782, Miss Butt (afterwards Mrs. Sherwood) in
1790, and Mary Russell Mitford when the school was removed to London in
1798.
The school had formerly been carried on under the management of a Mrs.
Latournelle, a good-natured person but, as Mrs. Sherwood tells us,
“only fit for giving out clothes for the wash, mending them, making tea
and ordering dinners.” But after a time she took as a partner a young
lady of talent and of excellent education who at once made her mark
felt.
What, however, caused the permanent success of the school was the
arrival in Reading of a certain Monsieur St. Quintin, the son of a
nobleman in Alsace—a man of very superior intellect—who had been
secretary to the Comte de Moustier, one of the last ambassadors from
Louis XVI to the Court of St. James. Having lost all his property in
the French Revolution, he was thankful to accept the post of French
teacher in Dr. Valpy’s school, and was soon afterwards recommended
by the doctor as a teacher of French in the Abbey School. In course
of time he married Mrs. Latournelle’s young partner, and they “soon
so entirely raised the credit of the seminary,” writes Mrs. Sherwood,
“that when I went there, there were above sixty girls under their
charge. The style of M. St. Quintin’s teaching,” she says, “was lively
and interesting in the extreme.”
Dr. Mitford had been a warm friend to M. St. Quintin ever since his
arrival in Reading, and there was much pleasant intercourse between the
Mitfords and the St. Quintins. In the summer of 1798 the school was
transferred to London, and Dr. and Mrs. Mitford, who had then decided
to send their little daughter to school, were glad to place her under
the friendly care of M. and Madame St. Quintin.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IX
THE SCHOOL IN HANS PLACE
Monsieur and Madame St. Quintin, on removing the Abbey School from
Reading to London, established it in Hans Place, a small oblong square
of pleasant-looking houses with a garden in the centre. It was almost
surrounded by fields, for London proper terminated in those days with
the double toll-gates at Hyde Park Corner.
The school-house (No. 22) was one of the largest in the place, and
possessed a spacious garden abounding in fine trees, smooth lawns and
gay flower-beds. Thither the little Mary was sent on the reopening of
the school after the midsummer holidays of the year 1798. Writing in
later years she thus describes the event:—
“It is now more than twenty years since I, a petted child of ten years
old, born and bred in the country, and as shy as a hare, was sent to
that scene of bustle and confusion, a London school. Oh, what a change
it was! What a terrible change!... To leave my own dear home for
this strange new place and these strange new people ... and so many
of them!... I shall never forget the misery of the first two days,
blushing to be looked at, dreading to be spoken to, shrinking like a
sensitive plant from the touch, ashamed to cry, and feeling as if I
could never laugh again.
“These disconsolate feelings are not astonishing ... the wonder is
that they so soon passed away. But everybody was good and kind. In
less than a week the poor wild bird was tamed. I could look without
fear on the bright, happy faces; listen without starting to the clear,
high voices, even though they talked in French; began to watch the
ball and the battledore; and felt something like an inclination to
join in the sports. In short, I soon became an efficient member of the
commonwealth; made a friend, provided myself with a school-mother, a
fine, tall, blooming girl ... under whose protection I began to learn
and unlearn, to acquire the habits and enter into the views of my
companions, as well disposed to be idle as the best of them.”
M. St. Quintin taught the pupils French, history and geography, also as
much science as he was master of or as he thought it requisite for a
young lady to know. Madame St. Quintin did but little teaching at this
period, but used to sit in the drawing-room with a book in her hand
to receive visitors. After M. St. Quintin the mainstay of the school
was the English teacher, Miss Rowden, an accomplished young lady of
good birth, who was assisted by finishing masters for Italian, music,
dancing and drawing. She was admired and loved by the whole school,
and especially by Mary Mitford, over whom she exercised an excellent
influence.
“To fill up any nook of time,” writes Mary, “which the common demands
of the school might leave vacant, we used to read together, chiefly
poetry. With her I first became acquainted with Pope’s Homer, Dryden’s
Virgil and the _Paradise Lost_. She read capitally, and was a most
indulgent hearer of my remarks and exclamations;—suffered me to admire
Satan and detest Ulysses, and rail at the pious Æneas as long as I
chose.”
[Illustration: HANS PLACE]
The French teacher was a very different type of womanhood. “She was a
tall, majestic woman,” writes Mary, “between sixty and seventy, made
taller by yellow slippers with long slender heels.... Her face was
almost invisible, being concealed between a mannish kind of neck-cloth
and an enormous cap, whose wide, flaunting strip hung over her cheeks
and eyes;—to say nothing of a huge pair of spectacles. Madame, all
Parisian though she was, had the fidgety neatness of a Dutch woman,
and was scandalized at our untidy habits. Four days passed in distant
murmurs ... but this was only the gathering of the wind before the
storm. It was dancing day; we were all dressed and assembled when
Madame, provoked by some indications of latent disorder, instituted,
much to our consternation, a general rummage through the house for all
things out of their places. The collected mass was thrown together in
one stupendous pile in the middle of the schoolroom—a pile that defies
description or analysis. The whole was to be apportioned amongst the
different owners and then affixed to their persons!... Poor Madame!
Article after article was held up to be owned in vain: not a soul would
claim such dangerous property. Nevertheless, she did succeed by dint of
lucky guesses, [and soon] dictionaries were suspended from the necks of
the pupils _en médaillon_, shawls tied round the waist _en ceinture_,
and unbound music pinned to the frock _en queue_ ... not one of us but
had three or four of these appendages; many had five or six. These
preparations were intended to meet the eye of Madame’s countryman,
the French dancing master, who would doubtless assist in supporting
her authority.... She did not know that before his arrival we were to
pass an hour in an exercise of another kind, under the command of a
drill-sergeant. The man of scarlet was ushered in. It is impossible to
say whether the professor of marching or the poor Frenchwoman looked
most disconcerted. Madame began a very voluble explanatory harangue;
but she was again unfortunate—the sergeant did not understand French.
She attempted to translate: ‘It is, Sare, que ces dames, dat dese miss
be des traineuses.’ This clear and intelligible sentence producing
no other visible effect than a shake of the head, Madame desired the
nearest culprit to tell ‘ce soldat là’ what she had said, which caused
him of the red coat to declare that ‘it made his blood boil to see so
many free-born English girls dominated over by their natural enemy.’
Finally he insisted that we could not march with such incumbrances,
which declaration being done into French all at once by half a dozen
eager tongues, the trappings were removed and the experiment was ended.”
In spite of this comical exception, the general system of education
followed in Hans Place was greatly superior to that of the ordinary
boarding schools of the day, where all that could be said of a young
lady when her education was finished was that she “played a little,
sang a little, talked a little indifferent French, painted shells
and roses, not particularly like nature, danced admirably, and was
the best player at battledore and shuttle-cock, hunt-the-slipper and
blindman’s-buff in her county.”
Dr. and Mrs. Mitford visited their little daughter frequently
during the period of her school life—often taking lodgings in the
neighbourhood to be within easy reach. Mrs. Mitford writes on one of
these occasions to her husband: “=Mezza=” (a pet name for Mary), “who
has got her little desk here, and her great dictionary, is hard at her
studies beside me.... Her little spirits are all abroad to obtain the
prize, sometimes hoping, sometimes desponding. It is as well perhaps
you are not here at present, as you would be in as great a fidget on
the occasion as she herself is.”
Whether Mary won this particular prize we do not know, but that she
_did_ win prizes is proved by the fact that two of them are carefully
treasured by the descendants of some of her friends. One of these is
in our temporary possession. It is a large volume entitled, _Adam’s
Geography_, bound in calf, and ornamented with elegant patterns in
gilding. On the upper side of the binding are the words:—
Prix de Bonne Conduite qu’a obtenu Mlle. Midford
while on the reverse side we read:—
Mrs. St. Quintin’s School Hans Place June 17th 1801.
The Mitfords’ name used to be spelt with a “d” at one time, but Dr.
Mitford changed it to a “t” a few years later than the period of which
we are writing.
There were three vacations in the year, the breaking up for which was
always preceded by a festival. Before Easter and Christmas there was
usually a ballet “when the sides of the schoolroom were fitted up
with bowers, in which the little girls who had to dance were seated,
and whence they issued at a signal from M. Duval the dancing master,
attired as sylphs or shepherdesses, to skip or glide through the mazy
movements of a fancy dance to the music of his kit. Or sometimes there
would be a dramatic performance, as when the same room was converted
into a theatre for the representation of Hannah More’s _Search after
Happiness_.
CHAPTER X
A GLIMPSE OF OLD FRENCH SOCIETY
During her school life Mary Mitford had an opportunity of seeing many
of the French refugees of noble birth who had escaped from their
country in the commencement of the Reign of Terror.
“M. St. Quintin,” she tells us, “being a lively, kind-hearted man, with
a liberal hand and a social temper, it was his delight to assemble as
many as he could of his poor countrymen and countrywomen around his
hospitable supper-table.”
“Something wonderful and admirable it was,” she writes, “to see how
these dukes and duchesses, marshals and marquises, chevaliers and
bishops bore up under their unparalleled reverses! How they laughed,
and talked, and squabbled, and flirted, constant to their high heels,
their rouge and their furbelows, to their old _liésons_, their polished
sarcasms and their cherished rivalries! They clung even to their
_mariages de convenance_; and the very habits which would most have
offended our English notions, if we had seen them in their splendid
hotels of the Faubourg St. Germain, won tolerance and pardon when mixed
up with such unaffected constancy and such cheerful resignation.”
There were supper parties also given to other members of the French
society by a cousin of Mary Mitford’s who had married an _émigré_ of
high birth and who resided in Brunswick Square. Mary often spent the
interval between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning with these
relatives. “Saturday was their regular French day,” she writes, “when
in the evening the conversation, music, games, manners and cookery
were studiously and decidedly French. Trictrac superseded chess or
backgammon, reversi took the place of whist, Gretry of Mozart, Racine
of Shakespeare; omelettes and salads, champagne moussu, and _eau sucré_
excluded sandwiches, oysters and porter.
“At these suppers their little school-girl visitor,” she says,
“assisted, though at first rather in the French than the English sense
of the word. I was present indeed, but had as little to do as possible
either with speaking or eating.... However, in less than three months I
became an efficient consumer of good things, and said ‘oui, monsieur,’
and ‘merci, madame,’ as often as a little girl of twelve years old
ought to say anything.
“I confess, however, that it took more time to reconcile me to the
party round the table than to the viands with which it was covered. In
truth they formed a motley group, reminding me now of a masquerade and
then of a puppet show. I shall attempt to sketch a few of them as they
then appeared to me, beginning, as etiquette demands, with the duchess.
“She was a tall, meagre woman of a certain age (that is to say on
the wrong side of sixty). Her face bore the remains of beauty, [but
injured by] a quantity of glaring rouge. Her dress was always simple
in its materials and delicately clean. She meant the fashion to be
English, I believe,—at least she used often to say, ‘me voilà mise à
l’Anglaise’; but as neither herself nor her faithful _femme de chambre_
could or would condescend to seek for patterns from _les grosses
bourgeoises de ce Londres là bas_ they constantly relapsed into the
old French shapes.... She used to relate the story of her escape from
France, and accounted herself the most fortunate of women for having,
in company with her faithful _femme de chambre_, at last contrived
to reach England with jewels enough concealed about their persons to
secure them a modest competence. No small part of her good fortune
was the vicinity of her old friend the Marquis de L., a little thin,
withered old man, with a face puckered with wrinkles, and a prodigious
volubility of tongue. This gentleman had been madame’s devoted beau for
the last forty years.... They could not exist without an interchange of
looks and sentiments, a mental intelligence, a gentle gallantry on the
one side and a languishing listening on the other, which long habit had
rendered as necessary to both as their snuff-box or their coffee.
“The next person in importance to the duchess was Madame de V., sister
to the marquis. Her husband, who had acted in a diplomatic capacity in
the stormy days preceding the Revolution, still maintained his station
at the exiled court, and was at the moment of which I write employed on
a secret embassy to an unnamed potentate.... In the dearth of Bourbon
news this mysterious mission excited a lively and animated curiosity
amongst these sprightly people.
“In person Madame de V. was quite a contrast to the duchess; short,
very crooked, with the sharp, odd-looking face and keen eye that so
often accompany deformity. She [used] a quantity of rouge and finery,
mingling [together] ribands, feathers and beads of all the colours of
the rainbow. She was on excellent terms with all who knew her, and was
also on the best terms with herself, in spite of the looking-glass,
whose testimony indeed was so positively contradicted by certain
couplets and acrostics addressed to her by M. le Comte de C., and the
chevalier des I., the poets of the party, that to believe one uncivil
dumb thing against two witnesses of such undoubted honour would have
been a breach of politeness of which madame was incapable.
“The Chevalier des I. was a handsome man, tall, dark-visaged, and
whiskered, with a look rather of the new than of the old French school,
fierce and soldierly; he was accomplished too, played the flute, and
wrote songs and enigmas. His wife, the prettiest of women, was the
silliest Frenchwoman I ever encountered. She never opened her lips
without uttering some _bêtise_. Her poor husband, himself not the
wisest of men, quite dreaded her speaking.
“It happened that the Abbé de Lille, the celebrated French poet, and
M. de Colonne, the ex-minister, had promised one Saturday to join
the party in Brunswick Square. They came: and our chevalier [as a
poet] could not miss so fair an opportunity of display. Accordingly,
about half an hour before supper he put on a look of _distraction_,
strode hastily two or three times up and down the room, slapped his
fore-head, and muttered a line or two to himself, then, calling
hastily for pen and paper, began writing with the illegible rapidity of
one who fears to lose a happy thought;—in short, he acted incomparably
the whole agony of composition, and finally, with becoming diffidence,
presented the impromptu to our worthy host, who immediately imparted
it to the company. It was heard with lively approbation. At last the
commerce of flattery ceased; the author’s excuses, the ex-minister’s
and the great poet’s thanks, and the applause of the audience died away.
“A pause [now] ensued which was broken by Madame des I., who had
witnessed the whole scene with intense pleasure, and who exclaimed,
with tears standing in her beautiful eyes, ‘How glad I am they like the
impromptu! My poor dear chevalier! No tongue can tell what pains it has
cost him! There he was all yesterday evening writing, writing,—all the
night long—never went to bed—all to-day—only finished just before we
came. My poor dear chevalier! Now he’ll be satisfied.’
“Be it recorded to the honour of French politeness that finding it
impossible to stop or to out-talk her, the whole party pretended not to
hear, and never once alluded to this impromptu _fait à loisir_ till the
discomforted chevalier sneaked off with his pretty simpleton. Then to
be sure they did laugh....
“The Comtess de C. would have been very handsome but for one terrible
drawback—she squinted. I cannot abide those ‘cross eyes,’ as the
country people call them; but the French gentlemen did not seem to
participate in my antipathy, for the countess was regarded as the
beauty of the party. Agreeable she certainly was, lively and witty....
She had an agreeable little dog called Amour—a pug, the smallest and
ugliest of the species, who regularly after supper used to jump out of
a muff, where he had lain _perdu_ all the evening, and make the round
of the supper-table, begging cake and biscuits. He and I established
a great friendship, and he would even venture, on hearing my voice,
to pop his poor little black nose out of his hiding-place before the
appointed time. It required several repetitions of _fi donc_ from his
mistress to drive him back behind the scenes till she gave him his cue.
“No uncommon object of her wit was the mania of a young smooth-faced
little abbé, the politician _par eminence_, where all were
politicians. M. l’Abbé must have been an exceeding bore to our English
ministers, whom by his own showing he pestered weekly with laboured
memorials,—plans for a rising in La Vendée, schemes for an invasion,
proposals to destroy the French fleet, offers to take Antwerp, and
plots for carrying off Buonaparte from the opera-house and lodging him
in the Tower of London. Imagine the abduction, and fancy him carried
off by the unassisted prowess and dexterity of M. l’Abbé!”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XI
THE GAY REALITIES OF MOLIÈRE
Dr. Mitford had set his heart upon his daughter’s becoming an
“accomplished musician,” in spite of her having, as she tells us,
“neither ear, nor taste, nor application.” Her first music master in
Hans Place failing to bring about any improvement in her playing upon
the piano, she was removed from his tuition and placed under that of
a German professor, “an impatient, irritable man of genius,” who, in
his turn, soon summarily dismissed his pupil! “Things being in this
unpromising state,” she writes, “I began to entertain some hope that my
musical education would be given up altogether. This time [however] my
father threw the blame upon the instrument, and he now resolved that I
should become a great performer upon the harp.
“It happened that our school-house ... was so built that the principal
reception-room was connected with the entrance-hall by a long passage
and two double doors. This room, fitted up with nicely bound books,
contained, amongst other musical instruments, the harp upon which I
was sent to practise every morning. I was sent alone, [and was] most
comfortably out of sight and hearing of every individual in the house,
the only means of approach being through the two resounding green baize
doors, swinging to with a heavy bang the moment they were let go. As
the change from piano to harp ... had by no means worked a miracle, I
very shortly betook myself to the book-shelves, and seeing a row of
octavo volumes lettered _Théâtre de Voltaire_, I selected one of them
and had deposited it in front of the music-stand and perched myself
upon the stool to read it in less time than an ordinary pupil would
have consumed in getting through the first three bars of _Ar Hyd y Nos_.
“The play upon which I opened was _Zaïre_. There was a certain
romance in the situation, an interest in the story.... So I got
through _Zaïre_, and when I had finished _Zaïre_ I proceeded to other
plays—_Ædipe_, _Mérope_, _Algire_, _Mahomet_, plays well worth reading,
but not so absorbing as to prevent my giving due attention to the
warning doors, and putting the book in its place, and striking the
chords of _Ar Hyd y Nos_ as often as I heard a step approaching.
“But when the dramas of Voltaire were exhausted and I had recourse to
some neighbouring volumes the state of matters changed at once. The new
volumes contained the comedies of Molière, and once plunged into the
gay realities of this delightful world, all the miseries of this globe
of ours—harp, music-books, practisings, and lessons—were forgotten....
I never remembered that there was such a thing as time; I never heard
the warning doors; the only tribulations that troubled me were the
tribulations of _Sganarelle_, the only lessons I thought about—the
lessons of the ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme.’ So I was caught; caught in
the very act of laughing till I cried over the apostrophes of the
angry father to the galley, in which he is told his son has been taken
captive, ‘Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère!’
“Luckily, however, the person who discovered my delinquency was one of
my chief spoilers—the husband of our good school mistress. Accordingly
when he could speak for laughing, what he said sounded far more like a
compliment upon my relish for the comic drama than a rebuke. I suppose
that he spoke to the same effect to my father. At all events the issue
of the affair was the dismissal of the poor little harp mistress and a
present of a cheap edition of Molière for my own reading.” And writing
in after years Miss Mitford says: “I have got the set still—twelve
little foreign-looking books, unbound, and covered with a gay-looking
pink paper, mottled with red, like certain carnations.”
Miss Mitford tells us in the Introduction to one of her works that her
father had engaged the English teacher Miss Rowden, of whom we have
already spoken, to act as a sort of private tutor—a governess out of
school hours to his young daughter.
“At the time I was placed under her care,” writes Mary, “her whole
heart was in the drama, especially as personified by John Kemble; and I
am persuaded that she thought she could in no way so well perform her
duty as in taking me to Drury Lane whenever his name was in the bills.
“It was a time of great actors—Jack Bannister and Jack Johnstone,
Fawcett and Emery, Lewis and Munden, Mrs. Davenport, Miss Pope and Mrs.
Jordan (most exquisite of all) made comedy a bright and living art, an
art as full as life itself of laughter and tears.
“My enthusiasm for the drama soon equalled that of Miss Rowden....
There was of course a great difference in kind between her pleasure and
mine; hers was a critical, mine a childish enjoyment; she loved fine
acting, I loved the play.”
Writing in later years of her pleasure, however imperfect then, in
the acting of “the glorious family of Kemble,” she says: “The fame
of John Kemble ... has suffered not a little by the contact with his
great sister. Besides her uncontested and incontestable power Mrs.
Siddons had one advantage not always allowed for—she was a woman. The
actress must always be dearer than the actor, goes closer to the heart,
draws tenderer tears.... Add that the tragedy in which they were best
remembered was one in which the heroine must always predominate, for
Lady Macbeth is the moving spirit of the play. But the characters of
more equality—Katherine and Wolsey, Hermione and Leontes, Coriolanus
and Volumnia, Hamlet and the Queen—and surely John Kemble may hold his
own. How often have I seen them in those plays! What would I give to
see again those plays so acted!”
In the year 1802, when Mary was fourteen years of age, her thirst for
knowledge was growing rapidly. Miss Rowden happened to be reading
Virgil, and Mary longed to be able to read it also. “I have just
taken a lesson in Latin,” she writes to her mother, “but I shall in
consequence omit some of my other business. It is so extremely like
Italian that I think I shall find it much easier than I expected.”
“I told you,” she says in a letter to her father, “that I had finished
the _Iliad_, which I admire beyond anything I ever read. I have begun
the _Æneid_, which I cannot say I admire so much. Dryden is so fond of
triplets and Alexandrines that it is much heavier reading; ... when I
have finished it I shall read the _Odyssey_.... I am now reading that
beautiful opera of Metastasio, _Themistocles_, and when I have finished
that I shall read Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_. His poetry is really
heavenly.”
Again she writes, “I went to the library the other day with Miss Rowden
and brought back the first volume of Goldsmith’s _Animated Nature_.
It is quite a lady’s natural history, and extremely entertaining....
The only fault is its length. There are eight volumes. But as I read
it to myself, and read pretty quick, I shall soon get through it. I am
likewise reading the _Odyssey_, which I even prefer to the _Iliad_. I
think it beautiful beyond comparison.”
Mrs. Mitford was staying in town in the summer of 1802, and she writes
to her husband: “You would have laughed yesterday when M. St. Quintin
was reading Mary’s English composition, of which the subject was, ‘The
advantage of a well-cultivated mind’; a word struck him as needless to
be inserted, and which after objecting to it he was going to expunge.
Mam Bonette (a pet name), in her pretty meek way, urged the necessity
of the word used. Miss Rowden was then applied to. She and I both
asserted that the sentence would be incomplete without it. St. Quintin,
on a more deliberate view of the subject, with all the liberality which
is so amiable a point in his character, begged our daughter’s pardon,
and the passage remained as it originally stood.”
A young French girl, Mlle. Rose, had recently become an inmate of the
schoolroom. She was an orphan, and her venerable grand-parents, who
belonged to a noble Bretonne family, were now dependent upon her for
support. The three were to be seen occasionally at M. St. Quintin’s
hospitable supper-parties, and on such occasions Rose “always brought
with her some ingenious straw-plaiting to make into fancy bonnets,
which were then in vogue.... She was a pallid, drooping creature,
whose dark eyes looked too large for her face.” She now brought her
straw-plaiting into the schoolroom and also assisted in teaching French
to the pupils.
“About this time a little girl named Betsy, of a short, squat figure,
plain in face and ill-dressed and overdressed, appeared at the school,
brought by her father. They happened to arrive at the same time with
the French dancing master, a marquis of the _ancien régime_. I never
saw such a contrast between two men. The Frenchman was slim, long
and pale, and allowing always for the dancing-master air, he might
be called elegant. The Englishman was the beau-ideal of a John Bull,
portentous in size, broad and red of visage, and loud of tongue. He did
not stay five minutes, but that was time enough to strike monsieur with
horror ... especially when his first words conveyed an injunction to
the lady of the house ‘to take care that no grinning Frenchman had the
ordering of his Betsy’s feet. If she must learn to dance, let her be
taught by an honest Englishman.’
“Poor Betsy! there she sat, the tears trickling down her cheeks, little
comforted by the kind notice of the governess and the English teacher.
I made some girlish advances towards acquaintanceship which she was too
shy or too miserable to return....
“For the present she seemed to have attached herself to Mademoiselle
Rose. She had crept to the side of the young French woman and watched
her as she wove her straw plaits. She had also attempted the simple art
with some discarded straws, and when mademoiselle had so far roused
herself as to show her the proper way, she soon became an efficient
assistant.
“No intercourse took place between them. Indeed none was possible
since neither knew a word of the other’s language. Betsy was silence
personified, and poor Mlle. Rose was now more than ever dejected.
An opportunity of returning to France had opened to her and to her
grand-parents, and was passing away. The expenses of the journey were
beyond her means. So she sighed over her straw-plaiting and submitted.
“In the meantime the second Saturday after the new pupil’s coming to
school arrived, and with it a summons home to Betsy, who, for the
first time gathering courage to address our good governess, asked ‘if
she might be trusted with the bonnet Mlle. Rose had just finished,
to show her aunt—she knew she would like to buy that bonnet because
mademoiselle had been so good as to let her assist in plaiting it.’ Our
good governess ordered the bonnet to be put into the carriage, told her
the price, called her a good child, and took leave of her till Monday.
“Two hours after, Betsy and her father reappeared in the schoolroom.
‘Ma’amselle,’ said he, bawling as loud as he could with the view
evidently of making her understand him, ‘Ma’amselle, I’ve no great love
for the French, whom I take to be our natural enemies. But you’re a
good young woman; you’ve been kind to my Betsy, and have taught her to
make your fal-lals. She says that she thinks you’re fretting because
you can’t manage to take your grandfather and grandmother back to
France again; so as you let her help you in that other handiwork, why
you must let her help you in this.’ Then throwing a heavy purse into
her lap and catching his little daughter up in his arms he departed,
leaving poor Mlle. Rose too much bewildered to speak or to comprehend
the happiness that had fallen upon her.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XII
RECOLLECTIONS OF OLD READING
In the spring of the year 1802 Dr. Mitford purchased an old farm-house
with its surrounding fields amounting to about seventy acres, near
to the small village of Graseley, which lies about three miles to
the south of Reading. The house, known as Graseley Court, had been
built in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and it possessed fine rooms
with ornamental panelling, oriel windows and a great oaken staircase
with massive balustrades. It had fallen out of repair, and the
doctor’s first plan was to carry out such restorations only as would
make it a comfortable dwelling-place for himself and his family. But
unfortunately he soon abandoned this plan and determined to pull down
the old house and to build upon its site a new and spacious mansion.
Dr. Mitford had little appreciation of the beauty he was destroying,
nor did he foresee the large sums of money that would be sunk in this
undertaking.
[Illustration: STRIKING LIKENESSES TAKEN IN THIS MANNER _ONE GUINEA
EACH_]
Mary’s school life came to an end at the close of the year 1802,
when she had just reached the age of fifteen. Her connection, however,
with Hans Place was not over, for she paid happy visits from time to
time to the St. Quintins and Miss Rowden, going to the London theatres,
hearing concerts, and seeing interesting society under their auspices.
Her first introduction to the Reading gaieties of a grown-up order
was to be at the Race Ball in August, 1803. “At these balls,” we are
told, “it was the custom for the steward of the races to dance with the
young ladies who then came out.” After alluding to the distress felt
by one of her companions on having to dance with a stranger on such an
occasion, Mary writes in 1802: “I think myself very fortunate that Mr.
Shaw Lefevre will be steward next year, for by that time I shall hope
to know him well enough to render the undertaking of dancing with him
less disagreeable.”
“The public amusements of the town,” she writes, “as I remember them
at bonny fifteen were sober enough. They were limited to an annual
visit from a respectable company of actors, the theatre being very
well conducted and exceedingly ill-attended; to biennial concerts ...
rather better patronized, to almost weekly incursions from itinerant
lecturers on all the arts and sciences, and from prodigies of every
kind, whether three-year-old fiddlers or learned dogs.”
“The good town of Belford [Reading],” she tells us, “was the paradise
of ill-jointured widows and portionless old-maids. They met in the
tableland of gentility, passing their mornings in calls at each
other’s houses and their evenings in small tea-parties, seasoned with
a rubber or a pool, and garnished with a little quiet gossiping ...
which their habits required. The part of the town in which they chiefly
congregated, the lady’s _quarter_, was one hilly corner of the parish
of St. Nicholas, a sort of highland district, all made up of short Rows
and pigmy Places entirely uncontaminated by the vulgarity of shops.”
Miss Mitford has given us many a racy description of the type of small
tradespeople of the period. Here is one of them:—
“The greatest man in these parts (I use the word in the sense of
Louis-le-Gros, not Louis-le-Grand) is our worthy neighbour Stephen
Lane, the grazier ex-butcher of Belford. Nothing so big hath been seen
since Lambert the gaoler or the Durham ox.
“When he walks he overfills the pavement and is more difficult to pass
than a link of full-dressed misses or a chain of becloaked dandies....
Chairs crack under him, couches rock, bolsters groan and floors
tremble....
“Tailors, although he was a liberal and punctual paymaster, dreaded his
custom. It was not only the quantity of material that he took, and yet
that cloth universally called ‘broad’ was not broad enough for him; it
was not only the stuff but the work—the sewing, stitching, plaiting and
button-holing without end. The very shears grew weary of their labours.”
For a contrast to this personage we have “little Miss Philly Firkin the
china woman,” whose shop stood in a narrow twisting lane called Oriel
Street. This street was cribbed and confined on one side by the remains
of an old monastic building, and after winding round the churchyard
of St. Stephens with an awkward curve it finally abutted upon the
market-place. So popular was this “incommodious avenue of shops”
that nobody dreamt of visiting Belford without desiring to purchase
something there, so that “horse-people and foot-people jostled upon its
pavement,” whilst “coaches and phaetons ran against each other in the
road.” Of all the shops the prettiest and most sought after was that of
Miss Philly Firkin.
“She herself was in appearance most fit to be its inhabitant, being a
trim, prim little woman, whose dress hung about her in stiff, regular
folds, very like the drapery of a china shepherdess on a mantelpiece,
and whose pink and white complexion ... had the same professional hue.
Change her spruce cap for a wide-brimmed hat and the damask napkin
which she flourished in wiping her wares for a china crook and the
figure in question might have passed for a miniature of the mistress.
In one respect they differed. The china shepherdess was a silent
personage. Miss Philadelphia was not; on the contrary, she was reckoned
to make ... as good a use of her tongue as any woman, gentle or simple,
in the whole town of Belford.”
Miss Mitford describes another female shop-keeper of those days, “a
reduced gentlewoman by name Mrs. Martin, who endeavoured to eke out a
small annuity by letting lodgings at eight shillings a week, and by
keeping a toyshop. The whole stock (of the little shop)—fiddles, drums,
balls, dolls and shuttle-cocks—might be easily appraised at under eight
pounds, including a stately rocking-horse, the poor widow’s _cheval de
bataille_, which had occupied one side of Mrs. Martin’s shop from the
time of her setting up in business, and still continued to keep his
station, uncheapened by her thrifty customers.”
When a certain Mr. Singleton, we are told, was ordained curate of
St. Nicholas after taking his degrees at college with “respectable
mediocrity” he was attracted by the appearance of the rooms above
the toyshop, “and there by the advice of Dr. Grampound (the Rector)
did he place himself on his arrival at Belford. He occupied the first
floor, consisting of the sitting-room—a pleasant apartment with one
window abutting on the High Bridge and the other on the market-place,
also a small chamber behind with its tent-bed and dimity furniture.”
And there the curate continued “to live for full thirty years with
the selfsame spare, quiet, decent landlady and her small serving
maiden Patty, a demure, civil damsel dwarfed as it should seem by
constant curtseying.... Except for the clock of time, which, however
imperceptibly, does still keep moving, everything about the little
toyshop was at a standstill. The very tabby cat, which lay basking on
the hearth, might have passed for his progenitor of happy memory, who
took his station there the night of Mr. Singleton’s arrival; and the
self-same hobby-horse still stood rocking opposite the counter, the
admiration of every urchin who passed the door.
“There the rocking-horse remained, and there remained Mr. Singleton,
gradually advancing from a personable youth to a portly middle-aged
man.”
We have already mentioned the frequent small fairs that were held in
the market-place from time to time, but the chief event of the year
in such matters was the Reading Great Fair, which took place regularly
upon May Day. “It was a scene of business as well as of pleasure,”
writes Mary Mitford, “being not only a great market for horses and
cattle, but one of the principal marts for the celebrated cheese of
the great dairy counties.... Before the actual fair day waggon after
waggon, laden with the round, hard, heavy merchandise, rumbled slowly
into the Forbury, where the great space before the school-house was
fairly covered with stacks of Cheddar and North Wilts.
“Fancy the singular effect of piles of cheeses several feet high
extending over a whole large cricket ground, and divided only by narrow
paths littered with straw, amongst which wandered chapmen offering
a taste of their wares to their cautious customers, the country
shop-keepers (who poured in from every village within twenty miles),
and to the thrifty house-wives of the town.... Fancy the effect of this
remarkable scene, surrounded by the usual moving picture of a fair,
the fine Gothic church of St. Nicholas on one side, the old arch of
the Abbey and the abrupt eminence called Forbury Hill, crowned with a
grand clump of trees, on the other.... When lighted up at night it was,
perhaps, still more fantastic and attractive, when the roars and
howlings of the travelling wild beasts used to mingle so grotesquely
with the drums, trumpets and fiddles of the dramatic and equestrian
exhibitions, and the laugh and shout and song of the merry visitors.”
[Illustration: THE OLD MARKET PLACE, READING]
In the year 1804 the building of the large new house at Graseley
was completed, and it received the name of Bertram House, so called
in honour of the Mitfords’ Norman ancestor, Sir Robert Bertram. The
doctor’s usual extravagance was shown in the style of its decorations
and furniture, which were little suited to his small and modest family.
We have visited Bertram House. It is a large square white building of
little architectural beauty, but there is beauty in a wide verandah
standing at the summit of a broad flight of stone steps leading up to
the entrance, which is completely festooned by roses and honeysuckles.
The house faces spreading lawns and gay flower-beds, whilst its
approach from the lane hard by is beneath an avenue of tall limes.
Fields stretch far away behind the building, their “richly timbered
hedgerows edging into wild, rude and solemn fir plantations.”
Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of her life, and here she got to
know and love not only their own beautiful grounds but also every turn
of the surrounding shady lanes, where the first violets and primroses
were to be found, and delighted in the wide expanse of its neighbouring
common gay with gorse and broom. Many of her pastoral stories are
connected with this smiling country.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XIII
A NORTHERN TOUR
In the autumn of the year 1806 Mary Mitford, then eighteen years of
age, was taken by her father for a tour in the north of England with a
view of introducing her to his relations in Northumberland. The head of
the family was Mitford of Mitford Castle, a fine old Saxon edifice that
stands on high ground above the river Wansbeck at a point where two
fords meet, and from which circumstance the name Mid-ford is derived.
Miss Mitford speaks in her _Recollections_ of “the massive ruins of the
castle” as “the common ancestral home of our race and name,” and tells
us “of the wild and daring Wansbeck almost girdling it as a moat.”
The castle is about two miles distant from Morpeth, and there is a
quaint rhyme still current in the north-country which runs as follows:—
“Midford was Midford ere Morpeth was ane, And still shall be Midford
when Morpeth is gane.”
At the time of the Norman Conquest it appears that the castle and
barony were in the possession of a certain Robert de Mitford, whose
only child and heiress was a daughter named Sibella. This daughter was
given in marriage by the Conqueror to one of his knights—Sir Robert
Bertram—who had fought in the battle of Hastings. It seems that there
is a curious entry respecting this same knight in a contemporary
document written in Norman French to the effect that Sir Robert Bertram
_estoít tort_ (crooked). One would like to know if the Saxon maid was
happy with her deformed husband, but the old chronicles are of course
silent on that subject.[3]
[Footnote 3: See _Memories_, by Lord Redesdale, K.C.B., published 1915.]
It was on the 20th day of September (1806) that Mary Mitford, together
with her father and her father’s cousin, Mr. Nathaniel Ogle, who
possessed an estate in Northumberland, started upon their northern
tour. They travelled to London by stage-coach, but performed the rest
of their journey in Mr. Ogle’s private carriage. Having changed horses
at Waltham Cross and again at Wade’s Mill, they halted at Royston for
the first night, and then, continuing their journey with various other
haltings, reached Little Harle Tower in Northumberland a few days
later.
Little Harle Tower, which stands in a romantic glen through which the
Wansbeck flows, was to be the headquarters of the Mitfords during their
tour. It was the property of Lord and Lady Charles Murray Aynsley,
Lord Charles having taken the name of Aynsley on account of a large
property left to his wife by a relative of that name. He was a son of
the Duchess of Athol. Perhaps the reader may remember his appearance in
an early chapter of this work as a very bashful young man. Lady Charles
was a first cousin of Dr. Mitford’s.
Mary writes to her mother from Little Harle Tower on September 28th: “I
imagine Papa has told you all our plans, which are extremely pleasant.
Lord and Lady Charles stay longer in the country on purpose to receive
us, and have put off their visit to Alnwick Castle that they may take
us there, as well as to Lord Grey’s, Colonel Beaumont’s and half a
dozen other places.... The post, which _never_ goes oftener than
three times a week from hence, will not allow our writing again till
Wednesday, when we go to Sir William Lorraine’s, and hope to get a
frank from Colonel Beaumont whom we are to meet there.”
This was Mary Mitford’s first introduction into what is called high
society, and the simplicity of her ordinary life made her specially
enjoy her new experiences.
The Beaumonts were people of large property, and Mary describes the
wonderful attire of Mrs. Beaumont, who appeared at the Lorraines’
dinner-party (although it was supposed to be a small informal
gathering) in a lavender satin dress covered with Mechlin lace, and
whose jewels consisted of amethysts of priceless value forming a
waist-belt, a bandeau, a tiara, armlets, bracelets, etc. etc. to match.
Lady Lorraine’s dress was quite different. “Her ladyship is a small,
delicate woman,” writes Mary, “and she wore a plain cambric gown and
a small chip hat, without any sort of ornament either on her head or
neck.”
Mary made mental notes concerning many of her new acquaintance. She
describes a certain Mr. M. as “an oddity from affectation.” “And I
often think,” she adds, “that no young man affects singularity when he
can distinguish himself by something better.”
Writing from Kirkley, Mr. Ogle’s property, on October 8th, Mary says:
“We go to-morrow to Alnwick and return the same night. I will write you
a long account of our stately visit when I return to Morpeth.”
Alnwick Castle was at that time the abode of the Dowager Duchess of
Athol, the mother of Lord Charles Murray Aynsley. This same Duchess was
also (in her own right) Baroness Strange and Lady of Man. Her husband,
the third Duke of Athol, had died some thirty years before, and ever
since his death she seems to have enjoyed a position of ever-increasing
power and authority.
“To-morrow,” writes Mary, “is expected to be a very full day at the
Castle on account of the Sessions Ball. The ladies—the married ones I
mean—go in court dresses without hoops, and display their diamonds and
finery upon the occasion.”
Mary had to make her preparations accordingly. “You would have been
greatly amused,” she writes, “at my having my hair cut by Lord
Charles’s _frisseur_, who is by occupation a joiner, and actually
attended me with an apron covered with glue and a rule in his hand
instead of scissors.
“Thursday morning we rose early. I wore my ball dress, and Lady C.
lent me a beautiful necklace of Scotch pebbles very elegantly set,
with brooches and ornaments to match. My dress was never the least
discomposed during the whole day, though we travelled thirty miles
of dreadful roads to the Castle. Lord Charles’s horses had been sent
on to Framlington (eighteen miles) the day before, and we took four
post horses from Cambo to that place. We set out at eleven and reached
Framlington by two.... We passed Netherwitten ... and Sworland, the
magnificent seat of the famous Alexander Davison. I had likewise a good
view of the beautiful Roadly Craggs, by which the road passes, and
likewise over some of the moors.
“The entrance to Alnwick Castle is extremely striking. After passing
through three massive gateways you alight and enter a most magnificent
hall, lined with servants, who repeat your name to those stationed on
the stairs; these again re-echo the sound from one to the other, till
you find yourself in a most sumptuous drawing-room of great size and,
as I should imagine, forty feet in height. This is at least rather
formidable, but the sweetness of the Duchess soon did away every
impression but that of admiration. We arrived first, and Lady Charles
introduced me with particular distinction to the whole family; and
during the whole day I was never for one instant unaccompanied by
one of the charming Lady Percys, and principally by Lady Emily, the
youngest and most beautiful.
“We sat down sixty-five to dinner.... The dinner of course was served
on plate, and the middle of the table was decorated by a sumptuous
_plateau_. I met Sir Charles Monck, my cousin of Mitford, and several
people I had known at Little Harle. After dinner when the Duchess
found Lady Charles absolutely refused to stay all night, she resolved
at least that I should see the Castle, and sent Lady Emily to show me
the library, chapel, state bedrooms, etc., and, thinking I was fond
of dancing, she persuaded Lady C. to go for an hour with herself and
family to the Sessions Ball, which was held that night.
“The Duchess is still a most lovely woman, and dresses with particular
elegance. She wore a helmet of diamonds. The young ladies were
elegantly dressed in white and gold. The news of Lord Percy’s election
arrived after dinner.
“At nine we went to the ball given in the town, and the room was so
bad and the heat so excessive that I determined, considering the long
journey we had to take, not to dance, and refused my cousin Mitford
of Mitford, Mr. Selby, Mr. Alder, and half a dozen whose names I have
forgotten. At half-past ten we took leave of the Duchess and her
amiable daughters and commenced our journey homeward....
“We went on very quietly for some time when we suddenly discovered that
we had come about six miles out of our way.... This so much delayed us
that it was near seven o’clock in the morning before we reached home
[Morpeth]. Seventy miles, a splendid dinner and a ball all in one day!
Was not this a spirited expedition?”
Mary was well placed for enjoyment during this tour. “My cousins,”
she writes in later life, “were acquainted, as it seemed to me, with
everyone of consequence in the county, and were themselves two of the
most popular persons it contained, [so] as the young relative and
companion of this amiable couple, I saw the country and its inhabitants
to great advantage.”
Mary mentions two younger sisters of Lady Charles—Mary and Charlotte
Mitford—cousins of whom she became fond. They often accompanied the
travellers in their visiting tours, as did also the Aynsleys’ only son,
whom she speaks of as her father’s “dear godson, and the finest boy you
ever saw.”
Writing from Morpeth, where her father’s uncle, old Mr. Mitford, and
her cousins lived, she speaks of a plan for a tour in the northern
part of the county arranged by Sir Charles and Lady Aynsley for her
entertainment. “When I go back to Little Harle,” she says, “we shall
set out for Admiral Roddam’s upon the Cheviot Hills, Lord Tankerville’s
and Lord Grey’s.... I am so happy in this opportunity of seeing the
Cheviot Hills.” The tour proved a very pleasant and interesting one.
The party travelled in a coach and four, the road sometimes taking
them across the summit of the Cheviots and “above the clouds.”
They visited Fallerton and Simonsburn and also Hexham—her father’s
birthplace—finally halting at Alnwick.
At this time Mary was put into an awkward position by her father
suddenly quitting her and returning in all haste to Reading in order to
further the Parliamentary election of Mr. Shaw Lefevre, thus cancelling
all his engagements with their relatives and friends. She wrote to urge
his return, and finally he did so on the 3rd November, and towards the
end of the month both father and daughter returned home.
Late in life, recording the various events of her tour in the north,
Mary writes: “Years many and changeful have gone by since I trod those
northern braes; they at whose side I stood lie under the green sod;
yet still as I read of the Tyne or of the Wansbeck the bright rivers
sparkle before me, as if I had walked beside them but yesterday. I
still seem to stand with my dear father under the grey walls of that
grand old abbey church at Hexham whilst he points to the haunts of his
boyhood. Bright river Wansbeck! How many pleasant memories I owe to thy
mere name!”
CHAPTER XIV
A ROYAL VISIT
Before quitting the pleasant society of Lord and Lady Charles Aynsley
we should like to introduce an incident in connection with them which
took place in the month of February, 1808. This was no less an event
than a visit from the exiled King Louis XVIII and his suite to Lord
Charles and his wife at the Deanery of Bocking.
Here we would explain that the post of Dean in connection with Bocking
Church, which is not a cathedral, was of a curious nature. It seems
that by an old ecclesiastical ordinance a set of clergymen were called
the Archbishop of Canterbury’s “Peculiars,” and that his Commissary
and Head of the Peculiars in Essex and Suffolk was constituted Dean of
Bocking, a post of such dignity that the Dean was wholly independent of
the Bishop of his diocese.[4]
[Footnote 4: See _History of the County of Essex_, by Thos. Wright,
published 1836.]
[Illustration: GOSFIELD HALL]
At the time of which we are writing the French King was residing at
Gosfield Hall, a mansion lent to him by the Marquess of Buckingham
upon his arrival in England during the previous month of November.
There, we are told, a mimic court was held in strict accordance with
Bourbon traditions; and even the old French custom of the King’s dining
in public was preserved. On such occasions the inhabitants of the
surrounding neighbourhood were permitted to pass in procession through
the long dining-room to witness the sight.
In spite, however, of their courtly ceremonies the purses of these
royal exiles do not seem to have been very full, to judge by the
following story. It was told some years ago by an old Essex woman
who could remember when a child seeing the King and his attendants
out walking. The King noticed the child and was disposed to give her
something, but the royal pockets were searched in vain for a coin of
any kind. At last one of the suite produced a half-penny. “I ought to
have kept that half-penny,” remarked the old dame.
The visit of Louis XVIII to the Bocking Deanery, which took place on
February 18th, is described in a letter from Lady Charles Aynsley
to her cousin, Mrs. Mitford, to whom she also sent a copy of the
_Chelmsford Chronicle_ of February 26th, which contained a paragraph
describing the event.
Fortunately the editors of the _Chelmsford Chronicle_, which has
existed for more than one hundred and fifty years, have kept an
unbroken file of its numbers, so that we have been able to study the
very paragraph in question. Mrs. Mitford incorporates the two accounts
in a letter to her husband, but where certain details in this newspaper
are omitted, we have introduced them between brackets.
In explanation of an allusion to a severe snowstorm which it was feared
might prevent the royal visit from taking place, we would remark that
an examination of several numbers of the paper prove that the month
of February, 1808, was marked by a prevalence of violent gales of
wind and heavy falls of snow. A large number of ships are reported to
have foundered, sea-walls were broken down in many places, and the
Margate pier totally destroyed. “From the extraordinary falls of snow,”
writes a journalist, “the usual communication between the metropolis
and the distant parts of the kingdom has been nearly impracticable.
The Portsmouth mail coach is reported to have lost its way in the
snowstorm, and many accidents to passengers in other mail coaches are
related.”
[Illustration:
_Dantoux_
LE COMTE D’ARTOIS (AFTERWARDS CHARLES X)]
“At Hatfield Peveral,” states a writer, “twenty sheep and lambs were
buried in a snow-drift, but were rescued owing to the sagacity of the
shepherd’s dog.” A solitary sheep elsewhere “remained buried in the
snow for eight days. When at last dug out it was discovered to be
actually alive! It had found wurzels in the ground and had fed upon
them.”
Mrs. Mitford writes to her husband on receiving Lady Charles Aynsley’s
letter from Bocking:—
“Her ladyship has been in a very grand bustle, as the King of France,
Monsieur (the Comte d’Artois), the Duke d’Angoulême, Duke de Berry,
Duke de Grammont and the Prince de Condé, with all the nobles that
composed His Majesty’s suite at Gosfield, dined at the Deanery last
Thursday. Mr. and Mrs. Pepper (Lady Fitzgerald’s daughter) were asked
to meet him, because she was brought up and educated at the French
Court in Louis XVI’s reign; General and Mrs. Milner for the same
reason, and Colonel, Mrs. and Miss Burgoyne—all the party quick at
languages.
“The [snow] storms alarmed Lady C. not a little, for it prevented
the carrier going to town in the first instance, and in the second
she began to fear the King might not be able to come, after all the
preparations made for him. The Milners were so anxious about it that
the General, who commands at Colchester, ordered five hundred pioneers
to clear the road from that city to Bocking. On His Majesty’s approach
the Bocking bells proclaimed it, and on driving up, the full military
band which Lord C. had engaged for the occasion struck up ‘God save the
King’ in the entrance passage. In His Majesty’s coach were Monsieur
[the Comte d’Artois] and the Dukes d’Angoulême and Berry. [They arrived
a little before five o’clock, and Lady Charles handed His Majesty from
his carriage into the drawing-room, and introduced the illustrious
guest to those friends who were invited upon this interesting occasion.
His Majesty in the most affable and engaging manner entered into
conversation with every individual present.]
“All stood,” continues Mrs. Mitford, “till dinner was announced, when
our cousin handed His Majesty—Lord C. walking before him with a candle.
The King sat at the top of the table with Lady C. on his right and Lord
C. on his left. Mrs. Milner’s and Mrs. Pepper’s French butlers were
lent for the occasion. The bill of fare was in French, and the King
appeared well pleased with his entertainment. [The French nobility, who
compose His Majesty’s suite, were in full dress and wore the insignia
of their respective orders.]
[Illustration: WHERE THE KING DINED]
“The company were three hours at dinner, and at eight the dessert was
placed on the table—claret and all kinds of French wine, fruit, etc.,
a beautiful cake at the top with ‘Vive le Roi de France’ baked round
it, and the quarterings of the French army in coloured pastry, which
had a novel and pretty effect. The three youngest children then entered
with white satin military sashes over their shoulders (upon which were)
painted in bronze ‘Vive le Roi de France—Prospérité à Louis dix-huit.’
Charles, on being asked for a toast, immediately gave ‘The King of
France,’ which was drunk with the utmost sensibility by all present,
and one of the little girls came up to His Majesty and, with great
expression, spoke the lines in French, composed for the occasion.”
“Louis soon followed the ladies into the drawing-room, when again all
stood, and Lady C. served her royal guest with coffee, which being
over, she told him that some of the neighbouring families were come
for a little dance in the dining-room and that perhaps His Majesty
would be seated at cards. He good humouredly said he would first go
and pay his respects in the next room, which was the thing she wished;
therefore handed him in, his family and nobles following, which was
a fine sight for those assembled, in all sixty-two. At the King’s
desire she introduced each person to him by name, and, on the King’s
sitting down, the band struck up, and Monsieur, who is supposed to be
the finest dancer in Europe, led off with Lady C., who, spite of Lord
Charles’s horror and her own fears for her lame ankle, hopped down two
country dances with him, and they were followed by Charlotte and the
Duke d’Angoulême.”
We have sat in the long dining-room at the Deanery where these
festivities took place more than a hundred years ago. The room is
evidently little changed, and as we gazed around, the whole scene
seemed to rise before our eyes. We saw the French guests in their stars
and orders sparkling under the lights of the chandeliers, and it seemed
almost as if an echo of their bright racy talk reached our ears.
CHAPTER XV
PLAYS AND POETRY
Mary Russel Mitford had from early youth been fond of writing verses
upon subjects which had taken her fancy. “No less than three octavo
volumes,” she writes, “had I perpetrated in two years. They had all
the faults incident to a young lady’s verses, and one of them had been
deservedly castigated by the _Quarterly_.” Here she adds in later years
the following footnote: “This article was fortunate for the writer at
a far more important moment. Mr. Gifford himself, as I have been given
to understand, came to feel that however well deserved the strictures
might be, an attack by his great review upon a girl’s first book was
something like breaking a butterfly upon the wheel. He made amends by
a criticism in a very different spirit on the first series of _Our
Village_, which was of much service to the work.”
The first volume of poems was published in the year 1810 and again with
additions in 1811. Two more volumes followed soon afterwards.
In spite of some adverse criticism the poems “had had their praises,”
writes Miss Mitford, “as what young lady’s verses have not? Large
impressions had gone rapidly off; we had run into a second edition.
They had been published in America—always so kind to me! Two or three
of the shorter pieces had been thought good enough to be stolen, and
Mr. Coleridge had prophesied of the larger one that the authoress of
‘Blanche’ would write a tragedy.”
Among the shorter poems was one upon the death of Sir John Moore,
written on February 7th, 1809, eight years before the appearance of
Wolfe’s well-known poem. It does not equal that poem in merit; but the
following lines, which close the dirge, seem to us to bear the true
ring of poetry:—
“No tawdry ‘scutcheons hang around thy tomb, No hired mourners wave the
sabled plume, No statues rise to mark the sacred spot, No pealing organ
swells the solemn note. A hurried grave thy soldiers’ hands prepare—
Thy soldiers’ hands the mournful burthen bear; The vaulted sky to
earth’s extremest verge Thy canopy; the cannon’s roar thy dirge.”
Mary was only twenty-one years of age when she wrote these lines, and
there is another poem belonging to the same period that is worthy of
quotation entitled “Westminster Abbey.” When viewing the tombs in
Poets’ Corner she writes:—
“The brightest union Genius wrought Was Garrick’s voice and
Shakespeare’s thought.”
About this same time Miss Mitford wrote a narrative poem entitled
“Christina” which had good success, especially in America, where it
passed through several editions.
Coleridge’s prophecy that the author of “Blanche” would write a tragedy
was fulfilled eventually, but in the meantime her taste for the drama,
stimulated when a school-girl by Molière’s inimitable plays, was now
being further developed.
“Every third year,” writes Mary, “a noble form of tragedy, one
with which women are seldom brought in contact, fell in my way.
Dr. Valpy, the master of Reading School ... had wisely substituted
the representation of one of the stern Greek plays [given in the
original language] for the speeches and recitations formerly delivered
before the heads of certain colleges of Oxford at their triennial
visitations.”[5]
[Footnote 5: Dr. Valpy was thus the pioneer of an important movement to
be adopted in later years by our great Universities.]
“Many of the old pupils will remember the effect of these performances,
complete in scenery, dresses and decorations, and remarkable for the
effect produced, not only on the actors, but on an audience, of which
a considerable portion was new alike to the language and the subject.
It is no offence to impute such ignorance to the mayor and aldermen
of that day who in their furred gowns formed part of the official
visitors, or to the mammas and sisters of the performers, who might
plead the privilege of sex for their want of learning.”
[Illustration: DR. VALPY’S SCHOOL]
“For myself, as ignorant of Latin or of Greek as the smuggest alderman
or slimmest damsel present, I had my own share in the pageant. In
spite of all remonstrance the dear Doctor would insist on my writing
the authorised account of the play—the grand official critique which
filled I know not how many columns of _The Reading Mercury_, and was
sent east, west, north and south wherever mammas and grand-mammas were
found. Of course it was necessary to mention everybody and to commit
all the injustice which belongs to a forced equality by praising some
too little and some too much. The too little was more frequent than the
too much, for the boys, as a body, did act marvellously, especially
those who filled the female parts, making one understand how the
ungentle sex might have rendered the Desdemonas and the Imogens in
James’s day.... One circumstance only a little injured the perfect
grouping of the scene. The visitation occurred in October, not long
after the conclusion of the summer holidays, and between cricket and
boating and the impossibility of wearing gloves ... our Helens and
Antigones exhibited an assortment of sunburnt fists that might have
become a tribe of Red Indians.... Sophocles is Sophocles nevertheless;
and seldom can his power have been more thoroughly felt than in these
performances at Reading School.”
“The good Doctor,” she continues, “full of kindness, and far too
learned for pedantry, rewarded my compliance with his wishes in the
way I liked best, by helping me to enter into the spirit of the mighty
masters who dealt forth these stern Tragedies of Destiny. He put into
my hands le Père Brumoy’s ‘Théâtre des Grecs,’ and other translations
in homely French prose, where the form and letter were set forth,
untroubled by vexatious attempts at English verse—grand outlines for
imagination to colour and fill up.”
In the month of May, 1809, Mary was staying in Hans Place with her
friend Miss Rowden, who had become the Head of the school on the
retirement of Monsieur and Madame St. Quintin; these latter, however,
still continued to live in Hans Place although in a different house.
Mary went much into society with her kind friends, and greatly enjoyed
frequent visits to the theatre.
She writes on June 4th to her mother: “I had not time to tell you
[yesterday] how very much I was gratified at the Opera House on Friday
evening. I dined at the St. Quintins’, and we proceeded to take
possession of our very excellent situation, a pit-box near the stage.
The house was crammed to suffocation. Young is an admirable actor;
I greatly prefer him to Kemble, whom I had before seen in the same
character (Zanga in _The Revenge_).... Billington, Braham, Bianchi,
Noldi, Bellamy and Siboni sang after the play, and the amateurs were
highly gratified. But my delight was yet to come. The dancing of
Vestris is indeed perfection. The ‘poetry of motion’ is exemplified in
every movement, and his Apollo-like form excels any idea I had ever
formed of manly grace.”
This grand performance, it seems, was for Kelly’s benefit. Kelly was
a popular singer of his day, and was also a composer of music. He
happened in addition to be a wine merchant, and Sheridan called him “a
composer of wine and importer of music.”
Besides visits to the Opera House and theatres Mary describes
expeditions to the Royal Academy, then at Somerset House, to the
Exhibition of Water Colours in Spring Gardens, and to the Panorama,
where she saw “a most admirable representation of Grand Cairo, taken
from drawings by Lord Valentia.” She also gives full particulars of a
grand ball given in a mansion where five splendid rooms opened into
each other; and there were upwards of three hundred people. “The
chalked floors and Grecian lamps,” she says, “gave it the appearance
of a fairy scene, which was still further heightened by the beautiful
exotics which almost lined these superb apartments.”
It is curious to note that in those days Bedlam was looked upon as
one of the sights of London, to which both foreigners and provincial
visitors were taken as a matter of course. In her last letter from town
Mary says: “To-morrow we go first to Bedlam, then to St. James’s Street
to see the Court people, and then I think I shall have had more than
enough of sights and dissipation.”
CHAPTER XVI
A CHOSEN CORRESPONDENT
Among the many names of well-known people that occur in Miss Mitford’s
letters of this period is that of Cobbett, to whom she had addressed
one of her early odes. He was an intimate friend of her father’s,
and we are told that some of his letters to the Doctor “are written
enigmatically and evidently with a view to secrecy, whilst others, on
the contrary, express his sentiments as openly as did the ‘Porcupine.’”
In these latter the violent denunciations of the King and the
Government, and indeed of all persons in authority, comically recall to
the mind of the reader the admirable skit upon Cobbett in the _Rejected
Addresses_. His letters to the Doctor usually conclude with the words,
“God bless you, and d—— the ministers!”
Miss Mitford describes Cobbett as “a tall, stout man, fair and
sunburnt, with a bright smile and an air compounded of the soldier and
the farmer, to which his habit of wearing an eternal red waistcoat
contributed not a little.” Mary’s attitude towards politics throughout
her life was naturally influenced by her surroundings; but her
admiration for Cobbett was caused specially by his love of animals and
love of rural scenery, in which she so warmly sympathised.
After a while an estrangement arose between the two families through
some misunderstanding, but Mary continued to admire Cobbett’s stirling
qualities. Writing of him some years later she remarks: “He was a
sad tyrant, as my friends the democrats sometimes are. Servants and
labourers fled before him. And yet with all his faults he was a man one
could not help liking.... The coarseness and violence of his political
writings and conversations almost entirely disappeared in his family
circle, and were replaced by a kindness, a good humour and an enjoyment
in seeing and promoting the happiness of others.... He was always what
Johnson would have called ‘a very pretty hater’; but since his release
from Newgate he has been hatred itself.... [May] milder thoughts attend
him,” she adds: “he has my good wishes and so have his family.”
Another political name occurring in Miss Mitford’s correspondence
is that of Sir Francis Burdett, the well-known leader of reform and
exposer of abuses. Mary writes on March 28th, 1810: “If the House of
Commons send Sir Francis to the Tower I should not much like anyone
that I loved to be a party in it, for the populace will not tamely
submit to have their idol torn from them, and especially for defending
the rights and liberties of the subject. As to Sir Francis himself,
I don’t think either he or Cobbett would much mind it. They would
proclaim themselves martyrs in the cause of liberty, and the ‘Register’
would sell better than ever.”
It was in the spring of this same year when visiting London that Mary
was first introduced to Sir William Elford, a friend of her father’s,
although totally opposed to him in politics. Sir William belonged to
an old Devonshire family, and was Recorder for Plymouth, which borough
he had represented in Parliament for many years. He was, moreover, a
man of cultivated tastes and of much refinement. His interest in Miss
Mitford seems to have commenced from the perusal of some of her early
verses shown to him by her father.
Describing their first acquaintance in later years to a friend,
Mary said: “Sir William had taken a fancy to me, and I became
his child-correspondent. Few things contribute more to that
indirect after-education, which is worth all the formal lessons
of the schoolroom a thousand times told, than such good-humoured
condescension from a clever man of the world to a girl almost young
enough to be his grand-daughter. I owe much to that correspondence....
Sir William’s own letters were most charming—full of old-fashioned
courtesy, of quaint humour, and of pleasant and genial criticism on
literature and on art.”[6]
[Footnote 6: See _Yesterdays with Authors_, by James T. Fields.]
Sometimes he would send Mary a few verses he had written upon some
congenial subject. Amongst these occur the following lines, composed
after witnessing a performance of Mrs. Siddons in the Plymouth theatre:—
“Her looks, her voice, her features so agree, Uniting all in such fine
harmony, That from her _voice_ the blind her looks declare, And in her
sparkling _eyes_ the deaf may hear.”
In one of his early letters to Mary he remarks: “Pray never refrain
from writing much because you want time and inclination to read over
what you have written. I would a thousand times rather see what falls
from your pen naturally and spontaneously than the most polished and
beautiful composition that ever went to the press, and so would you I
doubt not from your correspondents.... Pope’s maxim (if it is his) that
‘easy writing is not easily written’ is certainly true with respect to
what is intended for the world ... but is utterly false as applied to
familiar writing, of which his own letters—pretended to be warm from
the brain, but in reality polished and revised on publication—are a
striking proof. Write away then, my dear, as fast as you can drive your
quill, and abuse Miss Seward as much as you please.”
These words call to mind the same kind of advice given by the good
“Daddy” Crisp about forty years earlier to the young Fanny Burney:
“Let this declaration serve once for all, that there is no fault in an
epistolary correspondence like stiffness and study. Dash away whatever
comes uppermost; the sudden sallies of imagination clap’d down on
paper, just as they arise, are worth folios, and have all the warmth
and merit of that sort of nonsense that is eloquent in love.”
Crisp had greater powers as a critic than Sir William Elford, but Sir
William had qualities that specially suited the case in question. He
supplied a channel through which Mary could express and think out her
views on all kinds of topics, always secure of a kind and friendly
listener, and one whose judgment she valued. Being an only child and
with few intimate female friends, this was a great boon, and we owe
to their correspondence a fuller knowledge of Mary’s mind in its
development from youth to womanhood than we could have obtained by any
other means.
The allusion to Miss Seward, the “Swan of Lichfield,” by Sir William
refers to the following passage in one of Mary’s letters: “Have you
seen Miss Seward’s Letters? The names of her correspondents are
tempting, but alas! though addressed to all the eminent literati of
the last half-century, all the epistles bear the signature of Anna
Seward.... Did she not owe some of her fame, think you, to writing
printed books at a time when it was quite as much as most women could
do to read them?... I was always a little shocked at the sort of
reputation she bore in poetry. Sometimes affected, sometimes _fade_,
sometimes pedantic and sometimes tinselly, none of her works were ever
simple, graceful, or natural. Her letters ... are affected, sentimental
and lackadaisical to the highest degree. Who can read a page of Miss
Seward’s writings on any subject without finding her out at once [as]
the pedantic coquette and cold-hearted sensibility monger?”
“Anna Seward,” continues Miss Mitford, “sees nothing to admire in
Cowper’s letters—in letters (the playful ones of course I mean) which
would have immortalized him had the _Task_ never been written,
and which (much as I admire the playful wit of the two illustrious
namesakes Lady M. W. and Mrs. Montagu) are in my opinion the only
perfect specimens of epistolary composition in the English language....
They have to me, at least, all the properties of grace; a charm now
here, now there; a witchery rather felt in its effect than perceived in
its cause.”
“The attraction of Horace Walpole’s letters,” she adds, “is very
different, though almost equally strong. The charm which lurks in them
is one for which we have no term, and our Gallic neighbours seem to
have engrossed both the word and the quality. _Elles sont piquantes_
to the highest degree. If you read but a sentence you feel yourself
spellbound till you have read the volume.”
On another occasion Mary discusses the merits of Pope. She holds the
same opinion as that of Sir William respecting his letters “which,” as
she says, “affect to be unaffected and work so hard to seem quite at
their ease.” “Pope is,” she remarks, “even in his poetry, of a lower
flight and a weaker grasp than his predecessor [Dryden].... _They_ must
be born without an ear who can prefer the melodious monotony of Pope to
the stateliness, the ease, the infinite variety of Dryden. I should as
soon think of preferring the tinkling guitar to the full-toned organ!
“... In short, Pope is in the fullest sense of the word a mannerist.
When you have said ‘The Dunciad,’ ‘The Eloise’ and ‘The Rape of the
Lock’ you can say nothing more but ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ ‘The
Dunciad’ and ‘The Eloise.’ I have some notion,” she adds, “that you are
of a different opinion, and I am very glad of it; I love to make you
quarrel with me. Nothing is so tiresome as acquiescence; I would at
any time give a dozen civil Yes’s for one spirited No, especially in
correspondence, which is exactly like a game of shuttle-cock, and would
be at an end in an instant if both battledores struck the same way.”
In another letter, writing of her special favourites amongst
Shakespeare’s plays, she remarks: “And last, not least, _Much Ado About
Nothing_. The Beatrice of this play is indeed my standard of female
wit and almost of female character; nothing so lively, so clever, so
unaffected and so warm-hearted ever trod this workaday world. Benedick
is not quite equal to her; but this, in female eyes, is no great
sin. Shakespeare saw through nature, and knew which sex to make the
cleverest. There’s a challenge for you! Will you take up the glove?”
CHAPTER XVII
THE MARCH OF MIND
In the month of June, 1814, that memorable period in our history, Mary
Mitford was again visiting her friends the St. Quintins in Hans Place.
London was then swarming with crowned heads, victorious generals and
distinguished foreigners of all kinds, to rejoice with us upon the
downfall of Napoleon.
Even the ultra-Whigs, to which Mary and her family belonged, had long
ceased to entertain any hopes of him as a benefactor to the human
race, and she had declared to Sir William Elford in 1812 that she “was
no well-wisher to Napoleon—the greatest enemy to democracy that ever
existed.”
On the 18th June Mary and her friends went to the office of the
_Morning Chronicle_ (Mr. Perry, the editor, being an intimate friend
of the Mitfords) to behold the grand procession of royal personages
to the Merchant Taylors Hall. Writing on the following day to her
mother, she says: “The _Chronicle_ will tell you much more of the
procession than I can ... suffice it to say that we got there well and
pleasantly, and saw them all most clearly; that the Emperor and Duchess
are much alike—she a pretty woman, he a fine-looking man—both with
fair complexions and round _Tartar_ faces—no expression of any sort
except affability and good-humour; that the King of Prussia is a much
more interesting and intelligent-looking man, though not so handsome;
and that the Regent got notably hissed, in spite of his protecting
presence.” And writing a few days later she says:
“Yesterday I went, as you know, to the play with papa, and on our
road thither had a very great pleasure in meeting Lord Wellington,
just arrived in London, and driving to his own house in an open
carriage and six. We had an excellent sight of him, so excellent
that I should know him again anywhere; and it was quite refreshing
after all those parading foreigners, emperors, and so forth to see an
honest English hero, with a famous Mitford nose, looking quite happy,
without any affectation of bowing or seeming affable. He is a very fine
countenanced man, tanned and weather-beaten, with good dark eyes....
Very few of the populace knew him, but the intelligence spread like
wildfire, and Piccadilly looked like a hive of bees in swarming time.”
Writing to Sir William Elford in July, 1815, Mary apologises for not
having sent him, as she had proposed to do, a facsimile copy of _Louis
le Desiré’s_ letter to Lady Charles Aynsley. “As kings of France are
come in fashion again,” she remarks, “I hastened to repair my omission
by copying as well as I was able the aforesaid epistle.... I heard a
great deal respecting that very good but weak and bigoted man from
a French lady, Madame de Gourbillon, who was one of the favourite
attendants of his late wife. His memory exceeds even that of our own
venerable king. If you mention the slightest, the least remarkable fact
in natural history, in the belles-lettres, in history, or anything he
will say, ‘Ay, Buffon, or La Harpe, or Vertot speaks of it (quoting the
very words) in such a volume, such a chapter, such a page and such a
line.’ He is always correct, even to a monosyllable!”
This recalls to one’s mind the old aphorism applied to the Bourbons:
“They forgot nothing and they learnt nothing.”
“Another fact,” continues Mary, “which I ascertained respecting the
King of France is that he is afraid of my friend _la Lectrice de la
feue Reine_ as ever child was of its schoolmistress, and really it
is no impeachment to his courage, for I am not at all sure that
Buonaparte himself could stand against her.... Papa and she regularly
quarrelled once a day on the old cause, ‘France versus England,’ varied
occasionally into ‘French versus English,’ for she very reasonably used
to attack Papa for his utter want of French, in which, I believe, he
scarcely knows _ouí_ from _non_; and he, with no less reason, would
retort on her want of English, she having condescended to vegetate
twelve years in this island of fogs and roast beef without being able
at the end of that time to distinguish ‘How do you do?’ from ‘Very
well, I thank you!’”
During Miss Mitford’s stay in town in the summer of 1814 she had an
interesting and unlooked-for experience of which mention is made in the
_Morning Chronicle_ of June 25th.
The writer of the article remarks: “The friends of the British and
Foreign School Society dined together yesterday at the Freemasons’
Tavern. The Marquis of Lansdowne took the chair, supported by the Dukes
of Kent and Sussex, the Earls of Darnley and Eardley, and several other
eminent persons. The health of the Chairman and Vice-Presidents was
drunk, and then that of the female members of the Society. After this
a poetical tribute of Miss Mitford’s was sung, and ‘Thanks to Miss
Mitford’ was drunk with applause.”
The following lines occur in the poem:—
“The mental world was wrapt in night.”
* * * * *
Oh, how the glorious dawn unfold The brighter day that lurk’d behind?
The march of armies may be told, But not the march of mind.”
Mary was present on the occasion, being seated, together with her
friends, in the gallery of the hall. She writes to her mother: “I
did not believe my ears when Lord Lansdowne, with his usual graceful
eloquence, gave my health. I did not even believe it when my old
friend the Duke of Kent, observing that Lord Lansdowne’s voice was not
always strong enough to penetrate the depths of that immense assembly,
reiterated it with stentorian lungs. Still less did I believe my ears
when it was drunk with ‘three times three,’ a flourish of drums and
trumpets from the Duke of Kent’s band, and the unanimous thundering and
continued plaudits of five hundred people. I really thought it must be
[for] Mr. Whitbread, and though I wondered how he could be ‘fair and
amiable’ I still thought it him till his health was really drunk and he
rose to make the beautiful speech of which you have only a very faint
outline in the _Chronicle_.” This speech was made à propos of a toast.
“The Cause of Education throughout the World,” Mr. Whitbread remarking,
“Miss Mitford has designated it ‘The March of Mind.’”
Whilst Mary Mitford was thus growing in fame, her father, through his
many speculations, was frequently involved in money difficulties. In
the year 1811 it seems he was actually detained in the debtors’ prison,
and arrangements had to be made for the sale of the pictures at Bertram
House in order to obtain money for his release. His wife, who in her
warm affection was almost too forbearing, wrote to him: “I know you
were disappointed in the sale of the pictures; but, my love, if we have
less wealth than we hoped, we shall not have less affection; these
clouds may blow over more happily than we expected.”
Again she writes: “As to the cause of our present difficulties it
avails not how they originated. The only question is how they can be
most speedily and effectually put an end to. I ask for no details which
you do not voluntarily choose to make. A forced confidence my whole
soul would revolt at.”
Mary writes to her father on the occasion with the same
self-sacrificing love, but, it seems to us, with more judgment. She
suggests that they should let Bertram House, sell books, furniture,
everything possible to clear their debts, and then retire to some
cottage in the country or to humble lodgings in London. Then she goes
on to say: “Where is the place in which, whilst we are all spared
to each other, we should not be happy?... Tell me if you approve my
scheme, and tell me, I implore you, my most beloved father, the full
extent of your embarrassments. This is no time for false delicacy
on either side, I dread no evil but suspense.... Whatever those
embarrassments may be, of one thing I am certain that the world does
not contain so proud, so happy, or so fond a daughter. I would not
exchange my father, even though we toiled together for our daily bread,
for any man on earth, though he could pour the gold of Peru into my
lap.”
Miss Mitford’s biographers have justly censured her father’s evil
courses, some considering him as altogether worthless; but surely there
must have been many redeeming qualities in one who called forth such
love from such a daughter?
For the time being the crisis described was averted; but in 1814 Dr.
Mitford was again in great difficulties, caused by his speculations in
two enterprises that proved failures—one in coal, the other in a new
method for lighting and heating houses, invented by the Marquis de
Chavannes, a French refugee. In this latter scheme the doctor actually
invested £5000, and when the crash came he lost more money in carrying
on a protracted law suit in the French courts in the vain hope of
forcing the penniless nobleman to restore his lost property.
Mary, writing of her father’s money losses in later life, says: “He
attempted to increase his own resources by the aid of cards (he was
unluckily one of the finest whist players in England) or by that other
terrible gambling, which ... even when called by its milder term of
_speculation_ is that terrible thing gambling still.”
Early in the year 1814 Mary Mitford received a proof of the warm
approval accorded to her poems in America, which gave her heartfelt
pleasure.
Mrs. Mitford, writing of the event to her husband, says:—
“With your letter and the newspaper this morning arrived a small parcel
for our darling, directed to Miss Mary Russell Mitford.... This little
packet contained,—what do you think? No less than _Narrative Poems on
the Female Character in the various Relations of Life_, by Mary Russell
Mitford. Printed at New York, and published by Eastburn, Kirk & Co.,
No. 86 Broadway. The volume is a small pocket size, well printed and
elegantly bound, and the following is a copy of the letter which
accompanied it across the Atlantic:—”
NEW YORK, _October 23, 1813_.
MADAM,
We have the honour of transmitting to you a copy of our second edition
of your admirable _Narrative Poems on the Female Character_. All who
have hearts to feel and understandings to discriminate must earnestly
wish you health and leisure to complete your plan.
We shall be gratified by a line acknowledging the receipt of the copy
through the medium of our friends Messrs. Longman & Co....
We have the honour to be, madam,
Your most obedient servants, EASTBURN, KIRK & CO.
Mary writes to her father on the receipt of the parcel: “You will
easily imagine that I was flattered and pleased with my American
packet; but even you can scarcely imagine how much. I never was so
vain of anything in my whole life. Only think of their having printed
two editions (for the words ‘second edition’ are underscored in their
letter) before last October!”
The recognition which she received in America so early in her career
was never forgotten, and she used to say in after life, “It takes ten
years to make a literary reputation in England, but America is wiser
and bolder and dares to say at once, ‘This is fine.’”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XVIII
VERSATILITY AND PLAYFULNESS
In a letter to Sir William Elford dated January, 1812, Mary remarks: “I
have lived so little with girls of my own age, and have been so much
accustomed to think papa my pleasantest companion and mamma my best
friend that ... I have escaped unscathed from all the charming folly
and delectable romance of female intimacy and female confidence.” Then
going on to speak of the usual school training of girls at that period
she remarks: “I must observe that in this educating age everything is
taught to women except that which is perhaps worth all the rest—the
power and the habit of thinking. Do not misunderstand me.... I would
only wish that while everything is invented and inculcated that can
serve to amuse, to occupy, or adorn youth—youth which needs so little
amusement or ornament!—something should be instilled that may add
pleasure and respectability to age.”
About this time Sir William paid a visit to Bath. Mary writes: “What
says Bath of _Rokeby_? But Bath, I suppose, is, as to literature,
politics and fashion, the echo of London. Be that as it may, I am
very happy that you have arrived there, both because it brings us a
step nearer, and because it so comfortably rids you of the horrors of
solitude. ‘_O, la Solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut avoir
quelqu’une à qui l’on puisse dire, La Solitude est une belle chose!_’
... I most sincerely hope that we shall meet this spring in London ...
and that we shall have the pleasure of renewing (I might almost say
commencing) our personal acquaintance. You will find just the same
plain, awkward, blushing thing whom you profess to remember.... I talk
to you with wonderful boldness upon paper, and while we are seventy
miles distant; but I doubt whether I shall say three sentences to you
when we meet, because the ghosts of all my impertinent letters will
stare me in the face the moment I see you.”
A little later on Sir William paid a visit to the Mitfords at Bertram
House, and Mary writes of him: “He is the kindest, cleverest,
warmest-hearted man in the world.” Some of her friends fancied that,
in spite of the great discrepancy in their ages, her partiality might
possibly lead to a union between the friends. To their surmise Mary
answers: “I shall not marry Sir William Elford, for which there is a
remarkably good reason, the aforesaid Sir William having no sort of
desire to marry me.... He has an outrageous fancy for my letters, and
marrying a favourite correspondent would be something like killing the
goose with the golden egg.”
In one of Sir William’s letters he had complained of Miss Mitford’s
writing being somewhat illegible, to which she responds: “So, my dear
friend, you cannot make out my writing! And my honoured father cannot
help you! Really this is too affronting! The two persons in all the
world who have had the most of my letters cannot read them! Well, there
is the secret of your liking them so much. Obscurity is sometimes a
great charm. You just make out my meaning and fill it up by the force
of your own imagination. The outline is mine, the colouring your own.
So much the better for me.”
Writing on a hot summer’s day, she says: “I have been solacing myself
for this week past ‘taking mine ease’ in a hay-cock left solely for
my accommodation, where Mossy and I repair every morning to perform
between us the operation of reading a _good book_, I turning the leaves
and _he_ going to sleep over it. It is ... the most delightful hay-cock
in the world, in a snug little nook; nothing visible but lawn and
plantation; whilst breathing the odours of the firs, whose fragrance
this wet summer has been past anything I could have conceived.”
[Illustration: BERTRAM HOUSE]
Mossy was the name of her dog. Throughout her life Mary Mitford was
much attached to dogs, and she was generally accompanied in her
rambles by some special favourite. Sometimes it was a beautiful
greyhound—one of her father’s coursers that had been given to her.
She concludes one of her letters by remarking: “I have nothing more to
tell you, except that I have taken a new pet—the most sagacious donkey
that ever lived. She lets nobody ride her—follows me everywhere, even
indoors when she can—and is really a wonderful animal. Her favourite
caress is to have her ears stroked. Shakespeare has noticed this in the
_Midsummer Night’s Dream_ when Titania tells Bottom that she will give
him musk-roses and ‘stroke thy fair, large ears, my gentle joy.’”
In this same letter Mary speaks of some of the singers she had heard
recently in London. “I hope you like Braham’s singing,” she says,
“though I know among your scientific musicians it is a crime of _lèse
majesté_ to say so; but he is the only singer I ever heard in my life
who conveyed to my very unmusical ears any idea of the expression of
which music is susceptible; no one else joins any sense to the sound.
They may talk of music as ‘married to immortal verse’; but if it were
not for Braham they would have been divorced long ago.... Moore’s
singing has, indeed, great feeling; but then his singing is not much
beyond a modulated sigh—though the most powerful sigh in the world.”
And speaking of the actors of the period, she says: “Of all that I have
seen nothing has afforded me half so much delight as Miss O’Neil. She
broke my heart, and charmed me beyond expression by showing me that I
had a heart to break, a fact I always before rather doubted, having
been till I saw her as impenetrable to tragedy as Punch and his wife
or any other wooden-hearted biped. But she is irresistible.... The
manner in which she identifies herself with the character exceeds all
that I had before conceived possible of theatrical illusion. You never
admire—you only weep.”
In another letter she complains of Kemble’s always declaiming and
never speaking in a simple and natural manner. “It does appear to me,”
she says, “that no man can be a perfect tragedian who is not likewise
a good actor in the higher branch of comedy. A statesman not at the
council board, and a hero when the battle is safely ended, would, as
it seems to me, talk and walk much in the same way as other people.
Even a tyrant does not always rave nor a lover always whine.... That
Shakespeare and all the writers of Elizabeth’s days were of my opinion
I am quite sure. Nothing is more remarkable in their delightful dramas
... than the sweet and natural tone of conversation which sometimes
relieves the terrible intensity of their plots, like a flowery glade
in a gloomy forest, or a sunbeam streaming [across] a winter sky.” She
goes on to say: “I cannot take leave of the drama without adding my
feeble tribute of regret for the secession of Mrs. Siddons. Yet it was
better that she should quit the stage in undiminished splendour than
have remained to show the feeble twilight of so glorious a day.”
In a letter written during a severe winter we find this description of
a hoar-frost: “The scene has been lovely beyond any winter piece I ever
beheld; a world formed of something much whiter than ivory—as white
indeed as snow—but carved with a delicacy, a lightness, a precision
to which the mossy, ungrateful, tottering snow could never pretend.
Rime was the architect; every tree, every shrub, every blade of grass
was clothed with its pure incrustations, but so thinly, so delicately
clothed that every twig, every fibre, every ramification remained
perfect, alike indeed in colour, but displaying in form to the fullest
extent the endless, infinite variety of Nature. It is a scene that
really defies description.”
Here is a playful letter to Sir William, written in August, 1816:
“Pray, my dear friend, were you ever a bridesmaid? I rather expect
you to say no, and I give you joy of your happy ignorance, for I am
just now in the very agonies of the office, helping to buy and admire
wedding clothes.... The bride is a fair neighbour of mine.... Her head
is a perfect milliner’s shop, and she plans out her wardrobe much as
Phidias might have planned the Parthenon.... She has had no sleep
since the grand question of a lace bonnet with a plume, or a lace veil
without one, for the grand occasion came into discussion.”
Two months later Mary writes: “I have at last safely disposed of my
bride.... She had accumulated on her person so much finery that she
looked as if by mistake she had put on two wedding dresses instead of
one [and having wept copiously] was by many degrees the greatest fright
I ever saw in my life. Indeed between crying and blushing brides, and
bridesmaids too, do generally look strange figures. I am sure we did,
though to confess the truth I really could not cry, much as I wished
to keep all my neighbours in countenance, and was forced to hold my
handkerchief to my eyes and sigh in vain for ‘_ce don de dames que Dieu
ne m’a pas donné_.’”
Mary Mitford always enjoyed writing to Sir William upon literary
matters, as the reader knows, and comparing their respective opinions.
“I am almost afraid to tell you,” she writes, “how much I dislike
_Childe Harold_. Not but there are very many fine stanzas and powerful
descriptions; but the sentiment is so strange, so gloomy, so heartless,
that it is impossible not to feel a mixture of pity and disgust, which
all our admiration of the author’s talents cannot overcome.... Are
you not rather sick—now pray don’t betray me—are you not rather sick
of being one of the hundred thousand confidants of his lordship’s
mysterious and secret sorrows?... I would rather be the poorest Greek
whose fate he commiserates than Lord Byron, if this poem be a true
transcript of his feelings.”
In one of her letters she remarks: “I prefer the French pulpit oratory
to any other part of their literature.... I mean, of course, their
old preachers—Fénelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon and Bossuet—especially
the last, who approaches as nearly to the unrivalled sublimity of
the sacred writings as any writer I have ever met with. Oh! what a
contrast between him and our dramatic sermonists Mesdames Hawkins and
Brompton! I am convinced that people read them for the story, to enjoy
the stimulus of a novel without the name.... Ah! they had better take
South and Blair and Secker for guides, and go for amusement to Miss
Edgeworth and Miss Austen. By the way, how delightful is her _Emma_,
the best, I think, of all her charming works.”
“Have you read _Pepys’ Memoirs_?” she asks on another occasion. “I
am extremely diverted with them, and prefer them to Evelyn’s, all to
nothing. He was too precise and too gentlemanly and too sensible by
half; wrote in full dress, with an eye if not to the press, at least
to posthumous reputation. Now this man sets down his thoughts in a
most becoming _déshabille_—does not care twopence for posterity, and
evidently thinks wisdom a very foolish thing. I don’t know when any
book has amused me so much. It is the very perfection of gossiping—most
relishing nonsense.”
Writing in 1819 she says: “Oh! but the oddest book I have met with is
Madame de Genlis’s new novel _Les Parvenus_, an imitation of _Gil Blas_
... while she sticks to that she is very good; her comic powers are
really exceedingly respectable—but she flies off at a tangent to her
old beaten path of sentimental vice and fanatical piety, and sends her
heroine to the Holy Land as a Pilgrim in the nineteenth century and
then fixes her in a Spanish convent!”
Now she writes with deep admiration of Burns—“Burns the sweetest, the
sublimest, the most tricksy poet who has blest this nether world since
the days of Shakespeare! I am just fresh from reading Dr. Currie’s
four volumes and Cromak’s one, which comprise, I believe, all that
he ever wrote.... Have you lately read Dr. Currie’s work? If you
have not, pray do, and tell me if you do not admire him—not with the
flimsy lackadaisical praise with which certain gentle damsels bedaub
his _Mountain Daisy_ and his _Woodlark_ ... but with the strong and
manly feeling which his fine and indignant letters, his exquisite and
original humour, his inimitable pathos must awaken in such a mind as
yours. Ah, what have they to answer for who let such a man perish? I
think there is no poet whose works I have ever read who interests me
so strongly by the display of personal character contained in almost
everything he wrote (even in his songs) as Burns.” After speaking of
“his versatility and his exhaustless imagination,” she says: “By the
way, my dear Sir William, does it not appear to you that versatility
is the true and rare characteristic of that rare thing called
genius—versatility and playfulness?”
Writing to Sir William somewhat hurriedly in March, 1817, Mary
remarks: “Rather than send the envelope blank I will fill it with
the translation of a pretty allegory of M. Arnault’s, the author of
‘Germanicus.’ You must not read it if you have read the French,
because it does not come near to its simplicity. If you have not read
the French you may read the English. Be upon honour.”
Translation of M. Arnault’s lines on his own exile:—
“Torn rudely from thy parent bough, Poor withered leaf, where roamest
thou? I know not where! A tempest broke My only prop, the stately oak;
And ever since in wearying change With each capricious wind I range;
From wood to plain, from hill to dale, Borne sweeping on as sweeps the
gale, Without a struggle or a cry, I go where all must go as I; I go
where goes the self-same hour A laurel leaf or rose’s flower!”
CHAPTER XIX
FROM MANSION TO COTTAGE
Miss Mitford owed to her friendship with Sir William Elford her first
acquaintance with the artist Haydon. Describing in later years to a
friend how this came about, she said: “An amateur painter himself,
painting interested Sir William particularly, and he often spoke much,
and warmly, of the young man from Plymouth, whose picture of the
‘Judgement of Solomon’ was then on exhibition in London. ‘You must see
it,’ said he, ‘even if you come to town on purpose.’
“It so happened,” continued Miss Mitford, “that I merely passed through
London that season ... and I arrived at the exhibition in company with
a still younger friend so near the period of closing that more punctual
visitors were moving out, and the doorkeeper actually turned us and our
money back. I persisted, however, assuring him that I only wanted to
look at one picture, and promising not to detain him long. Whether my
entreaties would have carried the point or not I cannot tell, but half
a crown did; so we stood admiringly before the ‘Judgement of Solomon.’
I am no great judge of painting; but that picture impressed me then,
as it does now, as excellent in composition, in colour, and in that
great quality of telling a story which appeals at once to every mind.
Our delight was sincerely felt, and most enthusiastically expressed, as
we kept gazing at the picture, and [it] seemed to give much pleasure
to the only gentleman who remained in the room—a young and very
distinguished-looking person, who had watched with evident amusement
our negotiation with the doorkeeper.... I soon surmised that we were
seeing the painter as well as his painting; and when two or three years
afterwards a friend took me ... to view the ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’
Haydon’s next great picture, then near its completion, I found I had
not been mistaken.
“Haydon was at that period a remarkable person to look at and listen
to.... His figure was short, slight, elastic and vigorous; his
complexion clear and healthful.... But how shall I attempt to tell
you,” she adds, “of his brilliant conversation, of his rapid energetic
manner, of his quick turns of thought as he flew from topic to topic,
dashing his brush here and there upon the canvas?... Among the studies
I remarked that day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just
lost her only child—a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief.
A sonnet which I could not help writing on the sketch gave rise to our
long correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged.”
We have spoken in a recent chapter of the Mitfords’ great losses of
money from time to time. These were caused in part by the protracted
lawsuit carried on by Dr. Mitford against the Marquis de Chavannes.
But the main cause was the doctor’s unhappy habits of gambling and
of speculation. He was “ever seeking,” we are told, “to augment his
income by some doubtful investment for which he had the tip of some
unscrupulous schemer to whose class he fell an easy prey.” The only
remnant of the family property, once so large, which Dr. Mitford was
unable to touch was a sum of £3000 left by Dr. Russell to his daughter
and her offspring. This sum, placed in the funds, was happily held
in trust by the Mitfords’ fast friend, the Rev. William Harness, and
although he was applied to from time to time by Mrs. Mitford and
her daughter to hand it over to the doctor when he was pressed by
creditors, Mr. Harness steadily refused to do so. Writing to Miss
Mitford some years later after the death of her mother, he says: “That
£3000 I consider as the sheet-anchor of your independence ... and
_while your father lives_ it shall never stir from its present post
in the funds ... _from whatever quarter the proposition may come_ [to
hand it over to him]. I have but one black, blank unqualified _No_ for
my answer. I do not doubt Dr. Mitford’s integrity, but I have not the
slightest confidence in his prudence; and I am fully satisfied that
if these three thousand and odd hundreds of pounds were placed at his
disposal _to-day_ they would fly the way so many other thousands have
gone before them _to-morrow_.”[7]
[Footnote 7: See _Life and Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford_, by W.
J. Roberts.]
In the spring of 1820 the family were forced to quit Bertram House, at
which period we are told “the doctor must have been all but penniless,”
and there could have been “nothing between the father and mother and
hopeless destitution but the genius and industry of the daughter.”
Happily her courage and her affection never failed. But she could
not quit the house which had been her home for sixteen years without
sorrow. “It nearly broke my heart,” she writes. “What a tearing up of
the roots it was! The trees and fields and sunny hedgerows, however
little distinguished by picturesque beauty, were to me as old friends.
Women have more of this natural feeling than the stronger sex; they are
creatures of home and habit, and ill brook transplanting.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XX
THREE MILE CROSS
The Mitfords had taken a cottage in Three Mile Cross—a small village
about two miles from Graseley, which they supposed at first would be
only a temporary abode, but which finally proved to be their home for
many years. Here it was that Mary Russell Mitford, throwing herself
into the life of her rustic surroundings, and recognizing its poetry
and its beauty, conceived her plan of writing the tales of “Our
Village.” These tales were destined to render little Three Mile Cross
classic ground, and to attract pilgrims, even from the other side of
the Atlantic, to visit the prototype of “Our Village.”
Mary writes to Sir William Elford early in April, 1820:—
“We have moved a mile nearer Reading—to a little village street situate
on the turnpike road between Basingstoke and the aforesaid illustrious
and quarrelsome borough. Our residence is a cottage—no not a cottage,
it does not deserve the name—a messuage or tenement, such as a little
farmer who had made twelve or fourteen hundred pounds might retire to
when he left off business to live on his means. It consists of a series
of closets ... which they call parlours and kitchens and pantries,
some of them minus a corner which has been unnaturally filched for
a chimney; others deficient in half a side which has been truncated
by the shelving roof.... [But] we shall be greatly benefited by the
compression—though at present the squeeze sits upon us as uneasily as
tight stays, and is almost as awkward looking.
“Nevertheless we are really getting very comfortable and falling into
our old habits with all imaginable ease. Papa has already amused
himself by committing a disorderly person, the pest of the Cross....
Mamma has converted an old dairy into a most commodious store-house. I
have stuffed the rooms with books and the garden with flowers, and lost
my only key. Lucy has made a score of new acquaintances, and picked
up a few lovers; and the great white cat, after appearing exceedingly
disconsolate and out of his wits for a day or two, has given full proof
of resuming his old warlike and predatory habits by being lost all the
morning in a large rat hole and stealing the milk for our tea this
afternoon.”
[Illustration: THE MITFORDS’ COTTAGE]
Ten days later Mary writes to a female friend: “We are still at this
cottage, which I like very much.... Indeed I had taken root completely
till yesterday, when some neighbours of ours (pigs, madam) got into my
little flower court and made havoc among my pinks and sweet-peas, and
a little loosened the fibres of my affection. At the very same moment
the pump was announced to be dry, which, considering how much water we
consume—I and my flowers—is a sad affair.” But she adds a day or two
afterwards: “I am all in love with our cottage again: the cherries are
ripe, and the roses bloom, the water has come, and the pigs are gone!”
The Mitfords’ cottage is still to be seen standing in the long
straggling street of low cottages, divided by pretty gardens, with a
wayside inn on one side, on the other side a village shop, and right
opposite a cobbler’s stall. No railway has come to bring bustle and
noise to that quiet spot, so that the village still retains what
Miss Mitford has called its “trick of standing still, of remaining
stationary, unchanged and unimproved in this most changeable and
improving world.”
In the opening chapter of the first volume of _Our Village_ the writer
says:—
“Will you walk with me through our village, courteous reader? The
journey is not long. We will begin at the lower end, and proceed up
the hill.
“The tidy square red cottage[8] on the right hand with the long
well-stocked garden by the side of the road belongs to a retired
publican from a neighbouring town ... one who piques himself on
independence and idleness ... and cries out for reform. He introduced
into our peaceful vicinage the rebellious innovation of an illumination
on the Queen’s acquittal. Remonstrance and persuasion were in vain; he
talked of liberty and broken windows—so we all lighted up. Oh! how he
shone that night with candles and laurel and white bows and gold paper,
and a transparency with a flaming portrait of Her Majesty, hatted and
feathered in red ochre. He had no rival in the village that we all
acknowledged; the very bonfire was less splendid....
[Footnote 8: This house, though unaltered in appearance, is now an inn
called “The Fox and Horn.”]
“Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with a
yew arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a pale,
sickly-looking, black-haired man, the very model of sober industry.
There he sits in his little shop from early morning till late at night.
An earthquake would hardly stir him; the illumination did not. He
stuck immovably to his last from the first lighting up through the
long blaze and the slow decay till his large solitary candle was the
only light in the place. One cannot conceive anything more perfect
than the contempt which the man of transparencies and the man of shoes
must have felt for each other on that evening. Our shoemaker is a man
of substance, he employs three journeymen, two lame and one a dwarf,
so that his shop looks like a hospital.... He has only one pretty
daughter—a light, delicate, fair-haired girl of fourteen, the champion,
protectress and playfellow of every brat under three years old.... A
very attractive person is that child-loving girl....
“The first house on the opposite side of the way is the blacksmith’s,
a gloomy dwelling, where the sun never seems to shine, dark and smoky
within and without, like a forge. The blacksmith is a high officer in
our little state, nothing less than a constable; but alas! alas! when
tumults arise and the constable is called for he will commonly be found
in the thickest of the fray....
“Next to this official dwelling is a spruce little tenement, red, high
and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash windows, the only
sash windows in the village. That slender mansion has a fine, genteel
look. The little parlour seems made for Hogarth’s old maid and her
stunted foot-boy, for tea and card parties ... for the rustle of faded
silks and the splendour of old china, for affected gentility and real
starvation. This should have been its destiny, but fate has been
unpropitious, it belongs to a plump, merry, bustling dame with four
fat, rosy, noisy children, the very essence of vulgarity and plenty.
“Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious as
a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands and
bacon, for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which
you happen to want at the moment ... and which ‘they had yesterday
and will have again to-morrow.’ ... The people are civil and thriving
and frugal withal. They have let the upper part of their house to two
young women ... who teach little children their A B C, and make caps
and gowns for their mammas—parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua maker.
I believe they find adorning the body a more profitable vocation than
adorning the mind.”
This little shop still exists, and it still bears above its modest
window the identical name of Bromley, which it bore in Miss Mitford’s
day.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE SHOP]
“Divided from the shop by a narrow yard,” continues Miss Mitford, “and
opposite the shoe-maker’s, is a habitation of whose inmates I shall
say nothing. A cottage—no—a miniature house, with many additions,
little odds and ends of places, pantries, and what not; all angles
and of a charming in-and-outness; a little bricked court before
one half, a little flower-yard before the other; the walls old and
weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles and a
great apricot tree. The casements are full of geraniums (ah, there is
our superb white cat peeping out from amongst them!), the closets ...
full of contrivances and corner cupboards; and the little garden behind
full of common flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks and
carnations, with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where
one lives in a delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of
all gay flower-beds. That house was built on purpose to show in what an
exceedingly small compass comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter
there no longer.
“The next tenement is a place of importance—the Rose Inn [‘The Swan’],
a whitewashed building, retired from the road behind its fine swinging
sign, with a little bow-window room coming out on one side and forming
with our stable on the other a sort of open square, which is the
constant resort of carts, waggons and return chaises. There are two
carts there now, and mine host is serving them with beer in his eternal
red waistcoat.... He has a stirring wife, a hopeful son and a daughter,
the belle of the village, not so pretty as the fair nymph of the shoe
shop, and less elegant, but ten times as fine, all curl-papers in the
morning, like a porcupine, all curls in the afternoon, like a poodle,
with more flowers than curl-papers and more lovers than curls....
“In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden wall belonging
to a house under repair; the white house opposite the collar-maker’s
shop, with four lime trees before it and a waggon load of bricks at the
door. That house is the plaything of a wealthy, whimsical person who
lives about a mile off. He has a passion for bricks and mortar.... Our
good neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms and made them
dark, so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they
stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing
midsummer sun.”
[Illustration: THE SWAN INN]
Here we would remark that when paying our first visit to Three Mile
Cross many years ago that house was unchanged, and the row of old
pollarded limes still stood as sentinels before it; but since then the
house has been altered and the trees have disappeared. We would also
mention that the real name of the inn is the “Swan,” but in all her
village tales Miss Mitford calls it the “Rose.” The “collar-maker’s
shop,” on the opposite side of the road, a quaint little edifice, is
just as it was in appearance in the writer’s day.
“Next door [to the house under repair],” continues Miss Mitford, “lives
a carpenter, famed ten miles round, and worthy all his fame, with his
excellent wife and their little daughter Lizzie, the plaything and
queen of the village, a child of three years old, according to the
register, but six in size and strength and intellect, in power and
in self-will. She manages everybody in the place, her schoolmistress
included ... makes the lazy carry her, the silent talk to her,
the grave romp with her; does anything she pleases; is absolutely
irresistible.... Together with a good deal of the character of Napoleon
she has something of his square, sturdy, upright form ... she has the
imperial attitudes too, and loves to stand with her hands behind her,
or folded over her breast, and sometimes when she has a little touch
of shyness she clasps them together on the top of her head, pressing
down her shining curls, and looking so exquisitely pretty! Yes, Lizzie
is the queen of the village! She has but one rival in her dominions,
a certain white greyhound called Mayflower, much her friend, who
resembles her in beauty and strength, in playfulness and almost in
sagacity, and reigns over the animal world as she over the human. They
are both coming with me, Lizzie and Lizzie’s ‘pretty May.’
“We are now at the end of the street; a cross lane, a rope walk, shaded
with limes and oaks, and a cool, clear pond, overhung with elms, lead
us to the bottom of the hill. There is still an house round the corner,
ending in a picturesque wheeler’s shop. The dwelling-house is more
ambitious. Look at the fine flowered window-blinds, the green door with
the brass knocker.... These are the curate’s lodgings—apartments his
landlady would call them. He lives with his own family four miles off,
but once or twice a week he comes to his neat little parlour to write
sermons, to marry or to bury as the case may require. Never were better
people than his host and hostess, and there is a reflection of clerical
importance about them, since their connection with the Church, which is
quite edifying—a decorum, a gravity, a solemn politeness. Oh, to see
the worthy wheeler carry the gown after his lodger on a Sunday, nicely
pinned up in his wife’s best handkerchief; or to hear him rebuke a
squalling child or a squabbling woman! The curate is nothing to him. He
is fit to be perpetual churchwarden.”
We would remark here that the wheeler’s workshop is one of the most
striking objects in the village. Its great hatch doors are always
thrown wide open, revealing a dark interior in vivid contrast with
the sunshine overhead. Its old thatched roof is illuminated by the
golden light, as are also the spreading branches of a huge wistaria
that cover its main wall as well as the whole front of the adjoining
dwelling-house. The present wheelwright is the successor of the very
man whom Miss Mitford has just described. It is pleasant to have a
chat with him about the village, as he has known every corner of it
... also its inhabitants for many a year. He showed us the curate’s
little parlour, into which the front door opens, admitting a pretty
view of the “cool clear pond” on the further side of the lane with its
overhanging trees.
Little Three Mile Cross does not boast a church of its own, but it is
in the parish of Shinfield, and it was to Shinfield Church, distant
about two miles and a half, that the curate repaired, accompanied by
the “wheeler” carrying his gown.
On quitting the village Miss Mitford exclaims: “How pleasantly the
road winds up the hill between its broad green borders and hedgerows,
so thickly timbered!... We are now on the eminence close to the
Hill-house and its beautiful garden.” And looking back, she describes
“the view; the road winding down the hill with a slight bend ... a
waggon slowly ascending, and a horseman passing it at full trot,
[while] further down are seen the limes and the rope-walk, then the
village, peeping through the trees, whose clustering tops hide all but
the chimneys and various roofs of the houses ... [and in the distance]
the elegant town of B——, with its fine old church towers and spires,
the whole view shut in by a range of chalky hills; and over every part
of the picture trees so profusely scattered that it appears like a
woodland scene, with glades and villages intermixed.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXI
THE NEW HOME
Miss Mitford’s cottage in Three Mile Cross is practically the same as
it was in her day, the chief alterations being that the windows to the
front of the house, which were formerly leaded casement windows, have
been enlarged and are now sashed. Also that the window of a parlour
looking unto the back garden has been enlarged. In former times, too,
the red bricks of which the house is built were exposed, but they are
now covered with plaster.
Curiously enough some early prints of the cottage are very misleading.
A limner at a distance has evidently tried to make a pleasing drawing
from some very imperfect sketch done on the spot, which did not reveal
the fact that the right-hand portion of the house recedes, and that
the front door is not in the middle but on one side. Thus a report
arose that the cottage had been rebuilt in later years. But happily
we possess conclusive evidence to the contrary given by a gentleman
still living who passed his childhood in the cottage almost as an
adopted son of the household. When visiting the place a few years ago
he declared that the cottage was unchanged, and recalled, as he passed
from room to room, his happy associations with each spot.
The house is now used as a working man’s club, and the caretaker is
ready to show the place to any visitors desirous to see the home of
Miss Mitford.
Behind the house on part of the site of Miss Mitford’s garden there
is a large edifice built called the “Mitford Hall,” which is used as
an Institute for the working classes, and is a source of much good to
the neighbourhood. But happily it stands well back and cannot be seen
by the visitor who gazes at the cottage from the village street, and
who is glad to dwell only on what is connected with Miss Mitford’s
residence in the place.
In the sketch of the cottage given the reader will observe that the
windows have been drawn as they were formerly and a few other small
alterations made.
[Illustration: THE WRITING PARLOUR]
The cottage consists of a ground floor with one storey only above it.
The casement window in the receding portion of the cottage, just below
the shelving roof, belongs to Miss Mitford’s study, a quaint little
room where at a small table she used to write her stories of village
life. The window looks down upon the “shoemaker’s” little shop, with
its pointed roof and tiny window panes. It must be quite unchanged in
appearance since Miss Mitford described it, the sole alteration being
in the business carried on there, as it and the collar-maker’s quaint
shop at the top of the village have exchanged trades.
As she sat at that window Miss Mitford would jot down all the incidents
that occurred in the village street below. “It is a pleasant, lively
scene this May morning,” she writes, “with the sun shining so gaily on
the irregular rustic dwellings, intermixed with their pretty gardens;
a cart and a waggon watering (it would be more correct perhaps to say
_beering_) at the ‘Rose’; Dame Wheeler with her basket and her brown
loaf just coming from the bakehouse; the nymph of the shoe shop feeding
a large family of goslings at the open door; two or three women in
high gossip dawdling up the street; Charles North the gardener, with
his blue apron and a ladder on his shoulder, walking rapidly by; a cow
and a donkey browsing the grass by the wayside; my white greyhound,
Mayflower, sitting majestically in front of her own stable; and ducks,
chickens, pigs and children scattered over all.... Ah! here is the post
cart coming up the road at its most respectable rumble, that cart,
or rather caravan, which so much resembles a house upon wheels, or a
show of the smaller kind at a country fair. It is now crammed full of
passengers, the driver just protruding his head and hands out of the
vehicle, and the sharp, clever boy, who, in the occasional absence of
his father, officiates as deputy, perched like a monkey on the roof.”
“I have got exceedingly fond of this little place,” writes Mary to
Sir William Elford; “could be content to live and die here. To be
sure the rooms are of the smallest; I, in our little parlour, look
something like a blackbird in a goldfinch’s cage—but it is so snug and
comfortable.”
The projecting piece of building seen in the sketch in the front of the
cottage was appropriated by the doctor as his dispensary. It has a door
that opens into the little front court. The bedrooms are on the first
floor.
Mary’s study window commands a pretty view beyond the low peaked roofs
of the shoemaker’s shop and of its neighbouring cottages. At the foot
of a grassy slope can be seen a dark line of tree tops. They form part
of a magnificent avenue of elms that border a long stretch of grass—one
of the old drover’s roads—extending for nearly two miles. “The effect
of these tall solemn trees,” remarks Mary, “so equal in height, so
unbroken and so continuous, is quite grand and imposing as twilight
comes on, especially when some slight bend in the lane gives to the
outline almost the look of an amphitheatre.” This spot—Woodcock Lane as
it is called—was a favourite resort of Mary’s, and thither she often
repaired when composing her country sketches.
“In that very lane,” she writes one day, “am I writing on this sultry
June day, luxuriating in the shade, the verdure, the fragrance of
hayfield and beanfield, and the absence of all noise except the song of
birds and that strange mingling of many sounds, the whir of a thousand
forms of insect life, so often heard among the general hush of a summer
noon.
“... Here comes a procession of cows going to milking, with an old
attendant, still called the cow-boy, who, although they have seen me
often enough, one should think, sitting beneath a tree writing ... with
my dog Fanchon nestled at my feet—still _will_ start as if they had
never seen a woman before in their lives. Back they start, and then
they rush forward, and then the old drover emits certain sounds so
horribly discordant that little Fanchon starts up in a fright on her
feet, deranging all the economy of my extemporary desk and wellnigh
upsetting the inkstand. Very much frightened is my pretty pet, the
arrantest coward that ever walked upon four legs! And so she avenges
herself, as cowards are wont to do, by following the cows at a safe
distance as soon as they are fairly passed, and beginning to bark amain
when they are nearly out of sight.”
[Illustration: THE WHEELWRIGHT’S SHOP]
Mary delighted in the beauty of the country that surrounds Three Mile
Cross even from the first moment of her arrival, but her delight
increased as she became more intimately acquainted with its charms.
“This country is eminently flowery,” she writes. “Besides the variously
tinted primroses and violets in singular profusion we have all sorts
of orchises and arums; the delicate wood anemones; the still more
delicate wood sorrel, with its lovely purple veins meandering over
the white drooping flower; the field tulips [or fritillary] with its
rich checker-work of lilac and crimson, and the sun shining through
the leaves as through old painted glass; the ghostly field star of
Bethlehem [and] the wild lilies-of-the-valley.... Yes, this is really a
country of flowers!”
She revelled, too, in the wilder beauty of the great commons in the
neighbourhood “always picturesque and romantic,” she writes one day
in early summer, “and now peculiarly brilliant, and glowing with the
luxuriant orange flowers of the furze ... stretching around us like a
sea of gold, and loading the very air with its rich almond odour.”
She loved the winding rivers that water her part of the country; the
“pleasant and pastoral Kennet for silver eels renowned,” upon whose
bordering meadows the fritillary, both purple and white, grow in
profusion; and the changeful, beautiful Loddon “rising sometimes level
with its banks, so clear and smooth and peaceful ... and sometimes like
a frisky, tricksy watersprite much addicted to wandering out of bounds.”
There is a fine old stone bridge that crosses the Loddon about a mile
beyond Shinfield, with a small inn, “The George,” close by, a favourite
resort of fishermen. Standing on that bridge one summer evening Miss
Mitford watched the setting sun descend over the water.
“What a sunset! How golden! how beautiful!” she exclaims. “The sun just
disappearing, and the narrow liny clouds, which a few minutes ago lay
like soft vapoury streaks along the horizon, lighted up with a golden
splendour that the eye can scarcely endure.... Another minute and the
brilliant orb totally disappears, and the sky above grows every moment
more varied and more beautiful as the dazzling golden lines are mixed
with glowing red and gorgeous purple, dappled with small dark specks
and mingled with such a blue as the egg of the hedge-sparrow. To look
up at that glorious sky, and then to see that magnificent picture
reflected in the clear and lovely Loddon water is a pleasure never to
be described and never forgotten. My heart swells and my eyes fill
as I write of it and think of the immeasurable majesty of nature and
the unspeakable goodness of God who has spread an enjoyment so pure,
so peaceful and so intense before the meanest and the lowest of His
creatures.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXII
A LOQUACIOUS VISITOR
There is an amusing sketch in the first volume of _Our Village_
entitled “The Talking Lady,” from which we should like to quote a
few passages. Its scene is evidently laid in the Mitfords’ common
sitting-room, whose two windows look both front and back, and in which
we have sat many a time.
After alluding to a play written by Ben Jonson called _The Silent
Woman_ Miss Mitford remarks:—
“If the learned dramatist had happened to fall in with such a specimen
of female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might perhaps have
given us a pendant to his picture in the _Talking Lady_. Pity but he
had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time,
least of all now. I am too much stunned; too much like one escaped
from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue
of four days’ hard listening—four snowy, sleety, rainy days, all of
them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing,
were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out; four days chained
by ‘sad civility’ to that fireside once so quiet, and again—cheering
thought!—again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visitor’s
incessant tongue shall have died away.
“The visitor in question is a very excellent and respectable elderly
lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honour to her
dancing master, and a face exceedingly well preserved.... She took
us in the way from London to the West of England, and being, as she
wrote, ‘not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no
other guest might be admitted so that she might have the pleasure of
our conversation all to herself’ (_Ours!_ as if it were possible for
any of us to slide in a word edgewise!) ‘and especially enjoy the
gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house,
her countryman.’ Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter
it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty
years ago ... and ever since has she detailed with a minuteness ...
which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or
even a Scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing.... It should seem
to listen to her as if at some time of her life she must have listened
herself; and yet her countryman declares ... no such event has occurred.
“... Talking, sheer talking, is meat and drink and sleep to her. She
likes nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption.... Walking exhausts
the breath that might be better employed.... Allude to some anecdote of
the neighbourhood, and she forthwith treats you with as many parallel
passages as are to be found in an air with variations.... The very
weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual register of
hard frosts and long droughts and high winds and terrible storms, with
all the evils that followed in their train and all the personal events
connected with them.... By this time it rains, and she sits down to a
pathetic see-saw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith’s having
set out for her daily walk, or the possibility that Dr. Brown may have
ventured to visit his patients in his gig, and the certainty that Lady
Green’s new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the
coach.
[Illustration: WHERE THE CURATE LODGED]
“With all this intolerable prosing she is actually reckoned a pleasant
woman! Her acquaintance in the great manufacturing town where she
usually resides is very large.... Doubtless her associates deserve
the old French compliment, ‘_Ils ont tous un grand talent pour le
silence._‘... It is the _tête-à-tête_ that kills, or the small
fireside circle of three or four where only one can speak and all
the rest must seem to listen—_seem!_ did I say?—must listen in good
earnest.... She has the eye of a hawk, and detects a wandering glance,
an incipient yawn, the slightest movement of impatience. The very
needle must be quiet.... I wonder if she had married how many husbands
she would have talked to death.... Since the decease of her last
nephew she attempted to form an establishment with a widow lady for
the sake, as they both said, of the comfort of society. But—strange
miscalculation! she was a talker too! They parted in a week.
“... And we have also parted. I am just returned from escorting her
to the coach, which is to convey her two hundred miles westward; and
I have still the murmur of her adieux resounding in my ears like the
indistinct hum of the air on a frosty night. It was curious to see
how almost simultaneously these mournful adieux shaded into cheerful
salutations of her new comrades, the passengers in the mail. Poor
souls! Little does the civil young lad who made way for her or the fat
lady, his mamma, who with pains and inconvenience made room for her, or
the grumpy gentleman in the opposite corner who, after some dispute,
was at length won to admit her dressing-box—little do they suspect
what is to befall them. Two hundred miles! And she never sleeps in a
carriage! Well, patience be with them ... and to her all happiness.”
In one of her stories entitled “Whitsun Eve,” Mary Mitford describes
her own garden and its picturesque surroundings.
“The pride of my heart,” she writes, “and the delight of my eyes is my
garden. Our house, which is in dimensions very much like a bird-cage,
and might with almost equal convenience be laid on a shelf, or hung up
in a tree, would be utterly unbearable in warm weather were it not that
we have a retreat out of doors—and a very pleasant retreat it is....
“Fancy a small plot of ground with a pretty, low, irregular cottage
at one end; a large granary, divided from the dwelling by a little
court running along one side, and a long thatched shed, open towards
the garden, and supported by wooden pillars on the other. The bottom
is bounded, half by an old wall and half by an old paling, over which
we see a pretty distance of woody hills. The house, granary, wall and
palings are covered with vines, cherry trees, roses, honeysuckles
and jessamines, with great clusters of tall hollyhocks running up
between them.... This is my garden; and the long pillared shed, the
sort of rustic arcade, which runs along one side, parted from the
flower-beds by a row of rich geraniums, is our out-of-door drawing-room.
[Illustration: IN THE CURATE’S PARLOUR]
“I know nothing so pleasant as to sit there on a summer afternoon, with
the western sun flickering through a great elder tree, and lighting up
one gay parterre, where flowers and flowering shrubs are set as thick
as grass in a field ... where we may guess that there is such a thing
as mould but never see it. I know nothing so pleasant as to sit in the
shade of that dark bower ... now catching a glimpse of the little birds
as they fly rapidly in and out of their nests ... now tracing the gay
gambles of the common butterflies as they sport around the dahlias; now
watching that rarer moth which the country people, fertile in pretty
names, call the bee-bird....
“What a contrast from the quiet garden to the lively street! Saturday
night is always a time of stir and bustle in our village, and this is
Whitsun Eve, the pleasantest Saturday of all the year, when London
journeymen and servant lads and lasses snatch a short holiday to visit
their families.... This village of ours is swarming to-night like a
hive of bees.... I must try to give some notion of the various figures.
“First there is a group suited to Teniers, a cluster of out-of-door
customers of the ‘Rose,’ old benchers of the inn, who sit round a
table smoking and drinking in high solemnity to the sound of Timothy’s
fiddle. Next a mass of eager boys, the combatants of Monday, who are
surrounding the shoemaker’s shop where an invisible hole in their
[cricket] ball is mending by Master Kemp himself.... Farther down the
street is the pretty black-eyed girl, Sally Wheeler, come home for a
day’s holiday from B——, escorted by a tall footman in a dashing livery,
whom she is trying to curtsy off before her deaf grandmother sees him.
I wonder whether she will succeed?”
In another early sketch of _Our Village_ called “Dr. Tubb,” Mary
Mitford writes:—
“On taking possession of our present abode about four years ago we
found our garden and all the gardens of the straggling village street
in which it is situated filled, peopled, infested by a beautiful flower
which grew in such profusion and was so difficult to keep under that
(poor pretty thing!) instead of being admired and cherished ... it was
cut down, pulled up and hoed out like a weed. I do not know the name of
this elegant plant, nor have I met with anyone who does; we call it the
Spicer, after an old naval officer who once inhabited the white house
just above, and, according to tradition, first brought the seed from
foreign parts....
I never saw anything prettier than a whole bed of these spicers which
had clothed the top of a large heap of earth belonging to our little
mason by the roadside; [they] grew as thick and close as grass in a
meadow, covered with delicate red and white blossoms like a fairy
orchard.”
It seems to us that this flower may have been the American Balsam,
which grows as rapidly as any weed, and which we happened actually to
see, waving its pretty red and white blossoms in Miss Mitford’s garden
some years ago. This was long after her death, and when the cottage and
garden had fallen into humbler hands.
“I never passed the spicers,” remarks Mary, “without stopping to look
at them, and I was one day half shocked to see a man, his pockets
stuffed with the plants, two large bundles under each arm, and still
tugging away root and branch.... This devastation did not, however,
proceed from disrespect, the spicer gatherer being engaged in sniffing
with visible satisfaction the leaves and stalks. ‘It has a fine
venomous smell,’ quoth he in soliloquy, ‘and will certainly when
stilled be good for something or other.’ This was my first sight of Dr.
Tubb ... a quack of the highest and most extended reputation, inventor
and compounder of medicines, bleeder, shaver and physicker of man and
beast....
“We have frequently met since, and are now well acquainted, although
the worthy experimentalist considers me as a rival practitioner, an
interloper, and hates me accordingly. He has very little cause, [for]
my quackery, being mostly of the cautious, preventive, safeguard,
commonsense order, stands no chance against the boldness and decision
of his all-promising ignorance. He says, Do! I say, Do not! He deals in
_stimuli_, I in sedatives; I give medicine, he gives cordial waters.
Alack! alack! when could a dose of rhubarb, even although reinforced
by a dole of good broth, compete with a draught of peppermint and a
licensed dram? No! no! Dr. Tubb has no cause to fear my practice.”
CHAPTER XXIII
THE PUBLICATION OF _OUR VILLAGE_
Miss Mitford writes to Sir William Elford on March 5th, 1824: “In spite
of your prognostics, I think you will like _Our Village_. It will be
out in three weeks or a month.... It is exceedingly playful and lively,
and I think you will like it. 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_?”
Sir William Elford, in answering this letter, expressed his opinion
that the sketches of rural life would have been better if written in
the form of letters.
“Your notion of letters pleases me much,” replies Miss Mitford,
“as I see plainly that it is the result of the old prepossessions
and partialities which do me so much honour and give me so much
pleasure. But it would never have done. The sketches are too long, and
necessarily too much connected for _real_ correspondence.... Besides,
we are free and easy in these days, and talk to the public as a friend.
Read _Elia_, or the _Sketch Book_, or Hazlitt’s _Table Talk_, or any
popular book of the new school and you will find that we have turned
over the Johnsonian periods and the Blair-ian formality, to keep
company with the wigs and hoops, the stiff curtsys and low bows of our
ancestors. Now the public—the reading public—is, as I said before, the
correspondent and confidant of everybody.
“Having thus made the best defence I can against your criticism, I
proceed to answer your question, ‘Are the characters and descriptions
true?’ Yes! yes! yes! As true as is well possible. You, as a great
landscape painter, know that in painting a favourite scene you do
a little embellish, and can’t help it; you avail yourself of happy
accidents of atmosphere, and if anything be ugly you strike it out,
or if anything be wanting you put it in. But still the picture is a
likeness; and that this is a very faithful one you will judge when I
tell you that a worthy neighbour of ours, a post-captain, who has been
in every quarter of the globe and is equally distinguished for the
sharp look-out and the _bonhomie_ of his profession, accused me most
seriously of carelessness in putting ‘The Rose’ for ‘The Swan’ as the
sign of our next-door neighbour, and was no less disconcerted at the
_misprint_ (as he called it) of B. for R. in the name of our next town.
_A cela près_ he declares the picture to be exact.”
Miss Mitford thus prefaces her work in the first sketch entitled _Our
Village_:—
“Of all situations for a constant residence that which appears to
me most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small
neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages
and cottage-like houses ... with inhabitants whose faces are as
familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own,
close-packed and insulated like ants in an anthill or bees in a hive,
or sheep in a fold.... [Where we] learn to know and to love the people
about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and to
love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons that we
pass every day.
“Even in books I like a confined locality, and so do the critics when
they talk of the unities. Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled
half over Europe at the chariot wheels of a hero, to go to sleep at
Vienna and awaken at Madrid; it produces a real fatigue, a weariness
of spirit. On the other hand nothing is so delightful as to sit down
in a country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels, quite
sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every
person it contains; or to ramble with Mr. White over his own parish
of Selborne and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, as
well as with the birds, mice and squirrels who inhabit them; or to
sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and
his goats and his man Friday ... or to be ship-wrecked with Ferdinand
on that other lovelier island—the island of Prospero and Miranda, and
Calaban and Ariel, and nobody else ... that is best of all. And a
small neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry or
prose; a village neighbourhood such as this Berkshire hamlet in which
I write, a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a fine
eminence, with a road through it, always abounding in carts, horsemen
and carriages, and lately enlivened by a stage-coach from B—— to S——,
which passed through about ten days ago, and will, I suppose, return
some time or other.”
_Our Village_ soon made its mark, and towards the end of June Miss
Mitford was able to write to Sir William Elford, “It sells well,
and has been received by the literary world and reviewed in all the
literary papers better than I, for modesty, dare to say.”
Seven months later she wrote to the same friend, “The little prose
volume has certainly done its work and made an opening for a longer
effort. You would be diverted at some of the instances I could tell
you of its popularity. Columbines and children have been named after
Mayflower[9]; stage-coachmen and post-boys point out the localities;
schoolboys deny the possibility of any woman’s having written the
_Cricket Match_ without schoolboy help; and such men as Lord Stowell
(Sir William Scott, the last relique, I believe, of the Literary
Club) send to me for a key. I mean to try three volumes of tales next
spring.... Heaven knows how I shall succeed!
[Footnote 9: Her favourite greyhound.]
“Of course I shall copy as closely as I can Nature and Miss Austen,
keeping, like her, to genteel country life, or rather going a little
lower perhaps, and I am afraid with more of sentiment and less of
humour. I do not _intend_ to commit these delinquencies, mind—I _mean_
to keep as playful as I can; but I am afraid of their happening in
spite of me.”
Before the first volume of _Our Village_ had been a year in the hands
of the public it had passed into three editions, and by 1826 a second
volume had made its appearance, whose success was equally great. With
the money gained Mary was soon enabled to add to the comforts of her
small establishment. She writes to a friend in the summer of 1824: “We
have a pretty little pony-chaise and pony (oh! how I should like to
drive you in it!), and my dear father and mother have been out in it
three or four times, to my great delight; I am sure it will do them
both so much good.”
Among the various letters of warm appreciation of _Our Village_
received by Miss Mitford was the following from Mrs. Hemans, written on
June 6th, 1827:—
“I can hardly feel that I am addressing an entire stranger in the
author of _Our Village_,” she writes, “and yet I know it is right
and proper that I should apologise for the liberty I am taking. But
really after having accompanied you, as I have done again and again,
in ‘violeting’ and seeking for wood-sorrel—after having been with
you to call upon Mrs. Allen in ‘the dell,’ and becoming thoroughly
acquainted with May and Lizzie, I cannot but hope you will kindly
pardon my intrusion, and that my name may be sufficiently known to
you to plead my cause. There are writers whose books we cannot read
without feeling as if we really _had_ looked with them upon the scenes
they bring before us.... Will you allow me to say that _your_ writings
have this effect upon me, and that you have taught me, in making me
know and love your ‘village’ so well, to wish for further knowledge
also of _her_ who has so vividly impressed its dingles and copses upon
my imagination, and peopled them so cheerily with healthful and happy
beings? I believe if I could be personally introduced to you that I
should in less than five minutes begin to enquire about Lucy and the
lilies-of-the-valley, and whether you had succeeded in peopling that
‘shady border’ in your own territories with those shy flowers.”
Writing to her mother from London in November, 1826, Mary says: “I hope
that you have by this time received the new number of Blackwood[10] in
which I am very pleasantly mentioned in the last article, the ‘Noctes
Ambrosianæ.’”
[Footnote 10: Blackwood’s _Edinburgh Magazine_.]
It was under this title, the reader may remember, that the celebrated
“Christopher North” (John Wilson) was bringing out a series of
entertaining conversations on all sorts of subjects supposed to be
spoken by North himself and a few fellow habitués of an old-fashioned
Edinburgh inn. The character of the “Shepherd,” it seems, was drawn
from James Hogg the “Ettrick Shepherd.” This is the passage alluded to
by Miss Mitford—“Noctes Ambrosianæ.”
“NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ”
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SHEPHERD, NORTH, AND TICKLER
SCENE—_Ambrose’s Hotel, Picardy Place, Paper Parlour_
_Tickler._ Master Christopher North, there’s Miss Mitford, author of
_Our Village_, an admirable person in all respects, of whom you have
never, to my recollection, taken any notice in the Magazine. What is
the meaning of that?...
_North._ I am waiting for her second volume. Miss Mitford has not,
in my opinion, either the pathos or humour of Washington Irving; but
she excels him in vigorous conception of character, and in the truth
of her pictures of English life and manners. Her writings breathe a
sound, pure and healthy morality, and are pervaded by a genuine rural
spirit—the spirit of merry England. Every line bespeaks the lady.
_Shepherd._ I admire Miss Mitford just excessively. I dinna wunner at
her being able to write sae weel as she does about drawing-rooms wi’
sofas and settees, and about the fine folk in them seein’ themselves in
lookin’-glasses frae tap to tae; but what puzzles the like o’ me is her
pictures o’ poachers and tinklers ... and o’ huts and hovels without
riggin’ by the wayside, and the cottages o’ honest, puir men and byres
and barns.... And merry-makin’s at winter-ingles, and courtships aneath
trees atween lads and lasses as laigh in life as the servants in her
father’s ha’. That’s the puzzle, and that’s the praise. But ae word
explains a’—Genius—Genius—wull a’ the metaphizzians in the warld ever
expound that mysterious monysyllable?
_Tickler._ Monosyllable, James, did you say?
_Shepherd._ Ay—monysyllable. Does na that mean a word o’ three
syllables?
_North_ (in a later review). The young gentlemen of England should
be ashamed o’ thirselves fo’ letten her name be Mitford. They should
marry her, whether she wull or no, for she would mak boith a useful and
agreeable wife. Thet’s the best creetishism on her warks.
CHAPTER XXIV
A COUNTRY-SIDE ROMANCE
The framework of these stories—that is all that concerns Miss Mitford
herself, who figures not only as the narrator but as an actor in the
scenes described—is, for the most part, she tells us, strictly true.
Thus in giving quotations from her charming tales we are giving also
passages from her own daily life, and so we seem to see her walking
about the country lanes visiting the cottages or farm-houses, and even
to hear her conversing with the villagers.
[Illustration: OLD BERKSHIRE FARM]
In a story entitled _Patty’s New Hat_, Mary Mitford writes:—
“Wandering about the meadows one morning last May absorbed in the
pastoral beauty of the season and the scenery, I was overtaken by a
heavy shower, just as I passed old Mrs. Matthew’s great farm-house and
forced to run for shelter to her hospitable porch. A pleasant shelter
in good truth I found there. The green pastures dotted with fine old
trees stretching all around; the clear brook winding about them,
turning and returning on its course, as if loath to depart ... the
village spire rising amongst a cluster of cottages, all but the roofs
and chimneys concealed by a grove of oaks; the woody background and the
blue hills in the distance, all so flowery and bowery in the pleasant
month of May. The porch, around which a honeysuckle in full bloom was
wreathing its sweet flowers ... was alive and musical with bees. It
is hard to say which enjoyed the sweet breath of the shower and the
honeysuckle most, the bees or I; but the rain began to drive so fast
that at the end of five minutes I was not sorry to be discovered by
a little girl belonging to the family, and ushered into the spacious
kitchen, with its ample dresser glittering with crockery ware, and then
finally conducted by Mrs. Matthews herself into her own comfortable
parlour.
“On my begging that I might cause no interruption she resumed her
labours at a little table [where she was] mending a fustian jacket
belonging to one of her sons. On the other side of the little table
sat her pretty grand-daughter Patty, a black-eyed young woman, with a
bright complexion, a neat, trim figure, and a general air of gentility
considerably above her station. She was trimming a very smart straw
hat with pink ribands, trimming and untrimming, for the bows were tied
and untied, taken off and put on, and taken off again, with a look of
impatience and discontent, not common to a damsel of seventeen when
contemplating a new piece of finery. The poor little lass was evidently
out of sorts. She sighed and quirked and fidgeted and seemed ready
to cry, whilst her grandmother just glanced at her face under her
spectacles, pursed up her mouth, and contrived with some difficulty not
to laugh. At last Patty spoke.
“‘Now, grandmother, you will let me go to Chapel Row revel this
afternoon, won’t you?’
“‘Humph,’ said Mrs. Matthews.
“‘It hardly rains at all, grandmother!’
“‘Humph!’ again said Mrs. Matthews, opening the prodigious scissors
with which she was amputating, so to say, a button, and directing the
rounded end significantly to my wet shawl, whilst the sharp point was
reverted towards the dripping honeysuckle. ‘Humph!’
“‘There’s no dirt to signify!’
“Another ‘Humph!’ and another point to the draggled tail of my white
gown.
“‘At all events it’s going to clear.’
“Two ‘Humphs!’ and two points, one to the clouds and one to the
barometer.
“‘It’s only seven miles,’ said Patty; ‘and if the horses are wanted, I
can walk.’
“‘Humph!’ quoth Mrs. Matthews.
“‘My Aunt Ellis will be there, and my cousin Mary.’
“‘Humph!’ again said Mrs. Matthews.
“‘My cousin Mary will be so disappointed.’
“‘Humph!’
“‘And I half promised my cousin William—poor William!’
“‘Humph!’ again.
“‘Poor William! Oh, grandmother, do let me go! And I’ve got my new hat
and all—just such a hat as William likes! Poor William! You will let me
go, grandmother?’
“And receiving no answer but a very unequivocal ‘Humph!’ poor Patty
threw down her hat, fetched a deep sigh, and sat in a most disconsolate
attitude, snipping her pink riband to pieces. Mrs. Matthews went on
manfully with her ‘stitchery,’ and for ten minutes there was a dead
pause. It was at last broken by my little friend and introducer,
Susan, who was standing at the window, and exclaimed: ‘Who is this
riding up the meadow all through the rain? Look!—see!—I do think—no,
it can’t be—yes it is—it is certainly my cousin William Ellis! Look,
grandmother!’
“‘Humph!’ said Mrs. Matthews.
“‘What can cousin William be coming for?’ continued Susan.
“‘Humph!’ quoth Mrs. Matthews.
“‘Oh, I know!—I know!’ screamed Susan, clapping her hands and jumping
for joy as she saw the changed expression of Patty’s countenance,—the
beaming delight, succeeded by a pretty downcast shamefacedness as she
turned away from her grandmother’s arch smile and archer nod. ‘I know!
I know!’ shouted Susan.
“‘Humph!’ said Mrs. Matthews.
“‘For shame, Susan! Pray don’t, grandmother!’ said Patty imploringly.
“‘For shame! Why I did not say he was coming to court Patty! Did I,
grandmother?’ returned Susan.
“‘And I take this good lady to witness,’ replied Mrs. Matthews, as
Patty, gathering up her hat and her scraps of riband, prepared to make
her escape. ‘I take you all to witness that I have said nothing of any
sort. Get along with you, Patty!’ added she, ‘you have spoilt your pink
trimming, but I think you are likely to want white ribands next, and
if you put me in mind, I’ll buy them for you!’ And smiling in spite of
herself the happy girl ran out of the room.”
In one of her tales Miss Mitford describes a fog in her village and its
surrounding neighbourhood, contrasting it with a fog in London.
“A London fog,” she writes, “is a sad thing, as every inhabitant of
London knows full well: dingy, dusky, dirty, damp; an atmosphere black
as smoke and wet as steam, that wraps round you like a blanket; a
cloud reaching from earth to heaven; ‘a palpable obscure,’ which not
only turns day into night, but threatens to extinguish the lamps and
lanthorns with which the poor street wanderers strive to illuminate
their darkness.... Of all detestable things a London fog is the most
detestable.
“Now a country fog is quite another matter.... This last lovely autumn
has given us more foggy mornings, or rather more foggy days, than I
ever remember to have seen in Berkshire: days beginning in a soft and
vapoury mistiness, enveloping the whole country in a veil, snowy,
fleecy, and light, as the smoke which one often sees circling in the
distance from some cottage chimney, or as the still whiter clouds
which float around the moon, and finishing in sunsets of a surprising
richness and beauty when the mist is lifted up from the earth and
turned into a canopy of unrivalled gorgeousness, purple, rosy and
golden....
“It was in one of these days, early in November, that we set out about
noon to pay a visit to a friend at some distance. The fog was yet on
the earth, only some brightening in the south-west gave token that
it was likely to clear away. As yet, however, the mist held complete
possession. We could not see the shoemaker’s shop across the road—no!
nor our chaise when it drew up before our door; were fain to guess at
our own laburnum tree, and found the sign of The Rose invisible, even
when we ran against the sign-post. Our little maid, a kind and careful
lass, who, perceiving the dreariness of the weather, followed us
across the court with extra wraps, had wellnigh tied my veil round her
master’s hat and enveloped me in his bearskin, and my dog Mayflower,
a white greyhound of the largest size, who had a mind to give us the
undesired honour of her company, carried her point, in spite of the
united efforts of half a dozen active pursuers, simply because the
fog was so thick that nobody could see her. It was a complete game at
bo-peep.
“A misty world it was, and a watery; and I ... began to sigh and
shiver and quake, as much from dread of an overturn as from damp and
chilliness, whilst my careful driver and his sagacious steed went on
groping their way through the woody lanes that lead to the Loddon.
Nothing but the fear of confessing my fear, that feeling which
makes so many cowards brave, prevented me from begging to turn back
again. On, however, we went, the fog becoming every moment heavier
as we approached that beautiful and brimming river. My companion,
nevertheless, continued to assure me that the day would clear—nay,
that it was already clearing; and I soon found that he was right. As
we left the river we seemed to leave the fog ... [and] it was curious
to observe how object after object glanced out of the vapour. First of
all the huge oak at the corner of Farmer Locke’s field, which juts out
into the lane like a crag into the sea ... its head lost in the clouds;
then Farmer Hewitt’s great barn—the house, ricks and stables still
invisible; then a gate and half a cow, her head being projected over
it in strong relief, whilst the hinder part of her body remained in
the haze; then more and more distinctly hedgerows, cottages, trees and
fields, until, as we reached the top of Barkham Hill, the glorious sun
broke forth, and the lovely picture [of the valley] lay before our eyes
in its soft and calm beauty.”
This account of Mary and her father’s expedition in a fog caught the
fancy of two authoresses. One—Miss Sedgwick—writes to Mary from the
other side of the Atlantic: “Tell me anything of your noble father
(long may he live!) whom I have loved ever since you took that ride
with him in a one-horse chaise of a misty morning. Do you remember?”
The other—Mrs. Hemans—writes: “I hope ... that you were not the worse
for that fog, the very description of which almost took my hair out of
curl whilst reading it!”
CHAPTER XXV
A NEW PLAYWRIGHT
Mary Russell Mitford’s love of the drama was awakened in childhood, and
at her school in Hans Place it was much developed. “After my return
home,” she writes, “came days of eager and solitary poring over the
mighty treasures of the printed drama, that finest form of poetry which
can never be lost. At school I had been made acquainted, like other
schoolgirls, with Racine. Little did Madame de Maintenon, proud queen
of the left hand, think when the gentle poet died of a courtly frown,
that she and St. Cyr would be best remembered by ‘Athalie!’”
As Mary grew up she longed to try her hand at tragedy—that ambition of
young writers—but it was not until in later years when spurred on by
the necessity of earning money for the support of her father and mother
that she conceived the idea of writing plays for the stage. She had
heard that occasionally large sums of money were gained by the authors
of successful dramas, and she was encouraged in her undertaking by the
recollection that when her poems were first published Coleridge had
prophesied that the author of “Blanche” would write a tragedy. “So,”
writes Mary, “I took heart of grace and resolved to try a play.”
Her first attempt, a comedy, was rejected by the manager of a theatre.
“Then, nothing daunted,” she writes, “I tried tragedy, and produced
five acts on the story of _Fiesco_. But just as—conscious of the
smallness of my means and the greatness of my object—I was about to
relinquish the pursuit in despair, I met with a critic so candid a
friend, so kind, that, aided by his encouragement, all difficulties
seemed to vanish. I speak,” she adds, “of the author of _Ion_—Mr.
Justice Talfourd—then a very young man ... _Foscari_ was the result of
this encouragement.”
But before _Foscari_ had appeared on the stage her play of _Julian_,
having been read and approved by Macready, was performed with that
celebrated actor as the principal character. It was, happily,
successful, and, greatly cheered by this result and also by receiving
no less than £200 from the manager of Covent Garden theatre, Mary
Mitford continued her dramatic work.
But she had to go through many trials connected with it, which often
affected her health. The main cause of these trials were the unhappy
dissensions between Macready and Charles Kemble, who both appear to
have had hasty tempers. Mary writes to Sir William Elford on her return
home from a hurried visit to London: “My soul sickens within me when
I think of the turmoil and tumult I have undergone and am [still]
to undergo.... I am tossed about between Kemble and Macready like a
cricket-ball—affronting both parties and suspected by both because I
will not come to a deadly rupture with either.”
But, happily, later on she had reason to think differently about these
great actors. She speaks of Macready as “a most ardent and devoted
friend”; and when, in the autumn of 1826, _Foscari_ was about to appear
on the stage, she says she feels “inclined to hate herself for her
mistrust of Charles Kemble.” “There are no words for his kindness,” she
declares, “from the beginning of this affair to the end.”
Miss Mitford, accompanied by her father, went up to London for the
first performance of _Foscari_ at Covent Garden theatre, which was
fixed for the 5th November. They lodged at No. 45 Frith Street, Soho
Square, whence Mary wrote to her mother an account of the great event.
Outside her letter were the words, “Good news.” The letter is dated
Saturday night, November 5th:—
“I cannot suffer this parcel to go to you, my dearest mother, without
writing a few lines to tell you of the complete success of my play.
It was received with rapturous applause [and] without the slightest
symptoms of disapprobation from beginning to end.... William Harness
and Mr. Talfourd are both quite satisfied with the whole affair, and my
other friends are half crazy....
“I quite long to hear how you, my own dearest darling, have borne the
suspense and anxiety consequent on this affair, which, triumphantly as
it has turned out, was certainly a very nervous business. They expect
the play to run three times a week till Christmas. It was so immense a
house that you might have walked over the heads in the pit; and great
numbers were turned away, in spite of the wretched weather. All the
actors were good.... Mr. Young gave out the tragedy amidst immense
applause.”
[Illustration: FRITH STREET, SOHO SQUARE]
Mary herself was not present at this wonderful scene. Writing in
later years she remarks: “I had not nerve enough to attend the first
representation of my tragedies. I sat still and trembling in some quiet
apartment near, and thither some friend flew to set my heart at ease.
Generally the messenger of good tidings was poor Haydon, whose quick
and ardent spirit lent him wings on such an occasion, and who had full
sympathy with my love for a large canvas, however indifferently filled.”
When thanking Sir William Elford for his congratulations upon the
success of _Foscari_, Miss Mitford says: “Hitherto the success has been
very brilliant. We can hardly expect it to last.... But great good has
been done if (which Heaven avert) the tragedy stop not to-night.”
The agreement between the theatre and Miss Mitford for _Foscari_, we
are told, was £100 on the third, the ninth, the fifteenth, and the
twentieth nights, while the copyright of the play (together with a
volume of Dramatic Sketches) was sold to Whittaker for £150.
Miss Mitford had some new and strange experiences connected with the
performance of her plays, and amongst these she has recorded her first
sight of a theatre by daylight.
“To one accustomed to the imposing aspect of a great theatre at night,”
she writes, “blazing with light and beauty, no contrast can be greater
than to enter the same theatre at noontide. Leaving daylight behind
you, and stumbling as best you may through dark passages and amidst the
inextricable labyrinth of scenery, [you are] too happy if you be not
projected into the orchestra or swallowed up by a trap-door....
“When the eye becomes accustomed to the darkness the contrasts are
sufficiently amusing. Solemn tragedians ... hatted and great-coated,
skipping about, chatting and joking like common mortals ... tragic
heroines sauntering languidly through their parts in the closest of
bonnets and thickest of shawls; untidy ballet girls (there was a
dance in _Foscari_) walking through their quadrille to the sound of a
solitary fiddle, striking up as if of its own accord from amidst the
tall stools and music-desks of the orchestra, and piercing, one hardly
knew how, through the din that was going on incessantly.
“Oh, that din! Voices from every part, above, below, around, and in
every key, bawling, shouting, screaming; heavy weights rolling here
and falling there, bells ringing, one could not tell why, and the
ubiquitous call-boy everywhere!...
“No end to the absurdities and discrepancies of a rehearsal! I
contributed my full share to the amount.... There is a gun in _Julian_,
and I, frightened by one when a child, ‘hate a gun like a hurt wild
duck’ ... and my first address to Mr. Macready was an earnest entreaty
that he would not suffer them to fire that gun at rehearsal. They did,
nevertheless, ... but the smiling bow of the great tragedian had spared
me the worst part of that sort of fright, the expectation....
“Troubled and anxious though they were,” she adds, “those were pleasant
days, guns and all, days of hope dashed with so much fear, and of fear
illumined with fitful rays of hope. And in those rehearsals ... where
nobody is ever found when he is wanted, and nobody ever seems to know a
syllable of his part ... the business must somehow have gone on, for at
night the scenes fall into the right places, the proper actors come at
the right times, speeches are spoken in due order, and to the no small
astonishment of the novice, who had given herself up for lost, the play
succeeds.”
CHAPTER XXVI
_RIENZI_
Miss Mitford’s capacity of throwing herself heart and soul into
the widely varying subjects upon which she was engaged was truly
remarkable. For whilst writing her playful or pathetic stories
of village life, breathing as they do the calm and beauty of the
surrounding country, she was composing one after another her stirring
tragedies.
The finest of these is generally considered to be _Rienzi_ to
which Miss Mitford had given much time and thought. She wrote in
August, 1824, to a female friend who had enquired after her literary
undertakings:—
“I write as usual for magazines, and (but this is quite between
ourselves) I have a tragedy which will I may say certainly—as certainly
as we can speak of anything connected with the theatre—be performed
at Drury Lane next season. It is the story of ‘Rienzi,’ the friend of
Petrarch; the man who restored for a short time the old republican
government of Rome. If you do not remember the story you will find
it very beautifully told in the last volume of Gibbon, and still more
graphically related in L’Abbé de Sadi’s _Memoires pour la Vie de
Pétrarque_.”
It was not, however, until four years later that the play actually
appeared upon the stage. Its success was of vital importance to the
little household at Three Mile Cross, and Mary was immersed in business
of all sorts during the months preceding its début. Still she had a
“heart at leisure” even then to sympathise with her friends in their
joys and sorrows. On hearing that Haydon’s important picture of the
year had just been purchased by the King, she writes:—
“A thousand and a thousand congratulations, my dear friend, to you and
your loveliest and sweetest wife! I always liked the King, God bless
him! He is a gentleman—and now my loyalty will be warmer than ever....
This is fortune—fame you did not want—but this fashion and fortune.
Nothing in this world could please me more—not even the production of
my own _Rienzi_. To see you in your place in Art and Talfourd in his in
Parliament are the wishes next my heart, and I verily believe that I
shall live to see both....
“God bless you, my dear friends! and God save the King!”
Miss Mitford writes on Sept. 23rd, 1828, to Sir William Elford:—
“My tragedy of _Rienzi_ is to be produced at Drury Lane Theatre on
Saturday the 11th of October; that is to say, next Saturday fortnight.
“Mr. Young plays the hero, and has been studying the part during the
whole vacation; and a new actress makes her first appearance in the
part of the heroine. This is a very bold and hazardous experiment, no
new actress having come out in a new play within the memory of man;
but she is young, pretty, unaffected, pleasant-voiced, with great
sensibility, and a singularly pure intonation—a qualification which no
actress has possessed since Mrs. Siddons. Stanfield is painting the new
scenes, one of which is an accurate representation of Rienzi’s house.
This building still exists in Rome.... They have got a sketch which
they sent for on purpose, and they are hunting up costumes with equal
care; so that it will be very splendidly brought out, and I shall have
little to fear, except from the emptiness of London so early in the
season.”
[Illustration: IN GREAT QUEEN STREET]
Miss Mitford’s next letter to Sir William is written from London after
the first performance of _Rienzi_. It is dated Oct. 5th, 1828, 5 Great
Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn, and is as follows: “Our success last
night was very splendid and we have every hope (in the theatrical world
there is no such word as ‘certainty’) of making a great hit. As far
as things have hitherto gone nothing can be better—nothing. Our new
actress is charming.... Mr. Young is also admirable; and, in short, it
is a magnificent performance throughout. God grant that its prosperity
may continue! and these are not words, of course, but a prayer from my
inmost soul, for on that hangs the comfort of those far dearer to me
than myself.”
And a fortnight later she writes:—
“Hitherto the triumph has been most complete and decisive—the houses
crowded—and the attention such as has not been known since Mrs.
Siddons. You might hear a pin drop in the house. How long this run may
continue I cannot say, for London is absolutely empty; but even if the
play were to stop to-night I should be extremely thankful—more thankful
than I have words to tell; the impression has been so deep and so
general.”
Letters of congratulation from women of mark poured in from all sides,
but Mary missed the sympathy of her intimate friend Lady Franklin (wife
of the Arctic explorer) who had recently died. She remarks in the
Introduction to her Dramatic Works:—
“When _Rienzi_, after a more than common portion of adventures and
misadventures, did come out with a success rare in a woman’s life
... I missed the eager congratulations from her ... whose cheering
prognostics had so often spurred me on....
“No part of my success,” she adds, “was more delightful than the
pleasure which it excited amongst the most eminent of my female
contemporaries. Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, Felicia Hemans (and to
two of them I was at that time unknown) vied in the cordiality of their
praises. Kindness met me on every hand.”
In a letter from Mrs. Trollope (a well-known authoress of the day), who
was then staying in New York, she learns of _Rienzi_ being performed in
that city. “It is here and here only,” writes Mrs. Trollope, “that I
have had an opportunity of seeing _Rienzi_; it is a noble tragedy, and
not even the bad acting of the Chatham Theatre could spoil it. I never
witnessed such a triumph of powerful poetry over weak acting as in the
magnificent scene where Rienzi refuses pardon to an Orsini.”
The play continued to draw large audiences at Drury Lane, and ran for a
hundred days, a most unusual event in those times. Of the printed play
Miss Mitford writes: “It is selling immensely, the first very large
edition having gone in three days.”
We have read _Rienzi_ with deep interest. The tragic scenes are very
powerful, tension being kept up throughout the whole action, while the
love passages are beautiful, tender and truly pathetic. If we might
venture upon a criticism it is that there is an absence in the play of
all humour—a quality so conspicuous in Miss Mitford’s village stories.
Perhaps it is only Shakespeare who possesses the consummate art of
relieving the strain wrought upon the mind by deep tragedy with a touch
of humour. It is certainly absent in some of the finest French and
German tragedies.
Miss Mitford’s incessant work at this period, coupled with much
domestic anxiety (for her mother’s health was then failing), made her
possibly over anxious.
“I shall have hard work,” she observes in a letter to a friend, “to
write up to my own reputation, for certainly I am at present greatly
overrated.” And alluding to the triumph of _Rienzi_ she says:—
“Dramatic success, after all, is not so delicious, so glorious, so
complete a gratification as in our secret longings we all expect to
find. It is not satisfactory. It does not fill the heart.... It is an
intoxication.... Within four-and-twenty hours [of the performance of
_Rienzi_] I doubted if triumph there were, and more than doubted if it
were deserved. It is ill-success that leads to self-assertion. Never in
my life was I so conscious of my dramatic short-comings as on that day
of imputed exaltation and vainglory.”
But Mary’s fame as a dramatic author was growing in spite of her
own modest estimate of her powers, and in spite also of many a
disappointment that she had to endure. Her play of Charles I, the
subject of which was suggested to her by Macready, was condemned by the
Licenser, “who saw a danger to the State in permitting the trial of
an English monarch to be represented on the stage.” It was forbidden,
therefore, at the two great houses although it afterwards appeared at a
minor theatre.
The fate of another play, _Inez de Castro_, was still more unfortunate,
for after having been rehearsed three times at the Lyceum Theatre,
apparently with the approval of all concerned, it was suddenly
withdrawn for some unknown reason. Fanny Kemble, whom Miss Mitford
describes as “a girl of great ability,” was taking the part of the
heroine.
“Great at the moment were these anxieties and tribulations,” writes
Miss Mitford in after life, “but it is good to observe in one’s own
mind and good to tell others how just as the keenest physical pain is
known to be soon forgotten, so in mental vicissitudes time carries away
the bitter and leaves the sweet. The vexations and the injuries fade
into dim distance and the kindness and the benefits shine vividly out.”
An edition of her collected works was published in Philadelphia in the
year 1841, which is prefaced by a short biography of the author written
by James Crissy. It is pleasant therein to read his warm-hearted
appreciation of her literary genius. He speaks of Miss Mitford as “a
dramatist of no common power.” “In all her plays,” he says, “there
is strong, vigorous writing—masculine in the free unhashed use of
language, but wholly womanly in its purity from coarseness or licence
and in its touches [of the] softest feeling and finest observation.”
He goes on, however, to say: “But the claims of Miss Mitford to swell
the list of _inventors_ [of new styles in literature] rest upon yet
firmer grounds. They rest upon those exquisite sketches by which she
has created a school of writing, homely but not vulgar, familiar but
not breeding contempt.... Wherein the small events and the simple
characters of rural life are made interesting by the truth and
sprightliness with which they are represented.”
In the Introduction to her “Dramatic Works,” Miss Mitford thus closes a
detailed account of the composition and production of her plays:—
“So much for the Tragedies. There would have been many more such but
that the pressing necessity of earning money, and the uncertainties
and the delays of the drama, at moments when delay or disappointment
weighed upon me like a sin, made it a duty to turn away from the lofty
steep of Tragic Poetry to the everyday path of Village Stories.”
* * * * *
À propos of these words and knowing that Miss Mitford’s greatest power
lay in the writing of those very Village Stories, we would quote the
words of Tennyson:—
“Not once or twice in our fair island story The path of duty was the
way to glory.”
CHAPTER XXVII
FOREIGN NEIGHBOURS
“One of the prettiest dwellings in our neighbourhood,” writes Miss
Mitford in one of her stories, “is the Lime Cottage at Burley-Hatch.
It consists of a low-browed habitation, so entirely covered with
jessamine, honeysuckle, passion-flowers and china roses, as to resemble
a bower, and is placed in the centre of a large garden. On either side
of the neat gravel walk which leads from the outer gate to the door of
the cottage stand the large and beautiful trees to which it owes its
name; spreading their strong, broad shadow over the turf beneath, and
sending, on a summer afternoon, their rich spring fragrance half across
the irregular village green....
“Such is the habitation of Thérèse de G., an _émigrée_ of distinction,
whose aunt having married an English officer, was luckily able to
afford her niece an asylum during the horrors of the Revolution,
and to secure to her a small annuity and the Lime Cottage after her
death. There she has lived for five-and-thirty years, gradually losing
sight of her few and distant foreign connections, and finding all her
happiness in her pleasant home and her kind neighbours—a standing
lesson in cheerfulness and contentment.
“A very popular person is Mademoiselle Thérèse—popular both with high
and low; for the prejudice which the country people almost universally
entertain against foreigners vanished directly before the charm of her
manners.... She is so kind to them too, so liberal of the produce of
her orchard and garden and so full of resources in their difficulties.
Among the rich she is equally beloved. No party is complete without the
pleasant French woman. Her conversation is not very powerful, not very
brilliant—but then it is so good-natured, so genuine, so constantly
up and alive;—to say nothing of the charm which it derives from her
language, which is alternately the most graceful and purest French and
the most diverting and absurd broken English....
“Her appearance betrays her country almost as much as her speech. She
is a French-looking little personage with a slight, active figure,
exceedingly nimble and alert in every movement; a round and darkly
complexioned face, somewhat faded and passée but still striking from
the laughing eyes. Nevertheless, in her youth, she must have been
pretty; so pretty that some of our young ladies, scandalised at finding
their favourite an old maid, have invented sundry legends to excuse the
solecism, and talk of duels fought _pour l’amour de ses beaux yeux_,
and of a betrothed lover guillotined in the Revolution. And the thing
may have been so; although one meets everywhere with old maids who
have been pretty, and whose lovers have not been guillotined. I rather
suspect our fair demoiselle of having been in her youth a little of a
flirt.
“Even during her residence at Burley-Hatch hath not she indulged
in divers very distant, very discreet, very decorous, but still
very evident flirtations? Did not Doctor Abdy, the portly, ruddy
schoolmaster of B. dangle after her for three mortal years, holidays
excepted? And did she not refuse him at last? And Mr. Foreclose, the
thin, withered, wrinkled city solicitor, a man, so to say, smoke-dried,
who comes down every year to Burley for the air, did not he do suit and
service to her during four long vacations with the same ill-success?
Was not Sir Thomas himself a little smitten? Nay, even now, does not
the good major, a halting veteran of seventy—but really it is too
bad to tell tales out of the parish—all that is certain is that
Mademoiselle Thérèse might have changed her name long before now had
she so chosen.
“Her household consists of her little maid Betsy, a cherry-cheeked,
blue-eyed country lass, who with a fair unmeaning countenance, copies
the looks and gestures of her alert and vivacious mistress, and of a
fat lap-dog, called Fido, silky, sleepy and sedate....
“If everybody is delighted to receive this most welcome visitor, so is
everybody delighted to accept her graceful invitations, and meet to eat
strawberries at Burley-Hatch.
“Oh, how pleasant are those summer afternoons, sitting under the
blossomed limes, with the sun shedding a golden light through the
broad branches, the bees murmuring overhead, roses and lilies all
about us, and the choicest fruit served up in wicker baskets of her
own making.... Those are pleasant meetings; nor are her little winter
parties less agreeable, when to two or three female friends assembled
round their coffee, she will tell thrilling stories of that terrible
Revolution, so fertile in great crimes and great virtues. Or [relate]
gayer anecdotes of the brilliant days preceding that convulsion, the
days which Madame de Genlis has described so well, when Paris was the
capital of pleasure, and amusement the business of life; illustrating
her descriptions by a series of spirited drawings of costumes and
characters done by herself, and always finishing by producing a group
of Louis Seize, Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, and Madame Elizabeth, as
she had last seen them at Versailles—the only recollections that ever
bring tears into her smiling eyes.
“Madame Thérèse’s loyalty to the Bourbons was in truth a very real
feeling. Her family had been about the Court, and she had imbibed
an enthusiasm for the royal sufferers natural to a young and warm
heart—she loved the Bourbons and hated Napoleon with like ardour. All
her other French feelings had for some time been a little modified.
She was not quite so sure as she had been that France was the only
country, and Paris the only city of the world; that Shakespeare was a
barbarian, and Milton no poet; that the perfume of English limes was
nothing compared to French orange trees; that the sun never shone in
England; and that sea-coal fires were bad things.... Her loyalty to her
legitimate king was, however, as strong as ever, and that loyalty had
nearly cost us our dear mademoiselle.
“After the Restoration, she hastened, as fast as steamboat and
diligence could carry her, to enjoy the delight of seeing once more
the Bourbons and the Tuileries; took leave, between smiles and tears,
of her friends, and of Burley-Hatch, carrying with her a branch of
the lime-tree, then in blossom, and commissioning her old lover, Mr.
Foreclose, to dispose of the cottage: but in less than three months,
luckily before Mr. Foreclose had found a purchaser, mademoiselle came
home again. She complained of nobody; but times were altered. The house
in which she was born was pulled down; her friends were scattered, her
kindred dead; Madame (la Duchess d’Angoulême) did not remember her
... the King did not know her again (poor man! he had not seen her
for these thirty years); Paris was a new city; the French were a new
people; she missed the sea-coal fires; and for the stunted orange-trees
at the Tuileries, what were they compared with the blossomed limes of
Burley-Hatch!”[11]
[Footnote 11: We think this place may have been intended for Burghfield
Hatch.]
Another foreign neighbour, described by Miss Mitford, was an old
French _émigré_ who came to reside in “the small town of Hazelby”; a
pretty little place where everything seemed at a standstill.... “It
has not even a cheap shop,” she remarks, “for female gear.... The very
literature of Hazelby is doled out at the pastry-cook’s, in a little
one-windowed shop, kept by Matthew Wise. Tarts occupy one end of the
counter and reviews the other; whilst the shelves are parcelled out
between books, and dolls, and ginger-bread. It is a question by which
of his trades poor Matthew gains least.”
Here it was that the old _émigré_ lodged “in a low three-cornered room,
over the little shop, which Matthew Wise designated his ‘first floor.’”
Little was known of him, but that he was a thin, pale, foreign-looking
gentleman, who shrugged his shoulders in speaking, took a great deal
of snuff, and made a remarkably low bow. But it soon appeared from a
written paper placed in a conspicuous part of Matthew’s shop, that he
was an Abbé, and that he would do himself the honour of teaching French
to any of the nobility and gentry of Hazelby who might think fit to
employ him. Pupils dropped in rather slowly. The curate’s daughters,
and the attorney’s son, and Miss Deane the milliner—but she found the
language difficult, and left off, asserting that M. l’Abbé’s snuff made
her nervous. At last poor M. l’Abbé fell ill, really ill, dangerously
ill, and Matthew Wise went in all haste to summon Mr. Hallett (the
apothecary)....
“Now Mr. Hallett was what is usually called a rough diamond. He piqued
himself on being a plain downright Englishman [and] he had such an
aversion to a Frenchman, in general, as a cat has to a dog: and was
wont to erect himself into an attitude of defiance and wrath at the
mere sight of the object of his antipathy. He hated and despised the
whole nation, abhorred the language, and “would as lief,” he assured
Matthew, “have been called in to a toad.” He went, however, grew
interested in the case, which was difficult and complicated; exerted
all his skill, and in about a month accomplished a cure.”
By this time he had also become interested in his patient, whose piety,
meekness, and resignation had won upon him in an extraordinary degree.
The disease was gone, but a languor and lowness remained, which Mr.
Hallett soon traced to a less curable disorder, poverty. The thought
of the debt to himself evidently weighed on the poor Abbé’s spirits,
and our good apothecary at last determined to learn French purely to
liquidate his own long bill.
It was the drollest thing in the world to see this pupil of fifty,
whose habits were so entirely unfitted for a learner, conning his
task.... He was a most unpromising scholar, shuffled the syllables
together in a manner that would seem incredible, and stumbled at every
step of the pronunciation, against which his English tongue rebelled
amain. Every now and then he solaced himself with a fluent volley of
execrations in his own language, which the Abbé understood well enough
to return, after rather a polite fashion, in French. It was a most
amusing scene. But the motive! the generous noble motive!
M. l’Abbé after a few lessons detected this delicate artifice, and,
touched almost to tears, insisted on dismissing his pupil, who, on his
side, declared that nothing should induce him to abandon his studies.
At last they came to a compromise. The cherry-cheeked Margaret ... [who
kept the doctor’s house] took her uncle’s post as a learner, which she
filled in a manner much more satisfactory; and the good old Frenchman
not only allowed Mr. Hallett to administer gratis to his ailments, but
partook of his Sunday dinner as long as he lived.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXVIII
AGREEABLE JAUNTS
Mary Russell Mitford visited Southampton in the year 1812, and although
only one of her letters written at that time has been preserved it
gives us a vivid picture of her impressions of the place. The letter is
dated September 3rd.
“I have just returned from Southampton,” she writes to Sir William
Elford. “Have you ever been at that lovely spot, which combines all
that is enchanting in wood and land and water with all that is ‘buxom,
blythe and debonair’ in society—that charming town, which is not a
watering-place only because it is something better?... Southampton
has, in my eyes, an attraction independent even of its scenery in the
total absence of the vulgar hurry of business or the chilly apathy of
fashion. It is indeed all life, all gaiety; but it has an airiness, an
animation which might become the capital of Fairyland. The very motion
of its playful waters, uncontaminated by commerce or by war, seems in
unison with the graceful yachts that sail upon their bosom.”
[Illustration: THE WEST GATE, SOUTHAMPTON]
She admired the ruins of Netley Abbey, and writes in one of her poems:—
“Methinks that e’en from Netley’s gloom To look upon the tide Seems
gazing from the shadowy tomb On life and all its pride.”
At a much later date Miss Mitford visited Bath.
“Bath is a very elegant and classical-looking city,” she writes,
“standing upon a steep hillside, its regular white buildings rising
terrace above terrace, crescent above crescent, glittering in the sun,
and charmingly varied by the green trees of its park and gardens....
Very pleasant is Bath to look at. But when contrasted with its old
reputation as the favourite resort of the noble and the fair ... it is
impossible not to feel that the spirit has departed; that it is a city
of memories, the very Pompeii of watering-places.”
[Illustration: PULTENEY BRIDGE]
Again she writes: “A place full of associations is Bath. When we had
fairly done with the real people there were great fictions to fall
back upon, and I am not sure ... that those who never lived except in
the writings of other people—the heroes and heroines of Miss Austen,
for example—are not the more real of the two. Her exquisite story of
_Persuasion_ absolutely haunted me. Whenever it rained I thought of
Anne Elliott meeting Captain Wentworth, when driven by a shower to
take refuge in a shoe-shop. Whenever I got out of breath in climbing
uphill I thought of that same charming Anne Elliott, and of that ascent
from the lower town to the upper, during which all her tribulations
ceased. And when at last by dint of trotting up one street and down
another I incurred the unromantic calamity of a blister on the heel,
even that grievance became classical by the recollection of the similar
catastrophe which, in consequence of her peregrinations with the
Admiral, had befallen dear Mrs. Croft.”
Miss Mitford writes in one of her letters of a “most agreeable jaunt to
Richmond.”
“God made the country and man made the town!” “I wonder,” she says, “in
which of the two divisions Cowper would place Richmond. Every Londoner
would laugh at the rustic who should call it town, and with foreigners
it passes pretty generally for a sample (the only one they see) of the
rural villages of England; and yet it is no more like the country, the
real untrimmed genuine country, than a garden is like a field. Richmond
is Nature in a court dress, but still Nature—aye, and very lovely
nature too, gay and happy and elegant as one of Charles the Second’s
beauties, and with as little to remind one of the penalty of labour, or
poverty, or grief, or crime. To the casual visitor (at least) Richmond
appears as a sort of fairyland, a piece of old Arcadia, a holiday spot
for ladies and gentlemen, where they had a happy out-of-door life, like
the gay folks in Watteau’s pictures, and have nothing to do with the
workaday world....
“Here is Richmond Park, where Jeanie Deans and the Duke of Argyle met
Queen Caroline; it has been improved, unluckily, and the walk where the
interview took place no longer exists. To make some amends, however,
for this disappointment, [we are told that] in removing some furniture
from an old house in the town three portraits were discovered in the
wainscot, George the Second, a staring likeness, between Lady Suffolk
and Queen Caroline. The paintings were the worst of that bad era, but
the position of the three and the recollection of Jeanie Deans was
irresistible; those pictures ought never to be separated.”
“The principal charm of this smiling landscape,” she continues, “is the
river, the beautiful river. Brimming to its very banks of meadow or
of garden; clear, pure and calm as the bright sky which is reflected
in clearer brightness from its bosom.” As her boat glides along its
smooth surface amid scenes of ever-changing beauty and interest,
Miss Mitford’s thoughts turn to Sir Joshua Reynolds. “His villa is
here,” she exclaims, “rich in remembrances of Johnson and Boswell and
Goldsmith and Burke; here again the elegant house of Owen Cambridge;
close by the celebrated villa of Pope, where one seems to see again
Swift and Gay, St. John and Arbuthnot. A stone’s-throw off the still
more celebrated Gothic toy-shop, Strawberry Hill, which we all know
so well from the minute and vivid descriptions of its master, the
most amusing of letter-writers, the most fashionable of antiquaries,
the most learned of _petit-maîtres_, the cynical, finical, delightful
Horace Walpole.”
Then Miss Mitford tells us of “the landing at Hampton Court, the palace
of the cartoons and of the ‘Rape of the Lock,’ and lastly of her coming
home with her mind full of the divine Raphael ... strangely chequered
and intersected by vivid images of the fair Belinda, and of that
inimitable game at ombre which will live longer than any painting, and
can only die with the language.”
Here we would venture to give some passages from the “Rape of the Lock”
for the benefit of those who may not as yet have made the acquaintance
of the “fair Belinda.” This poem, so full of wit and fairy fancy, was
written by Pope to commemorate an event which had actually occurred. It
happened when a party of noble friends had met together in a stately
room in Hampton Court Palace and were gathered around a table prepared
for a game at ombre.
The heroine Belinda (whose real name was Arabella Fermor), famous
for her beauty and for her “sprightly mind,” was wooed by a certain
young Lord Petre, who ardently desired to possess one of “the shining
ringlets” that decked “her smooth ivory neck.” Meanwhile invisible
sylphs and sprites, aware that some “dire disaster” threatens to befall
the unconscious Belinda, hover protectingly about her. Even the very
cards take part in the drama, giving omens alternately of good or of
evil. At last Belinda wins the game and rejoices, but all too soon it
seems in her triumph.
The cards removed
“the board with cups and spoons is crowned, The berries crackle and the
mill turns round,
but coffee alas!
Sent up in vapours to the Baron’s brain, New stratagems, the radiant
Lock to gain. ... Just then Clarissa drew, with tempting grace,
A two-edged weapon from her shining case. He takes the gift with
reverence and extends The little engine on his fingers’ ends; This just
behind Belinda’s neck he spread As o’er the fragrant steams she bends
her head. Swift to the Lock a thousand sprites repair, A thousand wings
by turns blow back the hair;
The peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide To enclose the Lock;
now joins it to divide. ... The meeting points the sacred hair
dissever From the fair head, for ever and for ever!
* * * * *
The Lock, obtained with guilt and kept with pain, In every place is
sought, but sought in vain: With such a prize no mortal must be blest,
So Heaven decrees: with Heaven who can contest? ... Then cease, bright
nymph! to mourn thy ravished hair Which adds new glory to the shining
sphere! Not all the tresses that fair heads can boast Shall draw such
envy as the Lock you lost. For after all the murders of your eye, When
after millions slain, yourself shall die. ... This Lock the Muse shall
consecrate to fame, And ‘midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXIX
UFTON COURT
One of the most striking buildings in the beautiful county of Berkshire
often visited by Miss Mitford is Ufton Court, a stately manor-house of
considerable extent “that stands on the summit of a steep acclivity
looking over a rich and fertile valley to a range of wooded hills.”
The court is approached by a double avenue of oaks, on emerging from
which the fine old Elizabethan mansion is seen rising beyond its
smooth-spreading lawns and shady trees. It is surmounted “by more gable
ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day,” and by tall
clustered chimneys. Its long façade is flanked by two projecting wings,
and in the centre is a large porch, forming the letter E in the true
Elizabethan style. The entrance door of solid oak studded with great
nails might well have resisted an ancient battering-ram.
[Illustration: THE PORCH]
In the northern wing of Ufton Court we come once more upon associations
with the name of Arabella Fermor—the “fair Belinda” of the “Rape
of the Lock.” Here it was that she came to live upon her marriage in
1715 with Mr. Francis Perkins, a member of an ancient Roman Catholic
family. Mr. Perkins in honour of his bride had the rooms in this wing
newly decorated in the elegant style of the early eighteenth century.
The ceiling of the larger room, which is still called Belinda’s
Parlour, is adorned with mouldings of graceful design, while the small
panelling on the walls was replaced by the tall decorated panels then
just come into fashion. In the same way a lofty window was introduced
to shed light upon the whole.
[Illustration: ARABELLA FERMOR (MRS. PERKINS)
_By W. Sykes_]
[Illustration: FRANCIS PERKINS
_By W. Sykes_]
We learn from an old list of the furniture of Ufton Court that in a
small room near to Belinda’s Parlour there stood formerly a harpsichord
and an ombre table, the latter singularly suggestive of the heroine of
the “Rape of the Lock.”[12]
[Footnote 12: See _The History of Ufton Court_, by H. Mary Sharp.]
Two fine portraits exist of Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, which probably hung
in Belinda’s room. They are both signed with the name of W. Sykes, an
artist who flourished in the early part of the eighteenth century. That
of Mrs. Perkins must have been painted before her marriage, as her
maiden name is inscribed upon the picture, together with two lines
from the “Rape of the Lock,” thus:—
_Mrs. Arabella Fermor_
“_On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,_ _Which Jews might
kiss and Infidels adore._”
The lady’s dress is of a soft greenish blue colour so often seen in
portraits of that period.
The only engravings which exist of these portraits were taken from
copies of them made by Gardner, but they are not satisfactory, and it
is to the kindness of the present owner of the original pictures that
we are indebted for permission to reproduce them in this work.
Mary Russell Mitford has written much of Ufton Court. She delighted in
wandering about the old rambling mansion. “It retained strong marks of
former stateliness,” she writes, “in the fine proportion of the lofty
and spacious apartments, the rich mouldings of the ceilings, the carved
chimney-pieces and panelled walls; while the fragments of stained glass
in the windows of the great gallery, the relics of mouldering tapestry
that fluttered against the walls, and above all the secret chamber
constructed for a priest’s hiding-place in the days of Protestant
persecution conspired to give Mrs. Radcliffe-like Castle of Udolpho
sort of romance to the manor-house.”
[Illustration: BELINDA’S PARLOUR]
“The priest’s hiding-place,” she continues, “was discovered early in
the nineteenth century. A narrow ladder led down into this gloomy
resort, and at the bottom was found a crucifix. As many as a dozen
carefully masked openings into dark hiding-places have been discovered
in this storey; no doubt they were connected one with the other,
although the clue to the labyrinth is wanting.”
A broad terrace walk lies behind the Court, and from this terrace a
flight of stone steps of quaint construction leads down to a beautiful
walled garden. Here we can imagine Belinda and her friends enjoying the
delights of a summer evening and surveying the wide view which lies
beyond the garden of sloping fields to a wooded valley watered by a
rushing stream.
A pathway of the softest turf leads from the foot of the steps across
the garden to the pillars of a former gateway surmounted by stone balls
and flanked by two ancient gnarled yews, which stand like sentinels
to guard the entrance. In the centre of the garden the turf widens
to a circular piece of lawn, upon which stands an old sundial. It is
surrounded by gay flowers of all sorts, and is partly enclosed by a
rustic fence, forming a fairy garden as it were within the great garden.
[Illustration: THE GARDEN STEPS]
Beyond the main boundary wall the greensward slopes down abruptly to a
chain of fish ponds. These must have been kept neat and trim when fish,
so much needed for a Roman Catholic household, was difficult to obtain
beyond the precincts of the Court. But the ponds are beautiful in
their neglected condition, with their luxuriant growth of water plants,
their surrounding trees, whose branches are reflected below, and the
occasional glimpse of a moorhen skimming past.
Miss Mitford speaks of there being “on the lawn in front of the mansion
some magnificent elms, splendid both in size and form, and one gigantic
broad-browed oak—the real oak of the English forest—that must have seen
many centuries.” Its upper boughs have now gone, but its huge trunk and
lower foliage still remain.
It is of this oak that a poetess of the day wrote:—
“Triumphant o’er the tooth of time And o’er the woodman’s blade, Yon
oak still rears its head sublime And spreads its ample shade.”
À propos of Ufton Court, with its ingeniously contrived hiding-places
for unhappy refugees, Miss Mitford writes: “I am indebted to my friend
Mrs. Hughes for the account of another hiding-place in which the
interest is ensured by that charm of charms—an unsolved and insoluble
mystery.”
On some alterations being projected in a large mansion in Scotland
belonging to the late Sir George Warrender, the architect, after
examining and, so to say, studying the house, declared that there was
a space in the centre for which there was no accounting, and that there
must certainly be a concealed chamber. Neither master nor servants had
ever heard of such a thing, and the assertion was treated with some
scorn. The architect, however, persisted, and at last proved by the
sure test of measurement ... that the space he had spoken of did exist,
and as no entrance of any sort could be discovered from the surrounding
rooms it was resolved to make an incision in the wall. A large and
lofty apartment was disclosed, richly and completely furnished as a
bed-chamber; a large four-post bed, spread with blankets, counterpanes,
and the finest sheets was prepared for instant occupation. The very
wax lights in the candlesticks stood ready for lighting. The room was
heavily hung and carpeted as if to deaden sound, and was of course
perfectly dark. No token was found to indicate the intended occupant,
for it did not appear to have been used, and the general conjecture
was that the refuge had been prepared for some unfortunate Jacobite in
the ‘15, who had either fallen into the hands of the Government or had
escaped from the kingdom.
CHAPTER XXX
A FURTHER GLANCE AT OUR VILLAGE
Miss Mitford writes in 1830:—
“Our village continues to stand pretty much where it did, and has
undergone as little change in the last two years as any hamlet of its
inches in the county.... I have hinted that it had a trick of standing
still, of remaining stationary, unchanged and unimproved in this most
changeable and improving world.... There it stands, the same long
straggling street of pretty cottages divided by pretty gardens, wholly
unchanged in size or appearance, unincreased and undiminished by a
single brick.
“Ah, the in-and-out cottage! the dear, dear home!... No changes there!
except that the white kitten who sits purring at the window under the
great myrtle has succeeded to his lamented grandfather, our beautiful
Persian cat. I cannot find an alteration. To be sure, yesterday evening
a slight misfortune happened to our goodly tenement, occasioned by the
unlucky diligence which, under the conduct of a sleepy coachman and
a restive horse, contrived to knock down and demolish the wall of our
court, and fairly to drive through the front garden, thereby destroying
sundry curious stocks, carnations and geraniums. It is a mercy that
the unruly steed was content with battering the wall.... There was
quite din enough without any addition. The three insides (ladies)
squalling from the interior of that commodious vehicle; the outsides
(gentlemen) swearing on the roof; the coachman still half asleep, but
unconsciously blowing his horn; we in the house screaming and scolding;
the passers-by shouting and hallooing; May, who little brooked such an
invasion of her territories, barking in her tremendous lion note, and
putting down the other noises like a clap of thunder. The passengers,
coachman, horses and spectators all righted at last, and no harm done
but to my flowers and to the wall. May, however, stands bewailing
the ruins, for that low wall was her favourite haunt; she used to
parade backwards and forwards on the top of it as if to show herself,
just after the manner of a peacock on the top of a house. But the
wall is to be rebuilt to-morrow with old weather-stained bricks—no
patchwork! exactly in the same form; May herself will not find out the
difference, so that in the way of alteration this little misfortune
will pass for nothing. Neither have we any improvements worth calling
such, except that the wheeler’s green door has been retouched out of
the same pot (as I judge from the tint) with which he furbished up
our new-old pony-chaise; that the shop window of our neighbour, the
universal dealer Bromley’s, hath been beautified, and his name and
calling splendidly set forth in yellow letters on a black ground; and
that our landlord of the ‘Rose’ has hoisted a new sign of unparalleled
splendour.”
Miss Mitford happened to possess an “historic staff” which she greatly
valued, and which had been handed down from one relative to another
from its former owner—that Duchess of Athol and Lady of Man of whom
mention has been made in an earlier chapter.
At the period we are writing of Miss Mitford used the staff rather as
an ornament than otherwise, being then, as she says, “the best walker
of her years for a dozen miles round”; but in later life she was glad
of its support. “Now this staff,” she writes, “one of the oldest
friends I have in the world, is pretty nearly as well known as myself
in our Berkshire village.”
One day the stick was not to be found in its usual place in the hall,
“it was missing, was gone, was lost!” A great search was made for it
far and wide. “Really, ma’am,” quoth her faithful maid, “there is
some comfort in the interest the people take in the stick! If it were
anything alive—the pony, or Fanchon, or ourselves—they could not be
more sorry. Master Brent, ma’am, at the top of the street, he promises
to speak to everybody, so does William Wheeler, who goes everywhere,
and Mrs. Bromley at the shop; and the carrier and the postman. I
daresay the whole parish knows it by this time! I have not been outside
the gate to-day, but a dozen people have asked me if we had heard of
_our_ stick!”
The bustle of the village and the anxiety of Mary were, however, soon
to be allayed. “At ten o’clock one evening a rustling of the front
door latch was heard, together with a pattering of little feet, then
the little feet advanced into the house and some little tongues gained
courage to tell their good news—the stick was found!
An intimate friend of Miss Mitford’s, a certain Miss James, of Binfield
Park, had been staying for a short time at the inn hard by, on which
occasion Mary addressed the following lines to her:—
“The village inn! The wood-fire burning bright, The solitary taper’s
flickering light! The lowly couch! the casement swinging free! My
noblest friend, was this a place for thee? Yet in that humble room,
from all apart, We poured forth mind for mind and heart for heart,
Ranging from idlest words and tales of mirth To the deep mysteries of
heaven and earth.
* * * * *
No fitting place; yet (inconsistent strain And selfish) come, I
prythee! come again.”
* * * * *
In a story entitled _The Black Velvet Bag_ Miss Mitford has given
an amusing account of some of her shopping experiences in “Belford
Regis,” her name for Reading, where the various purchases for the small
household of Three Mile Cross were usually made.
“Last Friday fortnight,” she writes, “was one of those anomalies in the
weather with which we English people are visited for our sins; a day
of intolerable wind and insupportable dust, an equinoctial gale out
of season, a piece of March unnaturally foisted into the very heart
of May.... On that day did I set forth to the good town of B—— on the
feminine errand called shopping. I am a true daughter of Eve, a dear
lover of bargains and bright colours, and, knowing this, have generally
been wise enough to keep as much as I can out of temptation. At last
a sort of necessity arose for some slight purchases. The shopping was
inevitable, and I undertook the whole concern at once, most heroically
resolving to spend just so much and no more, and half comforting
myself that I had a full morning’s work of indispensables and should
have no time for extraneous extravagances.
“There was to be sure a prodigious accumulation of errands and wants.
The evening before they had been set down in great form on a slip of
paper headed thus—‘things wanted.’ To how many and various catalogues
that title would apply—from him who wants a blue riband to him who
wants bread and cheese! My list was astounding. It was written in
double columns in an invisible hand.... In good open printing it would
have cut a respectable figure as a catalogue and filled a decent number
of pages—a priced catalogue too, for as I had a given sum to carry
to market I amused myself with calculating the proper and probable
cost of every article, in which process I most egregiously cheated
the shop-keeper and myself by copying with the credulity of hope from
the puffs of newspapers, and expecting to buy fine solid wearable
goods at advertising prices. In this way I stretched my money a good
deal further than it would go, and swelled my catalogue, so that at
last, in spite of compression, I had no room for another word, and was
obliged to crowd several small but important articles such as cotton,
laces, pins, needles, shoe-strings, etc., into that very irregular
and disorderly store-house—that place where most things deposited are
lost—_my memory_, by courtesy so called.
“The written list was safely consigned, with a well-filled purse, to
my usual repository, a black velvet bag, and the next morning I and
my bag, with its nicely balanced contents of wants and money, were
safely convoyed in a little open carriage to the good town of B——.
There I dismounted and began to bargain most vigorously, visiting the
cheapest shops, cheapening the cheapest articles, yet wisely buying
the strongest and the best, a little astonished at first to find
everything so much dearer than I had set it down, yet soon reconciled
to this misfortune by the magical influence which shopping possesses
over a woman’s fancy—all the sooner reconciled as the monetary list lay
unlooked at and unthought of in its grave receptacle, the black velvet
bag.
“On I went with an air of cheerful business, of happy importance, till
my money began to wax small. Certain small aberrations had occurred,
too, in my economy. One article that had happened, by rare accident,
to be below my calculation, and indeed below any calculation—calico at
ninepence, fine, thick, strong, wide calico at ninepence absolutely
enchanted me and I took the whole piece; then after buying M.
[material for] a gown according to order, I saw one that I liked better
and bought that too. Then I fell in love, was actually captivated by a
sky-blue sash and handkerchief,—not the poor, thin greeny colour which
usually passes under that dishonoured name, but the rich full tint of
the noonday sky, and a cap riband really pink that might have vied
with the inside leaves of a moss-rose. Then in hunting after cheapness
I got into obscure shops where, not finding what I asked for, I was
fain to take something that they had, purely to make a compensation
for the trouble of lugging out drawers and answering questions. Lastly
I was fairly coaxed into some articles by the irresistibility of the
sellers, [in one case] by the fluent impudence of a lying shopman who,
under cover of a well-darkened window, affirmed on his honour that his
brown satin was a perfect match to my green pattern, and forced the
said satin down my throat accordingly. With these helps my money melted
all too fast; at half-past five my purse was entirely empty, and as
shopping with an empty purse has by no means the relish of shopping
with a full one I was quite willing and ready to go home to dinner,
pleased as a child with my purchases and wholly unsuspecting the sins
of omission, the errands unperformed, which were the natural result of
my unconsulted _memoranda_ and my treacherous memory.
“Home I returned a happy and proud woman, wise in my own conceit, a
thrifty fashion-monger, laden like a pedlar, with huge packages in
stout brown holland tied up with whipcord, and genteel little parcels
papered and pack-threaded in shopman-like style. At last we were
safely stowed in the pony-chaise, which had much ado to hold us, my
little black bag as usual in my lap. When we ascended the steep hill
out of B—— a sudden puff of wind took at once my cottage-bonnet and my
large cloak, blew the bonnet off my head so that it hung behind me,
suspended by the riband, and fairly snapped the string of the cloak,
which flew away much in the style of John Gilpin’s renowned in story.
My companion, pitying my plight, exerted himself manfully to regain
the fly-away garments, shoved the head into the bonnet, or the bonnet
over the head (I do not know which phrase best describes the manœuvre),
with one hand and recovered the refractory cloak with the other. It was
wonderful what a tug he was forced to give before that obstinate cloak
could be brought round; it was swelled with the wind like a bladder,
animated, so to say, like a living thing, and threatened to carry pony
and chaise and riders and packages backward down the hill, as if it had
been a sail of a ship. At last the contumacious garment was mastered.
We righted, and by dint of sitting sideways and turning my back on my
kind comrade, I got home without any further damage than the loss of
my bag, which, though not missed before the chaise had been unladen,
had undoubtedly gone by the board in the gale, and I lamented my trusty
companion without in the least foreseeing the use it would probably be
of to my reputation.
“Immediately after dinner I produced my purchases. They were much
admired, and the quantity when spread out in our little room being
altogether dazzling, and the quality satisfactory, the cheapness was
never doubted. Nobody calculated, and the bills being really lost in
the lost bag, and the particular prices just as much lost in memory
(the ninepenny calico was the only article whose cost occurred to me),
I passed, without telling anything like a fib, merely by a discreet
silence, for the best and thriftiest bargainer that ever went shopping.
After some time spent very pleasantly in admiration on one side and
display on the other we were interrupted by the demand for some of the
little articles which I had forgotten.
“‘The sewing-silk, please, ma’am.’
“‘Sewing-silk! I don’t know—look about.’
“Ah! she might look long enough! no sewing-silk was there. ‘Very
strange.’
“Presently came other enquiries. ‘Where’s the tape?’ ‘The tape!’
“‘Yes, my dear; and the needles, pins, cotton, stay-laces, boot-laces.’
“‘The bobbin, the ferret, shirt buttons, shoe-strings?’ quoth she of
the sewing-silk, taking up the cry, and forthwith began a search.... At
last she suddenly desisted from her rummage.
“‘Without doubt, ma’am, they are in the reticule, and all lost,’ said
she in a very pathetic tone.
“‘Really,’ said I, a little conscious stricken, ‘I don’t recollect,
perhaps I might forget.’
“‘But you never could forget so many things; besides, you wrote them
down.’
“‘I don’t know. I am not sure.’ But I was not listened to; Harriet’s
conjecture had been metamorphosed into a certainty; all my sins of
omission were stowed in the reticule, and before bed-time the little
black bag held forgotten things enough to fill a sack.
“Never was reticule so lamented by all but its owner; a boy was
immediately dispatched to look for it, and on his returning
empty-handed there was even a talk of having it cried. My care, on the
other hand, was all directed to prevent its being found. I had had the
good luck to lose it in a suburb of B—— renowned for filching, and I
remembered that the street was at that moment full of people ... so I
went to bed in the comfortable assurance that it was gone for ever.
“But there is nothing certain in this world—not even a thief’s
dishonesty. Two old women, who had pounced at once on my valuable
property, quarrelled about the plunder, and one of them in a fit of
resentment at being cheated of her share went to the mayor of B—— and
informed against her companion. The mayor, an intelligent and active
magistrate, immediately took the disputed bag and all its contents
into his own possession, and as he is also a man of great politeness
he restored it as soon as possible to the right owner. The very first
thing that saluted my eyes when I awoke in the morning was a note from
Mr. Mayor with a sealed packet. The fatal truth was visible. There
it lay, that identical black bag, with its name-tickets, its cambric
handkerchief, its unconsulted list and its thirteen bills.... I had
recovered my reticule and lost my reputation!”
CHAPTER XXXI
ECCENTRIC NEIGHBOURS
Mary Russell Mitford had strong likes and dislikes. Her American friend
Mr. James T. Fields, who knew her well, remarks:[13] “She loathed mere
dandies, and there were no epithets too hot for her contempt in that
direction. Old beaux she heartily despised, and speaking of one whom
she had known, I remember she quoted with a fine scorn this appropriate
passage from Dickens: ‘Ancient, dandified men, those crippled
_invalides_ from the campaign of vanity, where the only powder was
hair-powder and the only bullets fancy balls.’”
[Footnote 13: See _Yesterdays with Authors_.]
In one of her stories we come upon such a character—Mr. Thompson as she
calls him—a gentleman who had just arrived from London, and whom she
met at the house of a friend.
“Mr. Thompson was a gentleman of about—Pshaw! nothing is so impolite
as to go guessing how many years a man may have lived in this most
excellent world, especially when it is perfectly clear from his dress
and demeanour that the register of his birth is the last document
relating to himself which he would care to see produced.
“Mr. Thompson then was a gentleman of no particular age, not quite so
young as he had been, but still in very tolerable preservation, being
pretty exactly that which is understood by the phrase an Old Beau.”
And then, after describing the very artificial appearance of his
physiognomy, she goes on to say: “Altogether it was a head calculated
to convey a very favourable impression of the different artists
employed in getting it up.”
A very different personage to the Old Beau is described by Miss Mitford
in a tale entitled _An Admiral on Shore_.
Admiral Floyd, for so she calls him, had recently come with his wife to
reside in the neighbourhood, and it was when paying a call upon them in
their new home—a fine old mansion standing in beautiful grounds, known
as the White House at Hannonby—that she first made his acquaintance.
“I had been proceeding to call on our new neighbours,” writes Miss
Mitford, “when a very unaccountable noise induced me to pause at the
entrance; a moment’s observation explained the nature of the sound. The
Admiral was shooting wasps with a pocket pistol.... There under the
shade of tall elms sat the veteran, a little old withered man, very
like a pocket pistol himself, brown, succinct, grave and fiery. He wore
an old-fashioned naval uniform of blue, faced with white, which set off
his mahogany countenance, drawn into a thousand deep wrinkles.... At
his side stood a very tall, masculine, large-boned, middle-aged woman,
something like a man in petticoats, whose face, in spite of a quantity
of rouge and a small portion of modest assurance, might still be called
handsome, and could never be mistaken for belonging to other than an
Irish woman.... A younger lady was watching them at a little distance
apparently as much amused as myself. On her advancing to meet me the
pistol was put down and the Admiral joined us. We were acquainted in
a moment, and before the end of my visit he had shown me all over his
house and told me the whole history of his life and adventures.
“At twelve years old he was sent to sea, and had remained there ever
since till now, when an unlucky promotion had sent him ashore and
seemed likely to keep him there. I never saw a man so unaffectedly
displeased with his own title.
“Being, however, on land, his first object was to make his residence
as much like a man-of-war as possible, or rather as much like that
beau-ideal of a habitation, his last frigate, the _Mermaiden_, in which
he had by different prizes made above sixty thousand pounds. By that
standard his calculations were regulated. All the furniture of the
White House at Hannonby was adapted to the proportions of His Majesty’s
ship the _Mermaiden_. The great drawing-room was fitted up exactly on
the model of her cabin, and the whole of that spacious and commodious
mansion made to resemble as much as possible that wonderfully
inconvenient abode, the inside of a ship; everything crammed into the
smallest possible compass, space most unnecessarily economized and
contrivances devised for all those matters which need no contriving at
all. He victualled the house as for an East India voyage, served out
the provisions in rations, and swung the whole family in hammocks.
“It will easily be believed that these innovations in a small village
in a Midland county, where nineteen-twentieths of the inhabitants
had never seen a piece of water larger than Hannonby great pond,
occasioned no small commotion. The poor Admiral had his own troubles;
at first every living thing about the place rebelled—there was a
general mutiny; the very cocks and hens, whom he had crammed up in
coops in the poultry yard, screamed aloud for liberty; and the pigs,
ducks and geese, equally prisoners, squeaked and gabbled for water; the
cows lowed in their stall; the sheep bleated in their pens; the whole
livestock of Hannonby was in durance.
“The most unmanageable of these complainers were, of course, the
servants; with the men, after a little while, he got on tolerably,
sternness and grog (the wind and sun of the fable) conquered them.
His staunchest opponents were of the other sex, the whole tribe of
housemaids and kitchenmaids abhorred him to a woman, and plagued and
thwarted him every hour of the day. He, on his part, returned their
aversion with interest; talked of female stupidity, female awkwardness
and female dirt, and threatened to compound an household of the crew
of the _Mermaiden_ that should shame all the twirlers of mops and
brandishers of brooms in the county.
“Especially he used to vaunt the abilities of a certain Bill Jones as
the best laundress, sempstress, cook and housemaid in the navy; him
he was determined to procure to keep his refractory household in some
order; accordingly he wrote to desire his presence, and Bill, unable to
resist the summons of his old commander, arrived accordingly....
“The dreaded major-domo turned out to be a smart young sailor of
four or five-and-twenty, with an arch smile, a bright, merry eye and
a most knowing nod, by no means insensible to female objurgation or
indifferent to female charms. The women of the house, particularly
the pretty ones, soon perceived their power, and as the Admirable
Crichton of His Majesty’s ship the _Mermaiden_ had amongst his other
accomplishments the address completely to govern his master, all was
soon in the smoothest track possible.... Under his wise direction and
discreet patronage a peace was patched up between the Admiral and his
rebellious handmaids.
“Soothed, guided and humoured by his trusty adherent, and influenced
perhaps by the force of example and the effect of the land breeze which
he had never breathed so long before, our worthy veteran soon began to
show symptoms of a man of this world. He took to gardening and farming,
for which Bill Jones had also a taste, set free his prisoners in the
_basse-cour_ to the unutterable glorification and crowing of cock and
hen and gabbling of goose and turkey, and enlarged his own walk from
pacing backwards and forwards in the dining-room, followed by his old
shipmates, a Newfoundland dog and a tame goat, into a stroll round his
own grounds, to the great delight of those faithful attendants.
“... Amongst the country people he soon became popular. They liked the
testy little gentleman, who dispensed his beer and grog so bountifully,
and talked to them so freely. He would have his own way to be sure,
but then he paid for it; besides, he entered into their tastes and
amusements, promoted May-games, revels and other country sports,
patronized dancing dogs and monkeys and bespoke plays in barns. Above
all he had an exceeding partiality for vagrants, strollers, gipsies and
such like persons, listened to their tales with a delightful simplicity
of belief, pitied them, relieved them, fought their battles at the
bench and the vestry, and got into two or three scrapes with constables
and magistrates by the activity of his protection.
“Only one counterfeit sailor with a sham wooden leg he found out at a
question and, by aid of Bill Jones, ducked in the horse-pond for an
impostor, till the unlucky wretch, a thorough landlubber, was nearly
drowned, an adventure which turned out the luckiest of his life, he
having carried his case to an attorney, who forced the Admiral to pay
fifty pounds for the exploit.
“Our good veteran was equally popular amongst the gentry of the
neighbourhood. His own hospitality was irresistible, and his frankness
and simplicity, mixed with a sort of petulant vivacity, combined to
make him a most welcome relief to the dullness of a country dinner
party. He enjoyed society extremely, and even had a spare bed erected
for company, moved thereto by an accident which befell the fat rector
of Kinton, who, having unfortunately consented to sleep at Hannonby
one wet night, had alarmed the whole house, and nearly broken his
own neck by a fall from his hammock.... His reading was none of the
most extensive: _Robinson Crusoe_, the _Naval Chronicle_, Southey’s
admirable _Life of Nelson_ and Smollett’s novels formed the greater
part of his library, and for other books he cared little.
“For the rest he was a most kind and excellent person, although a
little testy and not a little absolute, and a capital disciplinarian,
although addicted to the reverse sins of making other people tipsy
whilst he kept himself sober, and of sending forth oaths in volleys
whilst he suffered none other to swear. He had besides a few prejudices
incident to his condition—loved his country to the point of hating all
the rest of the world, especially the French, and regarded his own
profession with a pride which made him intolerant of every other. To
the army he had an intense and growing hatred, much augmented since
victory upon victory had deprived him of the comfortable feeling of
scorn. The battle of Waterloo fairly posed him. ‘To be sure to have
drubbed the French was a fine thing—a very fine thing—no denying that!
but why not have fought out the quarrel by sea?’”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXXII
THE MAY-HOUSES
Miss Mitford delighted in all the simple pleasures of country life, and
entered into them with the enthusiasm of youth.
On a certain morning in spring-time she and her father set out in their
pony-chaise to attend the “Maying” at Bramley.
“Never was a day more congenial to a happy purpose,” she writes. “It
was a day made for country weddings and dances on the green—a day of
dazzling light, of ardent sunshine falling on hedgerows and meadows
fresh with spring showers.... We passed through the well-known and
beautiful scenery of W——[14] Park and the pretty village of M——[15]
with a feeling of new admiration, as if we had never before felt their
charms.... On we passed gaily and happily as far as we knew our way,
perhaps a little further, for the place of our destination was new to
both of us, when we had the luck, good or bad, to meet with a director
in the person of the butcher of M——. He soon gave us the customary and
unintelligible directions as to lanes and turnings, first to the right,
then to the left, etc....
[Footnote 14: Wokefield Park.]
[Footnote 15: Mortimer.]
“On we went, twisting and turning through a labyrinth of lanes ...
till we came suddenly on a solitary farm-house which had one solitary
inmate, a smiling, middle-aged woman, who came to us and offered her
services with the most alert civility.
“All her boys and girls were gone to the Maying, she said, and she
remained to keep house.
“‘The Maying! We are near Bramley then? Is there no carriage road?
Where are we?’
“‘At Silchester, close to the walls, only half a mile from the church.’
“‘At Silchester!’ and in ten minutes we had said a thankful farewell
to our kind informant, had retraced our steps a little, had turned up
another lane, and found ourselves at the foot of that commanding spot
which antiquaries call the amphitheatre, close under the walls of the
Roman city.”
Miss Mitford has written the following lines on this striking scene:—
“Firm as rocks thy ruins stand And hem around thy fertile land; That
land where once a city fair Flourished and pour’d her thousands there:
Where now the waving cornfields glow And trace thy wide streets as
they grow. Ah! chronicle of ages gone, Thou dwellest in thy pride
alone.”
“Under the walls,” she continues, “I [met] an old acquaintance, the
schoolmaster of Silchester, who happened to be there in his full glory,
playing the part of cicerone to a party of ladies, and explaining far
more than he knows, or than anyone knows of streets and gates and sites
of temples, which, by the way, the worthy pedagogue usually calls
parish churches. I never was so glad to see him in my life, never
thought he could have spoken with so much sense and eloquence as were
comprised in the two words ‘straight forward,’ by which he answered our
enquiry as to the road to Bramley.
“And forward we went by a way beautiful beyond description, and left
the venerable walls behind us.... But I must loiter on the road no
longer. Our various delays of a broken bridge—a bog—another wrong
turning—and a meeting with a loaded waggon in a lane too narrow to
pass—all this must remain untold.
“At last we reached a large farm-house at Bramley; another mile
remained to the Green, but that was impassable. Nobody thinks of
riding at Bramley.... We must walk, but the appearance of gay crowds
of rustics, all passing along one path, gave assurance that this time
we should not lose our way.... Cross two fields more and up a quiet
lane and we are at the Maying, announced afar off by the merry sound of
music and the merrier clatter of childish voices. Here we are at the
Green, a little turfy spot where three roads meet, close, shut in by
hedgerows, with a pretty white cottage and its long slip of a garden at
one angle.... In the midst grows a superb horse-chestnut in the full
glory of its flowery pyramids, and from the trunk of this chestnut the
May-houses commence. They are covered alleys built of green boughs,
decorated with garlands and great bunches of flowers—the gayest that
blow—lilacs, guelder roses, peonies, tulips, stocks—hanging down like
chandeliers among the dancers; for of dancers, gay, dark-eyed young
girls in straw bonnets and white gowns, and their lovers in their
Sunday attire, the May-houses were full. The girls had mostly the look
of extreme youth, and danced well and quietly like ladies—too much
so.... Outside was the fun. It is the outside, the upper gallery of the
world that has that good thing. There were children laughing, eating,
trying to cheat and being cheated round an ancient and practised vender
of oranges and ginger-bread; and on the other side of the tree lay a
merry group of old men.... That group would have suited Teniers; it
smoked and drank a little, but it laughed a great deal more. There
were ... young mothers strolling about with infants in their arms, and
ragged boys peeping through the boughs at the dancers, and the bright
sun shining gloriously on all this innocent happiness. Oh, what a
pretty sight it was—worth losing our way for!”
We hear of another Maying which took place in a neighbouring hamlet
of “Our Village,” which Miss Mitford calls Whitley Wood, into which
narrative is interwoven an amusing account of the love affairs of mine
host of the “Rose”—the village inn hard by the Mitfords’ cottage.
“Landlord Sims, the master of the revels,” writes Miss Mitford, “and
our very good neighbour, is a portly, bustling man of five-and-forty
or thereabout, with a hale, jovial visage, a merry eye, a pleasant
smile and a general air of good-fellowship.... There is not a better
companion or a more judicious listener in the county.... No one can
wonder at Master Sim’s popularity.
“After his good wife’s death this popularity began to extend itself in
a remarkable manner amongst the females of the neighbourhood. [His]
Betsy and Letty were good little girls, quick, civil and active, yet,
poor things, what could such young girls know of a house like the
‘Rose’? All would go to rack and ruin without the eye of a mistress!
Master Sims must look out for a wife. So thought the whole female
world, and apparently Master Sims began to think so himself.
[Illustration: OLD SHOEING FORGE]
“The first fair one to whom his attention was directed was a rosy,
pretty widow, a pastry-cook of the next town who arrived in our
village on a visit to her cousin the baker for the purpose of giving
confectionery lessons to his wife. Nothing was ever so hot as that
courtship. During the week that the lady of pie-crust stayed, her
lover almost lived in the oven.... It would be a most suitable match,
as all the parish agreed.... And when our landlord carried her back to
B—— in his new-painted green cart all the village agreed that they were
gone to be married, and the ringers were just setting up a peal when
Master Sims returned alone, single, crestfallen, dejected; the bells
stopped of themselves, and we heard no more of the pretty pastry-cook.
For three months after that rebuff mine host, albeit not addicted to
assertions, testified an equal dislike to women and tartlets, widows
and plum-cake....
“The fit, however, wore off in time, and he began again to follow the
advice of his neighbours and to look out for a wife, up street and down
street.... The down-street lady was a widow also, the portly, comely
relict of our drunken village blacksmith, who began to find her shop,
her journeymen and her eight children ... rather more than a lone woman
could manage, and to sigh for a helpmate to ease her of her cares....
Master Sims was the coadjutor on whom she had inwardly pitched, and
accordingly she threw out broad hints to that effect every time she
encountered him ... and Mr. Sims was far too gallant and too much in
the habit of assenting to listen unmoved ... and the whispers and
smiles and hand-pressings were becoming very tender.... This was his
down-street flame.
“The rival lady was Miss Lydia Day, the carpenter’s sister, a slim,
upright maiden, not remarkable for beauty and not quite so young as
she had been, who, on inheriting a small annuity from the mistress
with whom she had spent the best of her days, retired to her native
village to live on her means. A genteel, demure, quiet personage was
Miss Lydia Day, much addicted to snuff and green tea, and not averse to
a little gentle scandal—for the rest a good sort of woman and _un très
bon parti_ for Master Sims, who ... made love to her whenever she came
into his head.... Remiss as he was, he had no lack of encouragement
to complain of—for she ... put on her best silk, and her best simper,
and lighted up her faded complexion into something approaching a blush
whenever he came to visit her. And this was Master Sims’ up-street love.
“So stood affairs at the ‘Rose’ when the day of the Maying arrived, and
the double flirtation ... proved on this occasion extremely useful.
Each of the ladies contributed her aid to the festival, Miss Lydia by
tying up sentimental garlands for the May-house ... the widow by giving
her whole bevy of boys and girls a holiday and turning them loose
in the neighbourhood to collect flowers as they could. Very useful
auxiliaries were these eight foragers; they scoured the country far and
near—irresistible mendicants, pardonable thieves!
“... By the time a cricket match [which opened proceedings] was over
the world began to be gay at Whitley Wood. Carts and gigs and horses
and carriages and people of all sorts arrived from all quarters....
Fiddlers, ballad-singers, cake, baskets—Punch—Master Frost crying
cherries—a Frenchman with dancing dogs—a Bavarian woman selling
brooms—half a dozen stalls with fruit and frippery—and twenty noisy
games of quoits and bowls and ninepins gave to the assemblage the
bustle, clatter and gaiety of a Dutch fair. Plenty of eating in the
booths ... and landlord Sims bustling everywhere, assisted by the
little light-footed maidens, his daughters, all smiles and curtsies,
and by a pretty black-eyed young woman—name unknown—with whom, even
in the midst of his hurry, he found time, as it seemed to me, for a
little philandering. What would the widow and Miss Lydia have said? But
they remained in happy ignorance—the one drinking tea in most decorous
primness in a distant marquee, the other in full chase after the most
unlucky of all her urchins.
“Meanwhile the band struck up in the Mayhouse, and the dance, after
a little dinner, was fairly set afloat—an honest English country
dance—with ladies and gentlemen at the top and country lads and lassies
at the bottom; a happy mixture of cordial kindness on the one hand and
pleased respect on the other. It was droll though to see the beplumed
and beflowered French hats, the silks and the furbelows sailing and
rustling amidst the straw bonnets and cotton gowns of the humbler
dancers.
“Well! the dance finished, the sun went down, and we departed. The
Maying is over, the booths carried away and the May-house demolished.
Everything has fallen into its old position except the love affairs
of landlord Sims. The pretty lass with the black eyes, who first made
her appearance at Whitley Wood, is actually staying at the Rose Inn on
a visit to his daughters, and the village talk goes that she is to be
the mistress of that thriving hostelry and the wife of its master....
Nobody knows exactly who the black-eyed damsel may be—but she’s young
and pretty and civil and modest, and without intending to depreciate
the merits of either of her competitors, I cannot help thinking that
our good neighbour has shown his taste.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
WALKS IN THE COUNTRY
The above title is given to many a delightful ramble to which Mary
Russell Mitford takes her readers.
Writing one day in the month of June, she exclaims: “What a glowing,
glorious day! Summer in its richest prime, noon in its most sparkling
brightness, little white clouds dappling the deep blue sky, and the
sun, now partially veiled and now bursting through them with an
intensity of light.... We are going to drive to the old house at
Aberleigh, to spend a morning under the shade of those balmy firs and
amongst those luxuriant rose trees and by the side of that brimming
Loddon river.
“‘Do not expect us before six o’clock,’ said I as I left the house.
“‘Six at soonest,’ added my charming companion, and off we drove in our
little pony-chaise drawn by an old mare, and with the good-humoured
urchin, Henry’s successor, who takes care of horse and chaise, and cow
and garden for our charioteer.
“My comrade ... Emily is a person whom it is a privilege to know. She
is quite like a creation of the older poets, and might pass for one of
Shakespeare’s or Fletcher’s women stepped into life; just as tender, as
playful, as gentle and as kind....
[Illustration: BRIDGE ON THE LODDON]
“But here we are at the bridge! Here we must alight! ‘This is the
Loddon, Emily. Is it not a beautiful river? rising level with its
banks, so clear and smooth and peaceful ... bearing on its pellucid
stream the snowy water-lily, the purest of flowers, which sits
enthroned on its own cool leaves looking chastity itself, like the lady
in Comus ...’. We must dismount here and leave Richard to take care of
our equipage under the shade of these trees whilst we walk up to the
house. See, there it is! We must cross this stile, there is no other
way now.
“And crossing the stile we were immediately ... in full view of the
Great House, a beautiful structure of James the First time, whose
glassless windows and dilapidated doors form a melancholy contrast with
the strength and entireness of the rich and massive front. The story
of that ruin—for such it is—is always to me singularly affecting. It
is that of the decay of an ancient and distinguished family gradually
reduced from the highest wealth and station to actual poverty.... But
here we are in the smooth, grassy ride on the top of a steep turfy
slope descending to the river, crowned with enormous firs and limes of
equal growth, looking across the winding waters into a sweet, peaceful
landscape of quiet meadows, shut in by distant woods. What a fragrance
is in the air from the balmy fir trees and the blossomed limes! What
an intensity of odour! And what a murmur of bees in the lime trees!
And what a pleasant sound it is! the pleasantest of busy sounds, that
which comes associated with all that is good and beautiful—industry and
forecast, and sunshine and flowers.
“Emily exclaimed in admiration as we stood under the deep, strong,
leafy shadow and still more ... when roses, really trees, almost
intercepted our passage.
“‘On, Emily! farther yet! Force your way by that jessamine—it will
yield; I will take care of this stubborn white rose bough.’ ... After
we won our way through that strait, at some expense of veils and
flounces, she stopped to contemplate and admire the tall, graceful
shrub whose long, thorny stems, spreading in every direction, had
opposed our progress, and now waved those delicate clusters over our
heads.... ‘What an exquisite fragrance!’ she exclaimed, ‘and what a
beautiful flower! so pale and white and tender, and the petals thin and
smooth as silk! What rose is it?’
“‘Don’t you know? Did you never see it before? It is rare now, I
believe, and seems rarer than it is because it only blossoms in very
hot summers; but this, Emily, is the musk-rose—that very musk-rose of
which Titania talks, and which is worthy of Shakespeare and of her.’”
Having reached some steps that led to a square summer-house, formerly
a banqueting-hall with a boat-house beneath it, they were soon close
to the old mansion. “But it looked sad and desolate,” remarks Miss
Mitford, “and the entrance, choked with brambles and nettles, seemed
almost to repel our steps.”
Later on a halt was made on the further side of the river for “Emily”
to take a sketch, and this entailed “a delicious walk, when the sun,
having gone in, a reviving coolness seemed to breathe over the water,”
and, lastly, a drive home amid the lengthening shadows. So ended their
pleasant jaunt.
The old house known now as Arborfield House was rebuilt some years
after Miss Mitford knew it. The style is, of course, quite modern,
but the beautiful grounds, with their magnificent trees and the river
winding through them, remain unchanged, together with the luxuriant
flower gardens, but which are now carefully tended. We have wandered
through those grounds and have seen the poplars and acacias and firs
gracefully blending their foliage together as she has described them.
[Illustration: IN ABERLEIGH PARK]
Miss Mitford had a decided liking for gipsies, and they often figure
in her village stories. “There is nothing under the sun,” she writes,
“that harmonizes so well with nature, especially in her woodland
recesses, as that picturesque people who are, so to say, the wild
genus—the pheasants and roebucks of the human race.”
In one of these tales, after describing a spot of singularly wild
beauty some miles distant from her home, where a dark deep pool lay
beneath the shade of great trees, she says:—
“In this lovely place I first saw our gipsies. They had pitched their
little tent under one of the oak trees.... The party consisted only
of four—an old crone in a tattered red cloak and black bonnet who was
stooping over a kettle of which the contents were probably as savoury
as that of Meg Merrilees, renowned in story; a pretty black-eyed girl
at work under the trees; a sunburnt urchin of eight or nine, collecting
sticks and dead leaves to feed their out-of-door fire; and a slender
lad two or three years older, who lay basking in the sun, with a couple
of shabby dogs of the sort called mongrel in all the joy of idleness,
whilst a grave, patient donkey stood grazing hard by. It was a pretty
picture, with its soft autumnal sky, its rich woodiness, its sunshine,
its verdure, the light smoke curling from the fire, and the group
disposed around so harmless poor outcasts! and so happy—a beautiful
picture! I stood gazing at it till I was half ashamed to look longer,
and came away half afraid that they should depart before I could see
them again.
“This fear I soon found to be groundless. The old gipsy was a
celebrated fortune-teller.... The whole village rang with the
predictions of this modern Cassandra.... I myself could not help
admiring the real cleverness, the genuine gipsy tact with which she
adapted her foretellings to the age, the habits and the known desires
and circumstances of her clients.
“To our little pet Lizzie, for instance, a damsel of seven, she
predicted a fairing; to Ben Kirby, a youth of thirteen, head batter of
the boys, a new cricket ball; to Ben’s sister Lucy, a girl some three
years his senior, a pink top-knot; whilst for Miss Sophia Matthews, an
old-maidish schoolmistress ... she foresaw one handsome husband; and
for the smart widow Simmons two, etc. etc.
“No wonder that all the world—that is to say all our world—were crazy
to have their fortunes told—to enjoy the pleasure of hearing from such
undoubted authority that what they wished to be should be. Amongst the
most eager to take a peep into futurity was our pretty maid Harriet;
although her desire took the not unusual form of disclamation, ‘nothing
should induce her to have her fortune told, nothing upon earth!’ ‘She
never thought of the gipsy, not she!’ and to prove the fact she said
so at least twenty times a day. Now Harriet’s fortune seemed told
already; her destiny was fixed. She, the belle of the village, was
engaged, as everybody knows, to our village beau Joel Brent; they were
only waiting for a little more money to marry.... But Harriet, besides
being a beauty, was a coquette, and her affections for her betrothed
did not interfere with certain flirtations which came like Isabella ‘by
the by,’ and occasionally cast a shadow of coolness between the lovers.
There had probably been a little fracas in the present instance, for
she [remarked] ‘that none but fools believed in gipsies; that Joel had
had his fortune told and wanted to treat her to a prophecy, but she was
not such a simpleton.’
“About half an hour after the delivery of this speech I happened, when
tying up a chrysanthemum, to go to our wood yard for a stick of proper
dimensions and there, enclosed between the faggot pile and the coal
shed, stood the gipsy in the very act of palmistry, conning the lines
of fate in Harriet’s hand.... She was listening too intently to see me,
but the fortune-teller did, and stopped so suddenly that her attention
was awakened and the intruder discovered.
“Harriet at first meditated a denial. She called up a pretty
unconcerned look, answered my silence (for I never spoke a word) by
muttering something about ‘coals for the parlour,’ and catching up
my new-painted green watering-pot instead of the coal-scuttle began
filling it with all her might ... [while making] divers signs to the
gipsy to decamp. The old sybil, however, budged not a foot, influenced
probably by two reasons, one the hope of securing a customer in the
new-comer, whose appearance is generally, I am afraid, the very reverse
of dignified, rather merry than wise, the other a genuine fear of
passing through the yard gate on the outside of which a much more
imposing person, my greyhound Mayflower, who has a sort of beadle
instinct anent drunkards and pilferers and disorderly persons of all
sorts, stood barking most furiously.
“... But the fair consulter of destiny, who had by this time recovered
from the shame of her detection, extricated us from our dilemma by
smuggling the old woman away through the house.
“Of course, Harriet was exposed to some raillery and a good deal
of questioning about her future fate, as to which she preserved an
obstinate but evidently satisfied silence. At the end of three days,
however, [the prescribed period] when all the family except herself
had forgotten the story, our pretty soubrette, half bursting with the
long retention, took the opportunity of lacing on my new half-boots
to reveal the prophecy. ‘She was to see within the week, and this was
Saturday, the young man, the real young man, whom she was to marry.’
“‘Why, Harriet, you know, poor Joel.’
“‘Joel indeed! the gipsy said that the young man, the real young man,
was to ride up to the house dressed in a dark great-coat (and Joel
never wore a great-coat in his life—all the world knew that he wore
smock-frocks and jackets) and mounted on a white horse—and where should
Joel get a white horse?’
“‘Had this real young man made his appearance yet?’
“‘No; there had not been a white horse past the place since Tuesday; so
it must certainly be to-day.’
“A good look-out did Harriet keep for white horses during this fateful
Saturday, and plenty did she see. It was the market day at B——, and
team after team came by with one, two and three white horses; cart
after cart and gig after gig, each with a white steed; Colonel M——‘s
carriage, with its prancing pair—but still no horseman. At length one
appeared, but he had a great-coat whiter than the animal he rode;
another, but he was old farmer Lewington, a married man; a third, but
he was little Lord L——, a schoolboy on his Arabian pony. Besides, they
all passed the house....
“At last, just at dusk, just as Harriet, making believe to close our
casement shutters, was taking her last peep up the road something
white appeared in the distance coming leisurely down the hill. Was
it really a horse? Was it not rather Titus Strong’s cow driving home
to milking? A minute or two dissipated that fear; it certainly was a
horse, and as certainly it had a dark rider. Very slowly he descended
the hill, pausing most provokingly at the end of the village, as if
about to turn up the Vicarage lane. He came on, however, and after
another short stop at the ‘Rose,’ rode full up to our little gate, and
catching Harriet’s hand as she was opening the wicket, displayed to the
half-pleased, half-angry damsel the smiling, triumphant face of her own
Joel Brent, equipped in a new great-coat and mounted on his master’s
newly purchased market nag. Oh, Joel! Joel! The gipsy! the gipsy!”
CHAPTER XXXIV
A CENTRE OF INTEREST
As Mary Russell Mitford’s fame as a writer began to spread wider and
wider her cottage became a centre of interest and attraction to all
those who had learnt to love her works. Her chief biographer[16]—a
contemporary—writes:
[Footnote 16: Rev. A. G. L’Estrange.]
“In the summer time when she gave strawberry parties, the road leading
to the cottage was crowded with the carriages of all the rank and
fashion in the county. By example as well as precept she ‘brightened
the path along which she dwelt.’ Her kindly nature did not exhaust
itself in a girlish enthusiasm for pets and flowers, but went forth to
meet her fellow-men and women whose virtues seemed to expand and whose
faults to vanish at her approach.”
Her conversation had a peculiar charm, considered by some “to be even
better than her books,” delivered, as it was, by a “voice beautiful as
a chime of bells.”
It was in the year 1847 that Miss Mitford first made the acquaintance
of Mr. James T. Fields—a distinguished American—both author and
publisher—whose “bright, genial, vivacious letters” and “spirited
lectures on ‘Charles Lamb,’ ‘Longfellow,’ and others” are highly spoken
of by contemporaries.
Mr. Fields writes in his interesting book entitled _Yesterday with
Authors_:—
“It was a fortunate hour for me when kind-hearted John Kenyon said,
as I was leaving his hospitable door in London one summer midnight:
‘you must know my friend Miss Mitford. She lives directly in the line
of your route to Oxford, and you must call with my card and make
her acquaintance.’ The day selected for my call at her cottage door
happened to be a perfect one in which to begin an acquaintance with
the lady of ‘Our Village.’ She was then living at Three Mile Cross ...
on the high road between Basingstoke and Reading [where] the village
street 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. 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 loud pieces. The cheerful 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
curtsy. One curly-headed urchin made bold to take off his well-worn
cap, and waited to be recognized as ‘little Johnny.’ ‘No great
scholar,’ said the kind-hearted 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 she threw to him from the window. ‘I wish he
loved his book as well as he relishes sweet cakes,’ she sighed, as the
boy kicked up his heels and disappeared down the lane....
“From that day our friendship continued, and during other visits to
England I saw her frequently, driving about the country with her in her
pony-chaise and spending many happy hours in the new cottage which she
afterwards occupied at Swallowfield.
“... She was always cheerful and her talk is delightful to remember.
From girlhood she had known and 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.
“When she talked of Munden and Bannister and Fawcett and Emery, those
delightful old actors for whom she had such an exquisite relish, she
said they had made comedy to her a living art full of laughter and
tears. How often have I heard her describe John Kemble, Mrs. Siddons,
Miss O’Neil and Edmund Kean, as they were wont to electrify the town in
her girlhood! With what gusto she reproduced Elliston, who was one of
her prime favourites, and tried to make me, through her representation
of him, feel what a spirit there was in the man....
“I well remember, one autumn evening, when half a dozen friends were
sitting in her library after dinner, talking with her of Tom Taylor’s
life of Haydon, then lately published, how graphically she described
to us the eccentric painter whose genius she was among the foremost to
recognize. The flavour of her discourse I cannot reproduce; but I was
too much interested in what she was saying to forget the main incidents
she drew for our edification during those pleasant hours now far away
in the past.”
William Howett had paid a visit to the cottage at Three Mile Cross in
the late summer of 1835, which he described in an article that appeared
in the _Athenæum_. As he drove from Reading he says:—
“The sound of the sheep bells came pleasantly from the pastures where
the eye ranged over wide level fields cleared of their corn and all the
wayside was hung with such heavy and jetty clusters of blackberries
as scarcely ever were seen in another place.... And now I came to
the sweetest lanes branching off right and left under trees that met
across them and lo! ‘Three Mile Cross!’ ‘But which is Miss Mitford’s
cottage?’ That was the question I asked of two women that stood in the
street. ‘Oh, sir, you’ve passed it. It is where that green bush hangs
over the wall.’ I knocked and who came but Ben Kirby and no other,
and who quickly presented herself but Mary Russell Mitford! The very
person that every reader must suppose her to be, the sunny-spirited,
cordial-hearted, frank, kind, unaffected, genuine, English lady.
“We had known each other before, though we had never seen each
other, and we shook hands as old true friends should do; and in the
next moment passed through that ‘nut-shell of a house’ (her own
true expression) into a perfect paradise of flowers, and flowering
fragrance. We passed along the garden into the conservatory, and found
her father Dr. Mitford, the worthy magistrate, and two accomplished
ladies her friends.
“Now, if anyone should ask me to describe more particularly this place
what can I say but that it is most graphically described by the writer
herself? Has she not told you that her garden is her great delight?
Has she not told you that in summer she and her honoured father live
principally in the conservatory (a ‘rural arcade’ as she calls it) and
is it not so? And is it not a sweet summer abode with that glowing,
odorous bee-haunted garden all lying before it?
“As we drove [later] along those umbrageous lanes, and crossed the
sweet pastoral Loddon, she stayed her pony phaeton [at times] to admire
some goodly house, or picturesque parsonage, [and I noticed that] every
rustic face we met brightened into smiles, and for every one she had
a counter smile, or a kind passing word. Everything you see of her
only shows how truly she has spread the vitality of her heart over her
pages, and everything you see of the country with what accuracy she
sketches.”
Mary was much pleased and touched by this graceful and warm-hearted
account by Mr. Howett of his visit to Three Mile Cross, and she wrote
to him on the subject.
In his answer, written at Nottingham, after expressing his great
satisfaction at her pleasure, he goes on to say: “I shall send you
a paper to-morrow containing the account of the great cricket match
played here between Sussex and Nottingham.... We wished you had been
there—a more animated sight of the kind you never saw....
“I could not help seeing what a wide difference twenty years has
produced in the character of the English population. What a contrast in
this play to bull-baiting and cock-fighting! So orderly, so manly, so
generous in its character.... A sport that has no drawback of cruelty
or vulgarity in it, but has every recommendation of skill, taste,
health and generous rivalry. You, dear Miss Mitford,” he continues,
“have done a great deal to promote this better spirit, and you could
not have done more had you been haranguing Parliament, and bringing in
bills for the purpose.”
There are many letters extant from Mary Howett to Miss Mitford, and
we should like to give the following written in February, 1836: “This
new edition of _Our Village_ I have been coveting ever since I saw
the advertisement of it, and I will tell you why. It is one of those
cheerful, spirited works, full of fair pictures of humanity which,
especially when there are children who love reading, and being read to,
becomes a household book, turned to again and again, and remembered and
talked of with affection. So it is by our fireside, it is a work our
little daughter has read and loves to read, and which our little son
Alfred, a most indomitable young gentleman, likes especially.... He is
as yet a bad reader and therefore he is read to; and his cry is ‘Read
me the _Copse_!’ or ‘Read me the _Nutting_,’ or a ‘_Ramble into the
Country_!’
“Such, dear Miss Mitford, being the case when I saw the new edition
advertised, I began to cast in my mind whether or not we could buy it,
for perhaps you know that _literary_ people, though _makers_ of books,
are not exclusive _buyers_ thereof, you may think then what was my
delight—and the delight of us all—when a parcel came in, the string
was cut, and behold it contained no other than those long-coveted and
favourite volumes! Thank you, therefore, dearest Miss Mitford; you have
conferred a benefit upon our fireside which will make you even more
beloved than formerly, for now we shall always have you at hand.”
Miss Mitford held communion either personally or by correspondence with
several warm-hearted Americans, besides her friend Mr. James T. Fields.
George Ticknor, the celebrated author of _The History of Spanish
Literature_, and a partner in Mr. Fields’ publishing firm, when on a
visit to England in 1835, made a pilgrimage with his family to Three
Mile Cross. He writes in his diary of this visit:—
“We found Miss Mitford living literally in a cottage neither _ornée_
nor poetical, except inasmuch as it had a small garden, crowded with
the richest and most beautiful profusion of flowers. She has the
simplest and kindest manners, and entertained us for two hours with the
most animated conversation, and a great variety of anecdote, without
any of the pretensions of an author by profession, and without any of
the stiffness that generally belongs to single ladies of her age and
reputation.”
Writing to her afterwards he says: “We shall none of us ever forget the
truly delightful evening we spent in your cottage at ‘Our Village.’”
Daniel Webster, the orator and patriot so greatly valued in the United
States, also made his appearance in Three Mile Cross, together with
some members of his family, in their transit from Oxford to Windsor.
“My local position between these two points of attraction,” writes
Mary, “has often procured for me the gratification of seeing my
American friends when making that journey; but during _this_ visit a
little circumstance occurred so characteristic, so graceful, and so
gracious that I cannot resist the temptation of relating it.
“Walking in my cottage garden we talked naturally of the roses and
pinks that surrounded us, and of the different indigenous flowers
of our island and of the United States.... We spoke of the primrose
and the cowslip immortalized by Shakespeare and by Milton; and the
sweet-scented violets, both white and purple of our hedgerows and
our lanes; that known as the violet [yellow] being, I suspect, the
little wild pansy (viola tricolor) renowned as the love-in-idleness of
Shakespeare’s famous compliment to Queen Elizabeth.... I expressed an
interest in two flowers known to me only by the vivid descriptions of
Miss Martineau; the scarlet lily of New York and of the Canadian woods,
and the original gentian of Niagara. I observed that our illustrious
guest made some remark to one of the ladies of his party; but I little
expected that so soon after his return as seeds of these plants could
be procured, I should receive a packet of each, signed and directed by
his own hand. How much pleasure these little kindnesses give! And how
many such have come to me from over the same wide ocean!”
On New Year’s Day, 1830, Mrs. Mitford died after a short illness. An
affecting account of her last hours was written by her daughter, in
which she says: “No human being was ever so devoted to her duties—so
just, so pious, so charitable, so true, so feminine, so generous....
Never thinking of herself, the most devoted wife and the most faithful
friend. She died in a good old age, universally beloved and respected.”
Mrs. Mitford was buried in Shinfield Church—the parish church of Three
Mile Cross and the other surrounding villages where the Mitfords used
to worship. We have visited the place, which does not seem to have
changed much since Miss Mitford described it in one of her village
stories.
She speaks of “the tower of the old village church fancifully
ornamented with brick-work, and of the churchyard planted with broad
flowering limes and funereal yew-trees, also of a short avenue of
magnificent oaks leading up to the church.
“It stands,” she says, “amidst a labyrinth of green lanes running
through a hilly and richly wooded country whose valleys are threaded by
the silver Loddon.”
In the month of June of this same year Mary received an interesting
letter from the American authoress, Miss Sedgwick, whose works,
especially those for children, were much read in this country some
years ago.
“You cannot,” she remarks, “be ignorant that your books are re-printed
and widely circulated on this side of the Atlantic, but ... it is
probably difficult for you to realize that your name has penetrated
beyond our maritime cities, and is familiar and honoured and loved
through many a village circle, and to the borders of the lonely depths
of unpierced woods—that we venerate ‘Mrs. Mosse’ and are lovers of
‘Sweet Cousin Mary’ ... and, in short, that your pictures have wrought
on our affections like realities.
“... My niece, a child of nine years old, who is sitting by me, not
satisfied with requesting that her _love_ may be sent to Miss Mitford,
has boldly aspired to the honour of addressing a postscript to her,
and I ... not forgetting who has allowed us a precedent for spoiling
children, have consented to her wishes. Forgive us both, dear Miss
Mitford.”
In her little letter the child asks after the various characters in the
stories that have taken her fancy, not forgetting the pretty greyhound
Mayflower.
Miss Mitford responds in the following way:—
“My dear young friend,
“I am very much obliged to you for your kind enquiries respecting the
people in my book. It is much to be asked about by a little lady on the
other side of the Atlantic, and we are very proud of it accordingly.
‘May’ was a real greyhound, and everything told of her was literally
true; but alas! she is no more.... ‘Harriet’ and ‘Joel’ are not married
yet; you shall have the very latest intelligence of her. I am expecting
two or three friends to dinner and she is making an apple-tart and
custards—which I wish with all my heart that you and your dear aunt
were coming to partake of. The rest of the people are all doing well in
their several ways, and I am always, my dear little girl,
“Most sincerely yours, M. R. MITFORD.”
CHAPTER XXXV
A LONDON WELCOME
In the spring of 1836 Miss Mitford paid a short visit to London. She
stayed in the house of her father’s old friend Sergeant Talfourd, No.
56 Russell Square. Her stories were so well known by this time, and
so universally admired, that she received quite an ovation from the
literary world. Dinners and receptions were given in her honour, and
she had the pleasure of meeting many a writer whose works she valued
highly but whose personality was hitherto unknown to her.
Amongst these was the poet Wordsworth. Writing to her father on May
26th she says:—
“Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Landor and Mr. White dined here. I like Mr.
Wordsworth of all things; he is a most venerable-looking old man,
delightfully mild and placid, and most kind to me”; and again she
writes: “You cannot imagine how very very kindly Mr. Wordsworth speaks
of my poor works. You who know what I think of him can imagine how
much I am gratified by his praise.” Speaking of the other guests, she
says:—
“Mr. Landor is a very striking-looking person, and exceedingly clever.
Also we had a Mr. Browning, a young poet (author of _Paracelsus_), and
Mr. Proctor and Mr. Chorley, and quantities more of poets, etc.... Mr.
Willis has sailed for America. Mr. Moore and Miss Edgeworth are not in
town....
“There was a curious affair to-night. All the Sergeants went to the
play in a body [to see Sergeant Talfourd’s _Ion_]. Lord Grey and his
family were in a private box just opposite to us, and the house was
filled with people of that class, and the pit crammed with gentlemen.
Very very gratifying was it not?”
Writing to her father on May 31st Miss Mitford says:—
“At seven William [Harness] came to take me to Lord Dacre’s. It is a
small house, with a round table that only holds eight. The company was
William, Mrs. Joanna [Baillie], Mrs. Sullivan (Lady Dacre’s daughter,
the authoress), Lord and Lady Dacre, a famous talker called Bobus Smith
(otherwise the great Bobus) and my old friend Mr. Young the actor, who
was delighted to see me, and very attentive and kind indeed. But how
kind they were all!...
“In the evening we had about fifty people, amongst others, Edwin
Landseer, who invited himself to come and paint Dash. He is a charming
person; recollected me instantly, and talked to me for two whole
hours.... You may imagine that I was very gracious to the best dog
painter that ever lived, who asked my leave to paint Dash.... Edwin
Landseer says that it is the most beautiful and rarest race of dogs
in existence—the dogs who have most intellect and most _countenance_.
Stanfield had talked to him of his intention to paint my country, and
then Edwin Landseer resolved to paint my dog....
“Edwin Landseer has a fine Newfoundland dog whom he has often painted,
and who is content to maintain his posture as long as his master keeps
his palette in his hand, however long that may be; but the moment the
palette is laid down off darts Neptune and will sit no more that day....
“It is very odd that Mr. Knight should want to paint _me_. Mr. Lucas
will make the most charming picture of all—_of you_.
[Illustration:
_John Lucas_
DR. MITFORD]
“I told you, my dearest father, that Mr. Kenyon was to take me to
the giraffes and the Diorama, with both of which I was delighted. A
sweet young woman whom we called for in Gloucester Place went with
us—a Miss Barrett—who reads Greek as I do French, and has published
some translations from Æschylus and some most striking poems. She is
a delightful young creature, shy and timid and modest. Nothing but
her desire to see me got her out at all, but now she is coming to us
to-morrow night also.”
Again she writes of her on further acquaintance: “Miss Barrett has
translated the most difficult of the Greek plays (the _Prometheus
Bound_). If she be spared to the world you will see her passing all
women and most men as a narrative and dramatic poet. Our sweet Miss
Barrett!—to think of virtue and genius is to think of her.... She is
so sweet and gentle and so pretty that one looks at her as if she were
some bright flower.”
The two corresponded afterwards, and their letters are full of
interest. We should like to quote a passage from one of Miss Barrett’s
upon the Greek drama. “The Œdipus is wonderful,” she writes, “the
sublime truth which pierces through to your soul like lightning seems
to me to be the humiliating effect of guilt, even when unconsciously
incurred. The abasement, the self-abasement, of the proud, high-minded
King before the mean mediocre Creon, not because he is wretched, not
because he is blind, but because he is criminal, appears to me a
wonderful and most affecting conception. And there is Euripides with
his abandon to the pathetic, and Æschylus who sheds tears like a strong
man and moves you to more because you know that his struggle is to
restrain them.”
Miss Mitford writes to her friend in October of this year (1836):—
“I have just read your delightful ballad.[17] My earliest book was
_Percy’s Reliques_, the delight of my childhood, and after them came
Scott’s _Minstrelsy of the Borders_, the favourite of my youth, so that
I am prepared to love ballads, although perhaps a little biased in
favour of great directness and simplicity by the earnest plainness of
my old pet. Do read Tennyson’s _Ladye of Shalott_. You will be charmed
with its spirit and picturesqueness.
[Footnote 17: “The Romaunt of the Page.”]
“Are you a great reader of the old English drama? I am—preferring it to
every other sort of reading; of course, admitting and regretting the
grossness of the age, but that from habit one skips without a thought,
just as I should over so much Greek or Hebrew which I knew that I
could not comprehend. Have you read Victor Hugo’s plays? ... and his
_Notre Dame_? I admit the bad taste of these, the excess, but the power
and the pathos are to me indescribably great. And then he has broken
through the conventional phrases and made the French a new language.
He has accomplished this partly by going back to the old fountains,
Froissart, etc. Again these old chronicles are great books of mine.”
Mary Russell Mitford’s letters written to intimate friends were at all
times a true reflection of her mind and nature, and it is interesting
to learn from a passage in her _Recollections of a Literary Life_ what
her opinion was of the value of letters, “provided they are truthful
and spontaneous.” “Such is the reality and identity belonging to
letters written at the moment,” she writes, “and intended only for
the eye of a favourite friend, that it is probable that any genuine
series of epistles, were the writer ever so little distinguished, would
possess the invaluable quality of individuality, a quality which so
often causes us to linger before an old portrait of which we know no
more than it is a Burgomaster by Rembrandt or a Venetian Senator by
Titian. The least skilful pen when flowing from the fullness of the
heart, and untroubled by any misgivings of after publication, shall
often paint with as faithful and life-like a touch as either of these
great masters.”
Writing to Miss Barrett of her country rambles in the autumn of 1836
she says: “I was this afternoon for an hour on Heckfield Heath, a
common dotted with cottages and a large piece of water backed by woody
hills; the nearer portion of the ground a forest of oak and birch and
hawthorn and holly and fern, intersected by grassy glades.... On an
open space just large enough for the purpose a cricket match was going
on,—the older people sitting on benches, the younger ones lying about
under the trees; and a party of boys just seen glancing backward and
forward in a sunny glade, where they were engaged in an equally merry
and far more noisy game. Well, there we stood, Ben and I and Dash,
watching and enjoying the enjoyments we witnessed. And I thought if I
had no pecuniary anxiety, if my dear father were stronger and our dear
friend well[18] I should be the happiest creature in the world, so
strong was the influence of that happy scene.”
[Footnote 18: Miss Barrett’s health was causing much anxiety to her
friends.]
The pecuniary anxiety here referred to had been growing greater and
greater. The literary earnings of the devoted daughter seem to have
melted away in the father’s speculations. At last she was urged by her
valued friend William Harness to apply to Government for a pension—an
application which was strongly supported by influential friends. Her
petition, dated May, 1837, to Lord Melbourne concludes with these
words: “I am emboldened to take this step by the sight of my father’s
white hairs and the certainty that such another winter as the last
would take from me all power of literary exertion and send those white
hairs with sorrow to the grave.”
On the 31st May Miss Mitford writes to her friend Miss Jephson:—
“I cannot suffer one four-and-twenty hours to pass, my own dearest
Emily, without telling you what I am sure will give you so much
pleasure, that I had to-day an announcement from Lord Melbourne of a
pension of £100 a year. The sum is small, but that cannot be considered
derogatory, which was the amount given by Sir Robert Peel to Mrs.
Hemans and Mrs. Somerville, and it is a great comfort to have something
to look forward to as a certainty, however small, in sickness or old
age.... But the real gratification of this transaction has been the
kindness, the warmth of heart, the cordiality and the delicacy of every
human being connected with the circumstances. It originated with dear
William Harness and that most kind and zealous friend, Lady Dacre; and
the manner in which it was taken up by the Duke of Devonshire, Lord and
Lady Holland, Lord and Lady Radnor, Lord Palmerston and many others,
some of whom I had never even seen, has been such as to make this one
of the most pleasurable events of my life....
“Is not this very honourable to the kind feelings of our aristocracy? I
always knew that I had as a writer a strong hold in that quarter; that
they turned with disgust from the trash called fashionable novels to
the common life of Miss Austen, the Irish tales of Miss Edgeworth, and
my humble village stories; but I did not suspect the strong personal
interest which these stories had excited, and I am intensely grateful
for it.”
Miss Mitford was further cheered in her outlook upon life by an offer
to edit an important publication called _Finden’s Tableaux_, a large
quarto work illustrated by fine steel engravings from the works of the
leading artists of the day, and handsomely bound in leather elaborately
ornamented—a style then much in vogue. She gladly accepted the offer
and was soon applying to Miss Barrett, her “Sweet Love,” for a
contribution in the shape of a poem. The poem was supplied, bearing the
title of “A Romance of the Ganges,” and was followed in course of time
by many others.
This offer was followed in September, 1836, by a commission from the
editors of _Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal_. “It is one of the signs
of the times,” writes Miss Mitford, “that a periodical selling for
threepence halfpenny should engage so high-priced a writer as myself;
but they have a circulation of 200,000 or 300,000.” This was her
passing comment on the transaction, but it was to be of far more
lasting importance than she anticipated, resulting as it did in a close
friendship with William Chambers, and in a scheme of collaboration in
which she took a prominent part.[19]
[Footnote 19: See _Life and Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford_, by W.
J. Roberts.]
Mr. William Chambers paid a visit to Three Mile Cross in 1847, when he
and Miss Mitford and the latter’s warm friend, Mr. Lovejoy, of Reading,
talked over a scheme for forming Rural Libraries.
It was on the 31st March, 1836, that _Pickwick_ first made its
appearance, electrifying the reading world. It came out in monthly
numbers, price one shilling. Of the first number, it seems, 400 copies
were printed, but by the time it had reached the fifteenth number no
less than 40,000 were issued!
Miss Mitford writes to her friend Miss Jephson in June, 1837:—
“So you never heard of the _Pickwick Papers_? Well!... It is fun.
London life—but without anything unpleasant; a lady might read it all
_aloud_; and it is so graphic, so individual and so true that you
could curtsy to all the people as you met them in the street.... All
the boys and girls talk his fun—the boys in the streets; and yet they
who are of the highest taste like it the most. Sir Benjamin Brodie
takes it to read in his carriage between patient and patient, and Lord
Denman studies _Pickwick_ on the bench whilst the jury are deliberating.
“Do take some means to borrow the _Pickwick Papers_. It seems like
not having heard of Hogarth, whom he resembles greatly, except that
he takes a far more cheerful view, a Shakespearian view, of humanity.
It is rather fragmentary except the trial, which is as complete and
perfect as any bit of comic writing in the English language. You must
read the _Pickwick Papers_.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXXVI
A BRAVE HEART
Two new works by Mary Russell Mitford had been recently
published—_Belford Regis_ and _Country Stories_. Belford Regis, as the
reader may remember, was her pseudonym for the good town of Reading.
She writes in June, 1835, to Sir William Elford: “I thank you very
much, my ever dear and kind friend, for your kind letter, and I rejoice
that you like my book. It has been most favourably received and is, I
find, reckoned my best; although when one considers that _Our Village_
has passed through fourteen large editions in England and nearly as
many in America, one can hardly expect an increase of popularity and
has only to hope for an equal success for any future production.”
There was a still further proof of the popularity of _Our Village_ at
this time, as Miss Mitford learnt from a friend travelling in Spain
that he had come across a copy of the work translated into Spanish.
_Country Stories_ appeared two years later. She dedicated the work to
her valued friend, the Rev. William Harness, “whose old hereditary
friendship,” she writes, “has been the pride and pleasure of her
happiest hours, her consolation in the sorrows and her support in the
difficulties of life.”
It was to him that she opened her heart on religious matters more
than to anyone else, and it is interesting to learn from their
correspondence her opinions upon such matters as the question of Church
Reform, then beginning to be discussed.
After receiving a volume of Sermons by the Rev. William Harness, she
writes:—
“It is a very able and conciliatory plea for the Church. My opinion (if
an insignificant woman may presume to give one) is that certain reforms
ought to be; that very gross cases of pluralities should be abolished
... that some few of the clergy are too rich, and that a great many are
too poor. But although not holding all her doctrines, I heartily agree
with you that, as an establishment, the Church ought to remain; for to
say nothing of the frightful precedent of sweeping away property, which
would not stop there, the country would be overrun with fanatics....
But the Church must be (as many of her members are) wisely tolerant.
Bishops must not wage war with theatres, nor rectors with a Sunday
evening game of cricket.”
Happily reforms in such matters were soon to be brought forward by
Charles Kingsley and many others. Charles Kingsley, when he was made
Rector of Eversley, was a neighbour of Miss Mitford’s and became in
time her fast friend.
During the year 1842 Dr. Mitford’s health rapidly declined and his
devoted daughter was nearly worn out by her constant attendance upon
him. He had a strange notion which he held pertinaciously that all
outdoor exercise was bad for her, while, in fact, her short strolls
in her garden or in the neighbouring fields was the only change that
could keep her from breaking down. When after some hours spent in weary
watching she had seen her father fall asleep, she would steal out of
the house with Dash for a companion for a scamper round the meadows.
“How grateful I am,” she writes at this time, “to that great gracious
Providence who makes the most intense enjoyment the cheapest and the
commonest.”
Dr. Mitford died on the 11th day of December. He was buried by his
wife in Shinfield Church, being followed by an imposing procession of
neighbours and friends. We cannot help thinking that this was more to
show sympathy and respect for Miss Mitford than from special respect
to him.
That she loved her father dearly in spite of all his faults is very
certain, and that she was not blind to these faults is also certain.
But she looked upon them at all times very much in the same way as she
did when a young girl on hearing of his money losses. “Poor Papa!” she
would exclaim, “I am so sorry for him, I wish he would deal with honest
people.”
A beautiful expression of a dying mother to her children has been
handed down in our family, “Cover each other’s faults,” she said,
“with a mantle of love.” Miss Mitford did this and perhaps sometimes
unwisely, but her life was the happier for it. She never knew the
misery of condemning the conduct of her father.
“But her father was not the only person whom Miss Mitford egregiously
overestimated, and unconsciously flattered,” writes Mrs. Tindal.
“She looked upon her friends through rose-coloured spectacles, she
exaggerated their good gifts and multiplied their graces; she hoped and
believed great things of them.”
Dr. Mitford had continued to squander the small means of the household
to the last, and so powerless was his daughter to prevent this (without
giving him great pain) that she remarks in a letter to one with whom
she was intimate: “I have to provide for expenses over which I have no
more control than my own dog Dash.”
When the true state of affairs became known Miss Mitford was faced with
a list of liabilities amounting to nearly £1000, but her determination
was at once taken that all the creditors should have complete
satisfaction. “Everybody shall be paid,” she exclaimed, “if I have to
sell the gown off my back, or pledge my little pension.”
But this could never be allowed. Her friends and admirers were eager
to show their desire to help one who, by her beautiful writings and
unselfish life, had done so much for the good of humanity. Miss Mitford
was astonished and touched by the letters she received. “I only pray
God,” she writes, “that I may deserve half that has been said of me.”
Money was subscribed on all sides, and by the month of March following
nearly the whole thousand pounds had already been handed over to her,
whilst in addition to this some hundreds of pounds were promised. Many,
too, were the acts of kind and unostentatious attention that were
showered upon her and which went straight to her heart. Conspicuous
among these was the welcome act of her friend Mr. George Lovejoy, the
well-known bookseller of Reading, in supplying her with books. He was
a man of considerable learning, and his library was noted from its
earliest days for its fine collection of foreign works, which made it
especially valuable to Miss Mitford, whose love of French literature
was so marked.
Writing to a friend who had offered to lend her some books she explains
that she has already seen them. “I have at this moment,” she writes,
“eight sets of books belonging to Mr. Lovejoy. I have every periodical
within a week, often getting them literally the day before publication.”
About this time a source of happiness came into Mary Mitford’s life in
the shape of a little child of two years old, the son of her attached
servant K——, whom she soon looked upon as a son of the household, and
who as time went on became her constant little companion in her strolls
about the country.
A few years later Mary was suffering from an attack of lameness and
she had recourse for help to that same “historic staff” whose loss had
caused so much bustle and excitement in the village of Three Mile Cross.
[Illustration: Verses written by M. R. Mitford,
July 12th 1847]
“Long before little Henry could open the outer door, there he would
stand,” she writes, “the stick in one hand, and, if it were summer,
a flower in the other, waiting for my going out, the pretty Saxon
boy with his upright figure, his golden hair, his eyes like two stars,
and his bright intelligent smile.”
Woodcock lane was a chosen resort where Mary, her servant “the hemmer
of flowers,” little Henry and the dogs would proceed to a certain green
hillock “redolent of wild thyme and a thousand fairy flowers, delicious
in its coolness, its fragrance and its repose.” Here whilst Mary sat on
the turf with pen in hand and paper on knee jotting down her thoughts,
she would still keep an eye on the child who was gathering flowers hard
by. “Do not gather them all, Henry,” she would say, “because some one
who has not so many pretty flowers at home as we have may come this way
and would like to gather some.”
Miss Mitford’s many visitors from far and near had all a kindly word
for the little lad—Mr. Fields especially was much interested in him.
In the month of January, 1847, when the first volume of _Modern
Painters_ was just published, Mary Mitford wrote to a friend: “Have you
read an English Graduate’s _Letters on Art_? The author, Mr. Ruskin,
was here last week and is certainly the most charming person I have
ever known.” In her _Recollections of a Literary Life_ Miss Mitford
speaks with admiration of his “boldness” in demolishing old idols and
setting up new! “Often,” she remarks, “he was right, though sometimes
wrong, but always striking, always eloquent, always true to his own
convictions.... Many passages of _Modern Painters_ are really poems in
their tenderness, their sentiment and their grandeur.
“But the greatest triumph of Mr. Ruskin,” she remarks, “is that long
series of cloud pictures, unparalleled, I suppose, in any language,
whether painted or written.” Here follows a long quotation of which we
would give two passages.
“It is a strange thing,” writes the author, “how little, in general,
people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature
has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and
evident purpose of talking to him, and teaching him than in any other
of his works; and it is just the part in which we least attend to
her.... The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by
few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of
them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he
be always with them; but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is
not ‘too bright nor good for human nature’s daily food.’ It is fitted
in all its functions for the perpetual comfort, and exalting of the
heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.”
The acquaintance with Mr. Ruskin soon ripened into a warm friendship,
which was the cause of much happiness to Miss Mitford during the last
years of her life. His attentions to her when she was unwell were
unremitting either in the way of interesting books to entertain her or
of delicacies of the table to tempt her appetite. On one occasion when
she was confined to her bed from the effects of a fall, he writes to
her: “I do indeed sympathize most deeply in the sorrow (it may without
exaggeration be so called) which your present privation must cause you,
especially coming in the time of spring—your favourite season.... After
all though your feet are in the stocks, you have the Silas spirit, and
the doors will open in the mid-darkness.”
After an important event in his life had occurred in 1848, he writes:
“Two months ago I was each day on the point of writing to you to ask
for your sympathy—the kindest and keenest sympathy that, I think, ever
filled the breadth and depth of an unselfish heart.” And then alluding
to the Revolution of 1848 he says: “I should be very happy just now
but for these wild storm clouds bursting on my dear Italy and my fair
France. My occupation gone and all my earthly treasures ... perished
amidst ‘the tumult of the people and the imagining of vain things.’
... I begin to feel that ... these are not times for watching clouds
or dreaming over quiet waters, that some serious work is to be done,
and that the time for endurance has come rather than for meditation,
and for hope rather than for happiness. Happy those whose hope, without
this severe and tearful rending away of all the props and stability
of earthly enjoyments, has been fixed ‘where the wicked cease from
troubling.’ Mine has not; it was based on ‘those pillars of the earth’
which are astonished at His reproof.”[20]
[Footnote 20: See Cook’s _Life of Ruskin_.]
Mary Mitford continued her intimate correspondence with Miss Barrett
after the latter’s marriage with Robert Browning—which was a source
of much happiness to both. She warmly admired Mrs. Barrett Browning’s
poems, as we have already seen, but Browning’s poems were not equally
intelligible or attractive to her, and in a letter to a friend she thus
quaintly criticizes his style and writing: “I am just reading Robert
Browning’s Poems,” she says, “there is much more in them than I thought
to find.... He ought to be forced to write journey-work for his daily
bread (say for the _Times_) which would make him write clearly.”
In the summer of 1847 Hans Andersen was in England. “He is the lion of
London this year,” writes Miss Mitford. “Dukes, princes, and ministers
are all disputing for an hour of his company, and Mr. Boner (his best
translator) says that he is quite unspoilt, as simple as a child and
with as much poetry in his everyday doings as in his prose.... Mr.
Boner sent me the other day for dear Patty Lovejoy’s album (she is a
sweet little girl of eleven years old) an autograph of Spohr’s and one
of Andersen’s. The latter is so pretty that I must transcribe it for
you.
“‘How blue are the mountains! How blue the sea and the sky! It is the
expression of love in three different languages.
H. C. Andersen.’
London, July 16th, 1847.”
The Mr. Boner alluded to was a valued friend of Miss Mitford’s with
whom she corresponded much during the later years of her life.
CHAPTER XXXVII
FAREWELL TO THREE MILE CROSS
Writing to her American friend Mr. Fields in December, 1848, after
a sharp attack of illness, Miss Mitford says: “But I have many
alleviations [to my sufferings] in the general kindness of the
neighbourhood, the particular goodness of many admirable friends, the
affectionate attention of a most attached and affectionate old servant,
and above all in my continued interest in books and delight in reading.
I love poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen, and can
never be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to retain
the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy, by which we
are enabled to escape from the consciousness of our own infirmities
into the great works of all ages and the joys and sorrows of our
immediate friends.” Much as she loved reading, however, Miss Mitford
did justice to another source of comfort for women that is open to all,
namely needle-work, “that most effectual sedative, that grand soother
and composer of woman’s distress,” as she truly styles it.
“Is American literature,” she asks Mr. Fields, “rich in native
biography? Just have the goodness to mention to me any lives of
Americans, whether illustrious or not, that are graphic, minute and
outspoken. I delight in French memoirs and English lives, especially
such as are either autobiography or made out by diaries and letters;
and America, a young country, with manners as picturesque and
unhackneyed as the scenery, ought to be full of such works.”
And again she writes later on: “I have been reading the autobiographies
of Lamartine and Chateaubriand.... What strange beings these Frenchmen
are! Here is M. de Lamartine at sixty, poet, orator, historian and
statesman, writing the stories of two ladies—one of them married—who
died for love of him! Think if Mr. Macaulay should announce himself
a lady-killer, and put the details not merely into a book but into a
feuilleton!”
Writing to Mrs. Barrett Browning (then in Italy) in March, 1850,
she says: “My _Country Stories_ are just coming out, to my great
contentment, in the ‘Parlour Library’ for a shilling, or perhaps
ninepence—that being the price of Miss Austen’s novels. I delight
in this, and have no sympathy with your bemoanings over American
editions. Think of the American editions of my prose. _Our Village_
has been reprinted in twenty or thirty places, and _Belford Regis_ in
almost as many; and I like it. So do _you_, say what you may.”
And writing to the same friend a year later, when Miss Mitford’s health
was improving, she says: “You will wonder to hear that I have again
taken pen in hand. It reminds me of Benedick’s speech—‘When I said I
should die a bachelor I never thought to live to be married,’ but it
is our friend Henry Chorley’s fault.” And writing to Mr. Fields on
the same subject, she says: “After eight years’ absolute cessation of
composition, Henry Chorley, of the Athenæum, coaxed me last summer into
writing for a lady’s journal which he is editing for Messrs. Bradbury &
Evans, certain Readings of Poetry, old and new, which will, I suppose,
form two or three separate volumes when collected.... One pleasure will
be the doing what justice I can to certain American poets—Mr. Whittier,
for instance, whose ‘Massachusetts to Virginia’ is amongst the finest
things ever written ... and I foresee that day by day our literature
will become more mingled with rich, bright novelties from America, not
reflections of European brightness but gems all coloured with your own
skies and woods and waters....
“I shall cause my book to be immediately forwarded to you, but I don’t
think it will be ready for a twelvemonth. There is a good deal in it
of my own prose, and it takes a wider range than usual of poetry,
including much that has never appeared in any of the specimen books.”
This work ultimately bore the title of _Recollections of a Literary
Life_. It forms delightful reading, for the author has blended with her
own recollections of the poets or of the places they have immortalized
many interesting experiences of her own life given in her best style
of writing. It is a truly remarkable work when we consider how much
its author was suffering from impaired health during the period of its
composition.
The years 1849-50 were years of sudden changes and convulsions in the
political world of the Continent, and a whiff of the general excitement
penetrated even to little Three Mile Cross!
Mary Mitford writes to an American friend: “We have here one of the
Silvio Pellico exiles—Count Carpinetta—whose story is quite a romance.
He is just returned from Turin, where he was received with enthusiasm,
might have been returned as Deputy for two places, and did recover some
of his property confiscated years ago by the Austrians. It does one’s
heart good to see a piece of poetical justice transferred to real life.”
As a rule Miss Mitford’s judgment, both of books and of character, was
singularly sane, but there were some exceptions, her admiration of
Louis Napoleon being one of “her most potent crazes,” as a warm friend
styled it. She believed that his becoming Emperor would work much good
for France, but had she lived long enough to become acquainted with his
real character and to witness its baleful influence upon the nation we
feel sure she would have changed her opinion.
[Illustration: OLD HOUSE NEAR SWALLOWFIELD]
Among the many visitors from all parts to Three Mile Cross who were
desirous to see the author of _Our Village_ there was a certain Dr.
Spencer T. Hall, who had been giving lectures on scientific subjects at
Reading. He recorded his pleasant experiences in an article published
in a newspaper of the day of which we have a copy before us. After
describing Miss Mitford’s cottage by the roadside he goes on to say:
“A good garden at the back of the house produced some of the finest
geraniums and strawberries in the kingdom; and with presents of these
to her London or country friends she could gracefully, and to them
very agreeably, repay their occasional presents of new books and game,
for no woman stood higher in the estimation of some of the ‘county
families’ than did that cottage peeress, on whom they continued their
calls and compliments just as in more showy if not more happy days.
In a corner at the end of the garden there was a rustic summer-house,
and this was where our little party took tea, to which the hostess, by
her quiet, unaffected conversation, added a charm that will be more
easily understood than I can otherwise describe it when I say that it
was rich and piquant as her village stories or that pleasant gossip
to be found in the volume she afterwards published under the title of
_Recollections of a Literary Life_, and with which I trust the whole
country for its own sake is now familiar.”
The reader may remember mention being made earlier in this work of the
wheelwright’s picturesque workshop in the village of Three Mile Cross,
which stands at the turn of Church Lane near to the village pond.
Writing to a friend in November, 1850, Mary Mitford remarks: “Just now
I have been much interested in a painting that has been going on in
the corner of our village street—the inside of an old wheelwright’s
shop—a large barn-like place open to the roof, full of detail, with the
light admitted through the half of hatch doors, and spreading upwards.
It is a fine subject, and finely treated. The artist is one not yet
much known of the name of Pasmore.... It is capitally peopled too—with
children picking up chips and watching an old man sharpening a saw and
peeping in through windows, stretching up to look through them.”
For some years past the cottage at Three Mile Cross had been gradually
getting into decay, so that at last Miss Mitford was obliged to
contemplate a change of abode. “My poor cottage is falling about my
ears,” she writes to a friend in April, 1850. “We were compelled to
move my little pony from his stable to the chaise house because there
were in the stable three large holes big enough for me to escape
through. Then came a windy night and blew the roof from the chaise
house, and truly the cottage proper, where we two-legged creatures
dwell, is in little better condition; the walls seem to be mouldering
from the bottom, crumbling as it were like an old cheese, and whether
anything can be done with it is doubtful. Besides which as it belongs
to Chancery wards there is a further doubt whether the master will
do what may be done.... Yet I cling to it—to the green lanes—to the
commons, the copses, the old trees—every bit of the old country. It
is only a person brought up in the midst of woods and fields in one
country place who can understand that strong local attachment.”
The move, however, was inevitable, but in the meantime a cottage
in the neighbourhood had been found that would suit Miss Mitford’s
requirements, and thither her chief belongings, consisting of a library
of some thousands of volumes and of much furniture, was carted and the
removal accomplished in the month of September (1851).
“It was grief to go,” she writes; “there I had toiled and striven and
tasted as deeply of bitter anxiety, of fear and of hope as often falls
to the lot of woman. There in the fullness of age I had lost those
whose love had made my home sweet and precious.... Friends many and
kind; strangers, whose mere names were an honour, had come to that
bright garden and that garden room. There Mr. Justice Talfourd had
brought the delightful gaiety of his brilliant youth, and poor Haydon
had talked more vivid pictures than he ever painted. The illustrious
of the last century—Mrs. Opie, Miss Porter, Mr. Cary—had mingled there
with poets, still in their earliest dawn. It was a heart-tug to leave
that garden.”
When she was finishing the last series of stories for _Our Village_,
Miss Mitford had addressed some lines of farewell to the spot that she
loved so dearly, and we would give them here. “Sorry as I am,” she
writes, “to part from a locality which has become almost identified
with myself, this volume must and shall be the last.
“Farewell, then, my beloved village! The long straggling street, gay
and bright in this sunny, windy April morning, full of all implements
of dirt and noise—men, women, children, cows, horses, waggons, carts,
pigs, dogs, geese and chickens, busy, merry, stirring little world,
farewell! Farewell to the breezy common, with its islands of cottages
and cottage gardens, its oaken avenues populous with rooks; its clear
waters fringed with gorse, where lambs are straying; its cricket ground
where children already linger, anticipating their summer revelry; its
pretty boundary of field and woodland and distant farms; and latest
and best of its ornaments, the dear and pleasant mansion where dwell
the neighbours of neighbours, the friends of friends; farewell to ye
all! Ye will easily dispense with me, but what I shall do without you I
cannot imagine. Mine own dear village, farewell!”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXXVIII
SWALLOWFIELD
The “flitting” was accomplished in September, 1851. “I was compelled to
move from the dear old house,” writes Miss Mitford; “not very far; not
much further than Cowper when he migrated from Olney to Weston and with
quite as happy an effect.
“I walked from the one cottage to the other in an Autumn evening when
the vagrant birds whose habit of assembling here for their annual
departure gives, I suppose, its name of Swallowfield to the village,
were circling and twittering over my head.
“Here I am now in this 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 the
peopled world; and on either side the deep, silent, woody lanes that
form the distinctive character of English scenery. Very lovely is
my favourite lane, leading along a gentle declivity to the valley of
the Loddon, by pastoral water meadows studded with willow pollards,
past picturesque farm-houses and quaint old mills, the beautiful river
glancing here and there like molten silver.”
Again she writes: “I am charmed with my new cottage.... It stands under
the shadow of superb old trees, oak and elm, upon a scrap of common
which catches every breeze and I see the coolest of waters from my
window.”
We have visited Swallowfield Cottage, have been into its various rooms
and have wandered about its pretty garden. No wonder that Miss Mitford
felt it to be a sweet and peaceful home to retire to! The front court
is now a pretty piece of garden with a small lawn and with borders
of flowers on either side of the path which leads to the front door
from the garden gate. The house has been enlarged in recent years by
the addition of a small wing on the left-hand side, while two shallow
bay-windows have also been introduced—but it is still a cottage in
appearance.
On the right-hand side there still rises the tall acacia tree with the
syringa bush by its side of which Miss Mitford speaks. “So you do not
write out of doors,” she writes to a literary friend. “I _do_, and am
writing at this moment at a corner of the house under a beautiful
acacia tree with as many snowy tassels as leaves. It is waving its
world of fragrance over my head mingled with the orange-like odours
of a syringa bush. I have a love of sweet smells that amounts to a
passion.”
The larger garden at the back as well as the small front garden are
kept up with reverent care by their present owner; so that they seem to
suggest the presence of their flower-loving mistress.
Wild flowers, too, so dear to her heart, were to be seen just beyond
her garden fence. “Have you the white wild hyacinth [in your parts]?”
she asks a friend. “It makes a charming variety amongst its blue
sisters and is amongst the purest of white flowers—all so pure. A bank
close to my little field is rich in both. Have you fritillaries? They
are beautiful in our water meadows, looking like painted glass.”
Miss Mitford’s many friends both English and American were soon
visiting her in her new home.
[Illustration: THE LAST HOME]
“I have often been with her,” writes Mr. Fields, “among the wooded
lanes of her pretty country, listening to the nightingales, and on such
occasions she would discourse so eloquently of the sights and sounds
about us that her talk seemed to me ‘far above singing.’...
She knew all the literature of rural life and her memory was stored
with delightful eulogies of forests and meadows. When she repeated
or read aloud the poetry she loved, her accents were ‘like flowers’
voices, if they could speak.’
“... One day we drove along the valley of the Loddon and she pointed
out the Duke of Wellington’s seat of Strathfieldsaye.... But the
mansion most dear to her in that neighbourhood was the residence of
her tried friends the Russells of Swallowfield Park. It is indeed a
beautiful old place, full of historical and literary associations,
for there Lord Clarendon wrote his story of the Great Rebellion. Miss
Mitford never ceased to be thankful that her declining years were
passing in the society of such neighbours as the Russells.... She
frequently told me that their affectionate kindness had helped her over
the dark places of life more than once, when without their succour she
must have dropped by the way.”
Among the many friends who hurried to Swallowfield to pay their
respects to Miss Mitford was a young writer in whom she was much
interested—James Payn. In his _Literary Recollections_ he calls her
“the dear little old lady, looking like a venerable fairy, with bright
sparkling eyes, a clear incisive voice, and a laugh that carried you
away with it.”
Mary Mitford’s mind, in spite of advancing years, was ever open to new
ideas and new impressions, so that she gladly hailed the arrival of
works just published in America.
She writes to Mr. Fields, who on leaving England had proceeded
to Italy, to thank him for sending her an illustrated edition of
_Longfellow’s Poems_ together with a copy of the _Golden Legend_:
“I hope I shall be only one among the multitude who think this the
greatest and best thing he has done yet, so racy, so full of character,
of what the French call local colour, so in its best and highest sense,
original.... Then those charming volumes of De Quincey and Sprague and
Grace Greenwood, and dear Mr. Hawthorne and the two new poets, who if
also young poets will be fresh glories for America. How can I thank you
enough for all these enjoyments? I have fallen in with Mr. Kingsley,
and a most charming person he is ... you must know Mr. Kingsley. He is
very young too, really young, for it is characteristic of our ‘young
poets’ that they generally turn out middle-aged and very often elderly.”
And again writing to Mr. Fields she says: “I was delighted with Dr.
Holmes’s poems for their individuality. How charming a person he must
be! And how truly the portrait represents the mind, the lofty brow full
of thought, and the wrinkle of humour in the eye! (Between ourselves I
always have a little doubt of genius when there is no humour; certainly
in the very highest poetry the two go together—Scott, Shakespeare,
Fletcher, Burns.) Another charming thing in Dr. Holmes is that every
succeeding poem is better than the last.... And I like him all the
better for being a physician—the one truly noble profession. There are
noble men in all professions, but in medicine only are the great mass,
almost the whole, generous, liberal, self-denying, living to advance
science and to help mankind.
“I rejoice to hear of another romance by the author of _The Scarlet
Letter_. That is a real work of genius.”
On receiving _The House of Seven Gables_ a little later on, she
apologizes to Mr. Fields for a delay in thanking him for his kind gift
saying that she delayed doing so until she had read the book twice.
“At sixty-five,” she remarks, “life gets too short to allow us to read
every book once and again; but it is not so with Mr. Hawthorne, the
first time one sketches them (to borrow Dr. Holmes’s excellent word)
and cannot put them down for the vivid interest; the next one lingers
over the beauty with a calmer enjoyment. Very beautiful this book is!”
Later on she writes to Mr. Fields of Whittier: “He sent me a charming
poem on Burns, full of tenderness and humanity and the indulgence which
the wise and good can so well afford, and which only the wisest and
best can show to their erring brethren.”
She writes early in January, 1852, of her _Recollections of a Literary
Life_: “My book is out at last, hurried through the press in a
fortnight—a process which half killed me and has left the volumes no
doubt full of errata,—and you, I mean your House, have not got it. I
am keeping a copy for you personally. People say that they like it. I
think you will, because it will remind you of this pretty country and
of an old Englishwoman who loves you well.”
And later on she writes to Mr. Fields: “Thank you for telling me about
the kind American reception of my book.... I do assure you that to be
heartily greeted by my kinsmen across the Atlantic is very precious to
me.”
Miss Mitford writes to her friend Mrs. Hoare on the subject of Jane
Austen’s works: “Your admiration of Jane Austen is so far from being
a ‘heresy,’ that I never met any high literary people in my life who
did not prefer her to any female prose writer.... For my own part I
delight in her.” And again writing of truth in works of fiction she
says: “The greatest fictions of the world are the truest. Look at the
_Vicar of Wakefield_, look at the _Simple Story_, look at Scott, look
at Jane Austen, greater because truer than all.” In the same letter she
remarks:—
“Yes, I ought to have liked Shelley better. But I have a love of
clearness—a perfect hatred of all that is vague and obscure—and I still
think with the grand exception of the ‘Cenci’ and of a few shorter
poems, that there was rather the making of a great poet, if he had been
spared, than the actual accomplishment of any great work. It was an
immense promise.”
“If you have command of French books,” she writes to another friend,
“read Saint Beuve’s _Causeries du Lundi_—charming volumes, full of
variety and attractive in every way.”
During the late autumn of 1852 Miss Mitford was busy writing an
Introduction to a complete edition of her _Dramatic Works_ which her
publishers were preparing to bring out. À propos of this undertaking
she writes: “For my own part I am convinced that without pains there
will be no really good writing.... I am still so difficult to satisfy
that I have written a long preface to the _Dramatic Works_ three times
over, many parts far more than three times.”
This Introduction forms very interesting reading, giving as it does an
account of her own experiences, together with many shrewd and clever
remarks and criticisms. We have quoted several passages in our chapters
upon the production of the plays.
The work was dedicated to Mr. Bennock, a warm friend and a patron of
Art and Letters, who had first suggested the idea to the author of
gathering together all her plays in this way and editing them.
On the 24th December of this same year Miss Mitford had a severe
accident from an overturn of her pony-chaise in Swallowfield Park.
She was thrown violently down on the hard gravel road and was much
bruised and shaken although no bones were actually broken. In spite
of her sufferings she indites a letter to her friend Miss Jephson in
which she says: “I am writing to you at this moment with my left arm
bound tightly to my body and no power of raising either foot from
the ground.... The muscular power of the lower limbs seem completely
gone.... So much for the bad; now for the consolation. Nobody else was
hurt, nobody to blame; the two parts of me that are quite uninjured
are my head and my right hand. K. is safe in bed and Sam is really
everything in the way of help that a man can be, lifting me about, and
directing a stupid old nurse and a giddy young maid with surprising
foresight and sagacity. I need not tell you how kind everybody is;
poor Lady Russell comes every day through mud and rain and wind....
Everybody comes to me, everybody writes to me, everybody sends me books.
“Mr. Bentley has done me good by giving me something to think of in
writing no less than three pressing applications for a second series of
_Recollections_, and, although I am forbidden anything like literary
composition, and even most letter writing, yet it is something to
plan and consider over. I shall (if it please God to grant me health
and strength to accomplish this object) introduce several chapters on
French literature, and am at this moment in full chase of all Casimir
Delavigne’s ballads.”
Miss Jephson writes to a mutual friend when sending on this letter
to him: “Dear Miss Mitford! She is like lavender, the sweeter the
more it is bruised. How wonderful are her spirits and energy after
such an accident!... I am glad she is thinking of a second series of
_Recollections_. She cannot be idle; it would be death to her.”
CHAPTER XXXIX
PEACEFUL CLOSING YEARS
The winter of 1852-3 was unusually cold, and Miss Mitford suffered much
from rheumatism supervening upon the effects of her accident. For many
months she was entirely confined to her room. She writes to her friend
Mr. Fields in March: “Here I am at Easter still a close prisoner from
the consequences of the accident that took place before Christmas....
But when fine weather—warm, genial, sunny weather—comes I will get
down in some way or other, and trust myself to that which never hurts
anyone, the honest open air. Spring, and even the approach of spring,
has upon me something the effect that England has upon you. It sets me
dreaming—I see leafy hedges in my dreams and flowery banks, and then I
long to make the vision a reality.”
She writes again to Mr. Fields in the month of June: “I am in
somewhat better trim, although the getting out of doors and into the
pony-chaise, from which Mr. May hoped such great things, has hardly
answered his expectations.... I am still unable to stand or walk unless
supported by Sam’s strong hands. However I am in as good spirits as
ever, and just at this moment most comfortably seated under the acacia
tree at the corner of my house—the beautiful acacia, literally loaded
with snowy chains—the flowering trees this summer—lilacs, laburnums,
rhododendrons, azalias—have been one mass of blossoms, and none as
graceful as this waving acacia.... On one side a syringa ... a jar of
roses on the table before me—fresh-gathered roses, the pride of Sam’s
heart; and little Fanchon at my feet, too idle to eat the biscuits with
which I am trying to tempt her—biscuits from Boston, sent to me by Mrs.
Sparks, whose kindness is really indefatigable, and which Fanchon ought
to like upon that principle if upon no other, but you know her laziness
of old. Well, that is a picture of Swallowfield Cottage at this moment.”
Among the many gifts from admiring readers of the _Recollections of a
Literary Life_ that arrived at Swallowfield were choice plants for the
garden. No less than twelve climbing roses for the front of her house
appeared from the Hertfordshire nurseries, also two seedlings called in
honour of her the “Miss Mitford” and the “Swallowfield.”
Mary Mitford writes to Mr. Fields:—
“Never, my dear friend, did I expect to like so well a man who came in
your place as I do like Mr. Ticknor.... It is delightful to hear him
talk of you, and to feel that sort of elder brotherhood which a senior
partner must exercise is in such hands. He was very kind to little
Harry, and Harry likes him _next_ to you. He came here on Saturday with
the dear Bennocks, and the Kingsleys met him. Mr. Hawthorne was to have
come but could not leave Liverpool so soon, so that is a pleasure to
come.
“Mr. Ticknor will tell you that all is arranged for printing with
Colburn’s successors, Hurst and Blackett, two separate works, the plays
and dramatic scenes forming one, the stories to be headed by a long
tale, of which I have always had the idea in my head to form almost a
novel. God grant me strength to do myself and my publishers justice in
that story!”
The title of the new book was _Atherton and other Stories_. They are as
fresh and bright in style as if the author were in perfect health, and
yet it was, as she writes to Mr. Fields, “in the midst of the terrible
cough, which did not allow me to lie down in bed, and a weakness
difficult to describe, that I finished _Atherton_.”
In her short Preface Miss Mitford mentions the adverse circumstances
under which the composition had been carried on, and expresses her
thankfulness to the merciful Providence for “enabling me still to
live by the mind, and not only to enjoy the never-wearying delight of
reading the thoughts of others, but even to light up a sick chamber and
brighten a wintry sky by recalling the sweet and sunny valley which
formed one of the most cherished haunts of my happier years.” And
then she closes this, her last work, with the words: “And now, gentle
reader, health and farewell.
M. R. MITFORD.
SWALLOWFIELD, _March, 1854_.”
_Atherton_ was dedicated to her valued friend Lady Russell, and was
published in three volumes during the month of April. It was also
published shortly afterwards in America. She writes to Mr. Fields on
May 2nd: “Long before this time you will, I hope, have received the
sheets of _Atherton_. It has met with an enthusiastic reception from
the English press, and certainly the friends who have written to me on
the subject seem to prefer the tale which fills the first volume to
anything that I have done. I hope you will like it. I am sure you will
not detect in it the gloom of a sick chamber.”
And writing to an English friend also in May she says: “Thank you for
your kindness in liking _Atherton_. It has been a great comfort to me
to find it so indulgently, so very warmly, received. Mr. Mudie told Mr.
Hurst that the demand was so great that he was obliged to have four
hundred copies in circulation.”
In this same letter she says: “I am sitting now at my open window,
not high enough to see out, but inhaling the soft summer breezes,
with an exquisite jar of roses on the window-sill and a huge sheaf of
fresh-gathered meadow-sweet giving its almondy fragrance from outside;
looking on blue sky and green waving trees, with a bit of road and some
cottages in the distance, and [hearing] K——‘s little girl’s merry voice
calling Fanchon in the court.... An avalanche of kindness has come from
America, where, as in Paris, my book has been reprinted. Letters to me
or for me addressed through my friend Mr. Fields have arrived, I think,
from almost every man of note in the States—Hawthorne, Longfellow,
Holmes, etc. etc. And one lady, Mrs. Sparkes, wife of Jared Sparks,
President of Harvard University, Cambridge, gravely invites me, with
man-servant and maid-servant, pony and Fanchon, to go and take up my
abode with them for two or three years, an unlimited hospitality which
seems to English ears astounding. Cambridge is close to Boston, where
most of the literary men of America live, and if I were not such a
helpless creature really one would be tempted to go and thank all these
warm-hearted people for their extraordinary kindness.”
And writing in August she says: “I do not think there is an authoress
of name who has not sent me messages full of the kindest interest.
It is one of the highest mercies by which this visitation has been
softened that I can still give my thoughts and time and love and
sympathy, not merely to dear friends, but to books and flowers and the
common doings of this workaday world.”
A lady friend on one occasion had remonstrated with Mary Mitford for
what she considered a misplaced enthusiasm. “Ah, my dear friend!” she
responds, “do not lecture me for loving and admiring! It is the last
green branch in the old tree, the lingering touch of life and youth.”
À propos of a tendency of hers to extoll at times some modern poem
that had taken her fancy as being superior to the great poems of old,
Mr. Fields quotes a saying of Pascal’s that “the heart has reasons
that reason does not know.” “Miss Mitford,” he says, “was a charming
exemplification of this wise saying.”
During the autumn of 1854 Mary’s condition had been rapidly growing
worse, though her letters show that her bright spirit was not broken
by her continued sufferings and increased weakness, nor her mind in
any way clouded. Her last letter to Mr. Fields was written on December
23rd, 1854, only eighteen days before she died. In it she says: “God
bless you, my dear friend! May He send to both of you health and
happiness and length of days and so much of this world’s goods as is
needful to prevent anxiety and insure comfort. I have known many rich
people in my time, and the result has convinced me that with great
wealth some deep black shadow is as sure to walk as it is to follow the
bright sunshine. So I never pray for more than the blessed enough for
those whom I love best.”
On January 1st, 1855, nine days only before her death, she wrote the
following letter to a friend: “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;
and I really think that the feeling for these simple pleasures is
increasing with the increase of education.”
The end came on January 10th and was in accordance with her sweet
life. As she lay with her hand in that of her dear friend Lady Russell
she expired so quietly that the actual moment of her departure was
not realized. “The features of her face in death,” we are told,
“undisturbed by any trace of the cares and trials she had endured, were
overspread by an expression of intense repose and peace and charity
such as no living face had ever known.”
In the introduction to her _Dramatic Works_ Miss Mitford remarks that
she “hopes the plays will be as mercifully dealt with as if they were
published by her executor, and that the hand that wrote them were laid
in peaceful rest where the sun glances through the great elms in the
beautiful churchyard of Swallowfield.” And there she lies in the heart
of the country she so dearly loved and amidst the sights and sounds
that she most cherished.
We would close this book with the words of a friend and contemporary
author who knew Miss Mitford well.
“Pleasant is the memory because happy was the life, kindly the nature
and genial the heart of Mary Russell Mitford. She had her trials and
she bore them well; trusting and ever faithful to the _Nature_ she
loved; sending forth from her poor cottage at Three Mile Cross—from its
leaden casement and narrow door—floods of light and sunshine that have
cheered and brightened the uttermost parts of the earth.”
[Illustration]
INDEX
A
Abbey School, Reading, its interesting associations, 63-65
Alresford, Hants, birthplace of Mary Russell Mitford, description of,
1-2; Broad Street, Dr. Mitford’s house in, 5
Andersen, Hans, his visit to England, his words in an album, 349
Anning, Mary, an inhabitant of Lyme Regis, discovers the gigantic
fossil bones of the Ichthyosaurus, receives a visit from the King of
Saxony, Kenyon’s verses upon her, 44-46
Athol, Dowager Duchess of, M. R. M. visits her at Alnwick Castle, 1806,
description of, 104-7
Austen, Jane, M. R. M.’s admiration of, 253-255, 368-369
Aynsley, Lord Charles Murray, son of the Dowager Duchess of Athol,
visited by M. R. M. in Northumberland in 1806, 103-105; receives visit
from Louis XVIII, in Bocking Deanery, 111-118
Aynsley, Lady, wife of the above, first cousin of Dr. Mitford, is
visited by
M. R. M. in Northumberland in 1806, at Little Harle Tower, takes her to
Alnwick Castle, 103-107; describes visit from Louis XVIII in Bocking
Deanery in letter to Mrs. Mitford, 111-118
B
Baillie, Joanna, meets M. R. M. in society, 329
Barrett, Miss Elizabeth. See under Mrs. Barrett Browning
Bath, M. R. M.’s visit to, 252-255
_Belford Regis_, by M. R. M., published 1835, 339
Bonar, Charles, translator of Hans Andersen’s’ works, friend of M. R.
M., 349
Browning, Robert, meets M. R. M., 329; his marriage, 348
Browning, Mrs. Barrett, first meets M. R. M. before her marriage,
1836, their interesting correspondence, 330-334; her marriage, her
correspondence with M. R. M., 348
C
Chorley, Henry, meets M. R. M. in London, 329; persuades her to resume
literary work, 352
Cobbett, William, friend of Dr. Mitford, 126-127
_Country Stories_, published 1835, 339-340
Cowper, William, his letters, 131-132
E
Elford, Sir William, his influence on M. R. M., their interesting
correspondence, 128-133; his views upon _Our Village_, 203-205
Exeter, Bishop of, 1
F
Fermor, Arabella (the “Belinda” of _The Rape of the Lock_), marries Mr.
Perkins and lives at Ufton Court, 257-264
Fields, James T., American publisher and author, describes first visit
to M. R. M. at Three Mile Cross, her surroundings and interesting
conversation, 316-319; M. R. M.’s letters to him, 350-1; describes his
visit to her at Swallowfield, 362-365; her letters to him, 368, 372,
376-378
_Foscari_, M. R. M.’s tragedy of, performed at Covent Garden, 5th
November, 1826, 223-227
H
Hall, Dr. Spencer T., his visit to Three Mile Cross, 354-356
Harness, Rev. William, valued friend of the Mitfords, his wise
guardianship of a bequest of Dr. Russell, his views on Dr. Mitford’s
conduct, 158-159; meets M. R. M. in London, 329; M. R. M.’s letter to
him on Church Reforms, 340-341
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, publication of _The Scarlet Letter_, _House of
Seven Gables_, etc., etc., M. R. M.’s interest in them, 367
Haydon, Benjamin Robert, his picture the “Judgment of Solomon,” becomes
friend of M. R. M., described by M. R. M., 318-319; his Life by Tom
Taylor, 318
Hemans, Mrs., letter to M. R. M., on publication of _Our Village_,
208-209, 220
Holmes, Dr. (Oliver Wendell), M. R. M.’s admiration of his poems and
personality, 366-367
Howett, Mrs. (Mary), authoress, letter to M. R. M. on _Our Village_,
321-322
Howett, William, author, describes visit to M. R. M. at Three Mile
Cross, letter to M. R. M., 319-321
J
Jephson, Miss, letters to her from M. R. M., 335-336, 370-371
K
Kenyon, John, friend of the Mitfords, his lines on Mary Anning, 46; his
words on M. R. M. to James T. Fields, 316
Kingsley, Charles, 341; described by M. R. M., 366
L
Landor, Walter Savage, meets M. R. M. in London, 228, 229
Landseer, Edwin, offers to paint M. R. M.’s dog, 330
Lansdowne, Lord, proposes M. R. M.’s health at meeting, 137-139
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, M. R. M.’s words on his poems and the
_Golden Legend_, 366
Louis XVIII and court at Gosfield Hall, his visit to Bocking Deanery
described by Lady Charles Aynsley, 110-118; his remarkable memory, 136,
137
Lyme Regis, removal of Mitfords to, in 1795, the Great House described
by M. R. M., its association with the Monmouth Rebellion, 29-39
M
Macready, William Charles, takes leading rôle in _Foscari_, 222-224
Mitford, Dr., marriage and birth of child, 2; his gambling, loss of
fortune, starts practice in Reading, 22, 23; removal to Lyme Regis,
29-50; further losses, flight to London to debtors’ Sanctuary, wins
prize in lottery, 52-56; builds Bertram House, 92; further losses,
139-141; obliged to leave Bertram House, settles at Three Mile Cross,
158-162; witnesses performance of _Foscari_, 221; portrait by Lucas,
330; illness and death, confusion of his affairs, 341-343
Mitford, Mrs., née Russell, only child and heiress of Dr. Russell,
Rector of Ashe, marriage with Dr. Mitford, birth of her only daughter,
Mary, in 1787, home in Alresford, 2-8; visits her daughter in Hans
Place, 72; another visit, 87, 88; letter on Louis XVIII’s visit to
Bocking, 113-118; her death, New Year’s Day, 1830; buried in Shinfield
churchyard, her daughter’s tribute, 325-326
Mitford, Mary Russell, born at Alresford, Hants, December 16th, 1787,
2; early recollections of her home in Broad Street, precocious power
of reading, 5-8; their village neighbours, at a rustic wedding,
9-21; removal of family to Reading, 1791, her early recollections of
the town, 22-25; a flying visit to London, 25-28; removal of family
to Lyme Regis, 1795, her recollections of the Great House, etc.,
29-39; rambles on the shore, 40-44; sudden loss of fortune, flight to
London, 49-51; family takes refuge in debtors’ Sanctuary, a lottery
ticket bought, turns up a prize, 52-55; sent to a school in Hans
Place, her recollections of it, 64-73; amusing account of old French
Society, 74-81; interest in French drama, visits to the theatre,
great actors of the day, Miss Rowden’s inspiring influence, 82-88; an
incident of school life, 88-91; leaves school, 1802, recollections
of old Reading, 92-99; removal of family to Bertram House, 99-100;
her visit to Northumberland with her father, guests of Lord and Lady
Murray Aynsley, visits to Alnwick Castle, Morpeth and Cheviot Hills,
returns home, 104-109; early poems published in 1810-11, successful,
119-121; describes performances of “Greek tragedies,” by Dr. Valpy’s
pupils, 121-123; short visit to London, 123-125; writes of Cobbett
and Sir Francis Burdett, 126-128; introduced to Sir William Elford,
becomes his chosen correspondent, their interesting letters, 128-133;
in London in June, 1814, witnesses the assemblage of Crowned Heads
on the fall of Napoleon, sees the Duke of Wellington, 134-137; an
ovation to M. R. M. at a public meeting, 137-139; more loss of money
owing to her father’s gambling, 139-140; flattering recognition by
American publishers, 141-143; Sir William Elford’s visit to Bertram
House, their correspondence resumed, writes of singers and actors of
the day, and distinguished writers, 144-155; Haydon’s “Judgment of
Solomon,” describes the artist, 156-158; further losses of property,
forced to quit Bertram House, the family settle in Three Mile Cross,
M. R. M.’s detailed account of their cottage and the village, 161-178;
describes village scenes, and a sunset over the Loddon, 182-189; _The
Talking Lady_, 190-196; describes her garden, a quack doctor, 196-202;
publication of _Our Village_, the opening paragraph, letters received
about it, its early success, 203-211; _Patty’s New Hat_, 212-217; a fog
in the country, Mrs. Heman’s words, 217-220; tries hand at tragedy,
_Foscari_ and _Julian_ approved by Macready, _Foscari_ performed
at Covent Garden Theatre, 1826, M. R. M. present and describes its
success, 221-229; writes _Rienzi_, produced at Drury Lane Theatre, its
great success, M. R. M. in town, letters of congratulation, performed
in New York, tribute from James Crissy, 230-240; her stories of two
émigrés neighbours, 241-249; describes visits to Southampton, Bath,
Richmond Park, and Hampton Court, 250-259; writes of Ufton Court and
its associations, 264-270; writes of Three Mile Cross in 1830, _The
Black Velvet Bag_, 271-282; stories of eccentric neighbours, 283-291;
attends country Mayings and visits Silchester, 292-301; a trip to
Aberleigh (Arborfield) on the Loddon, 302-306; stories of gipsies,
306-314; her friendship with James T. Fields, his visit to Three Mile
Cross, also visits from William Howett, George Ticknor, and Daniel
Webster, 315-325; words on her mother’s death, letter to a child,
325-327; stays with Sergeant Talfourd, receives warm welcome from
leading writers, correspondence with Miss Barrett (afterwards Mrs.
Barrett Browning), 328-334; pecuniary anxieties, receives pension,
undertakes fresh literary work, 334-337; writes on first appearance
of _Pickwick_, 337-338; publication of _Belford Regis_, and _Country
Stories_, _Our Village_, translated into Spanish, 339-340; writes
to William Harness on Church reforms, 340-341; death of her father,
1842, resolves to pay all his debts but whole sum subscribed by
friends, receives constant supply of books from Mr. George Lovejoy,
little Henry, adopted child of the family, 341-345; her interest in
_Modern Painters_ and friendship for Ruskin, her words on Browning’s
poems, Hans Andersen in London, 345-349; letters to Mr. Fields,
_Country Stories_ republished, commencing her _Recollections of a
Literary Life_, an Italian exile in Three Mile Cross, her views on
Louis Napoleon, receives a visit from Dr. Spencer Hall, decides to
leave Three Mile Cross, her farewell to the village, 350-359; settles
at Swallowfield, describes her cottage and garden, visits from Mr.
Fields, Mr. James Payne and others, her affection for the Russells
of Swallowfield Park, 360-365; her interest on works of Longfellow,
Hawthorne, O. W. Holmes, and Whittier, 366-368; _Recollections of a
Literary Life_ published, its success in America, her admiration of
Jane Austen’s works, her remarks on Shelley and on Saint Bouve, writes
introduction to her dramatic works, 368-370; her severe accident, her
courage, cheerful letters to Mr. Fields, kind attentions from far and
near, visits from Mr. Ticknor, writes _Atherton and Other Stories_,
dedicated to Lady Russell, its great success, 370-376; her last
illness, her delight in beauty of nature to the end, her last letter
to Mr. Fields, her death, January 1st, 1855, buried in Swallowfield
churchyard, 376-380
Molière, M. R. M.’s early delight in his comedies, 84-85
“Monsieur” (Le Conte d’Artois) visits Lord and Lady Aynsley in Bocking
Deanery, 114-118
N
North, Christopher (John Wilson), his amusing scene in the “Noctes
Ambrosianæ” upon the publication of _Our Village_, 209-211
O
_Our Village_, publication of, March, 1824, its success, etc. (see
under Mary Russell Mitford), 203-211
P
Pepys (Samuel), M. R. M. on his “Memoirs,” 153
_Pickwick_, publication of, 31 March, 1836, its great success, 337-338
Pope (Alexander), M. R. M.’s early remarks on him as a letter writer
and poet, 132-133; quotation from _Rape of the Lock_, 258-259; its
heroine Belinda, 260-263
R
Racine, his “Athalie,” 221
Reading (“Belford Regis”), removal of Mitford family to, 1791,
22-23; M. R. M.’s early recollections of, 25, 56-59, 63-65; shopping
adventures, 271-282
_Recollections of a Literary Life_, by M. R. M., 352; published in
January, 1852, its success in America, 368
_Rienzi_, M. R. M.’s tragedy of, performed at Drury Lane, October 4,
1828, 232-235 (see under Mary Russell Mitford)
Rowden, Miss, a teacher in the school in Hans Place, her inspiring
influence on M. R. M., 68, 85-88
Russell, Dr., Rector of Ashe, his daughter marries Dr. Mitford, 2
Russell, Lady, of Swallowfield Park, 365, 371; M. R. M.’s _Atherton_
dedicated to her, 375
S
St. Quintin, M., arrival in Reading, becomes head of Abbey School,
marries the English teacher, removes School to Hans Place, London,
1798, M. R. M. becomes their pupil, 64-68; his hospitality to émigrés,
74-91
Sedgwick, American authoress, her letters to M. R. M., 220, 326-327
Seward, Anna, “Swan of Lichfield,” M. R. M.’s early strictures on her
writing, 130-132
Shakespeare, William, M. R. M.’s early appreciation of _Much Ado About
Nothing_, 133
Shelley (Percy Bysshe), M. R. M. on his poems, 369
Sherwood, Mrs. (née Butt), sees M. R. M. when a child, 23-25; her
recollections of Abbey School, Reading, 64-65
Swallowfield, M. R. M. residing at, 360-380
Swallowfield Park, abode of the Russell family, 365
T
Talfourd Sergeant, author of _Ion_, present at performance of
_Foscari_, 222-224; M. R. M. at his house in London, interesting
society, 328-330
Three Mile Cross, prototype of _Our Village_, description of, 156-183
(see under Mary Russell Mitford)
Ticknor, George (American author and publisher), describes visit to M.
R. M. at Three Mile Cross in 1835, 323; visits her at Swallowfield, 374
Trollope, Mrs. (authoress), describes performance of _Rienzi_ in New
York, 236
U
Ufton Court (in Berkshire), description of, 260-269
V
Valpy, Dr., headmaster of Reading Grammar School, man of great
influence, 62-65; introduces acting of Greek tragedy in original
language, described by M. R. M., 121-123
Voltaire, M. R. M. reading his tragedies at school, 83
W
Walpole (Horace), M. R. M.’s admiration for his letters, 132; her words
upon him, 257
Webster, Daniel (American statesman and author), his visit to Three
Mile Cross described by M. R. M., 323-325
Whittier (John Greenleaf), M. R. M.’s admiration of his “Massachusetts
to Virginia,” 352; and of his poem on Burns, 368
Wordsworth, William, his personality described by M. R. M., 328-329
Y
Young, Charles Mayne, performs leading rôle in _Rienzi_, 232-235
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