United States or Chad ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Barrett Browning's hands, it has been possible to extract many passages of a sufficiently great, and not too private, interest for our purpose. These extracts in some cases almost entire letters indeed constitute a fairly complete record of Mr. and Mrs. Browning's joint life till the summer of 1854, when Miss Mitford's death was drawing near, and the correspondence ceased.
There was an announcement that she was engaged to one of her own clan, and the news spread among her friends. The romantic Mrs. Hofland had conjured up the suggestion, to Miss Mitford's extreme annoyance. It is said Mrs. Hofland also married off Miss Edgeworth in the same manner. Mary Mitford found her true romance in friendship, not in love. One day Mr.
Of Miss Mitford's writings Ruskin says, 'They have the playfulness and purity of the "Vicar of Wakefield" without the naughtiness of its occasional wit, or the dust of the world's great road on the other side of the hedge.... *It is Mr. Harness who says, writing of Ruskin and Miss Mitford, 'His kindness cheered her closing days.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper 'On the Spirit of Obligations' was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's laws a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands.
Miss Mitford would have joined with Hamerton, when he says, 'I humbly thank Divine Providence for having invented dogs, and I regard that man with wondering pity who can lead a dogless life. Another of Miss Mitford's great friends was John Ruskin,* and one can well imagine how much they must have had in common.
But I doubt whether many persons have noticed the significance of the washing of Kira Kotsuke-no-Suke's severed head, or the significance of the address inscribed to their dead lord by the brave men who had so long waited and watched for the chance to avenge him. This address, of which I quote Mitford's translation, was laid upon the tomb of the Lord Asano.
Sometimes the address was only spoken; sometimes it was also written, and the manuscript left upon the tomb. There is probably none of my readers unacquainted with Mitford's ever-delightful Tales of Old Japan, and his translation of the true story of the "Forty-Seven Ronins."
"If I were a writing person, she would become literature, impinging upon Miss Mitford's tales of 'Our Village, Miss Austen's varieties, and the young Bronte woman's 'Wuthering Heights. Mon Dieu! what a resource it would be to be a writing person!" he wrote to the Roman friend. To his daughters he said: "She brings back my tenderest youth.
In Sparta, also, a form of selection was followed, for it was enacted that all children should be examined shortly after birth; the well-formed and vigorous being preserved, the others left to perish. Mitford's 'History of Greece, vol. i. p. 282. The Grecian poet, Theognis, who lived 550 B.C., clearly saw how important selection, if carefully applied, would be for the improvement of mankind.
Gaskell's incomparable "Cranford," is, I think, the most popular of Miss Mitford's works. She herself has always a peculiar honor in my mind, from the exemplary devotion of her whole life to her father, for whom her dutiful and tender affection always seemed to me to fulfil the almost religious idea conveyed by the old-fashioned, half-heathen phrase of "filial piety."
Word Of The Day