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Updated: June 14, 2025
Lady Russell, who had sent the phaeton with the fast-stepping horse to meet us, was walking in the park as we drove up, and instead of taking us back to the house, she first led the way across the grass and by the stream to the old church, standing in its trim sweet garden, where Death itself seems smiling and fearless; where kind Mary Mitford's warm heart rests quiet, and 'her busy hand, as she says herself, 'is lying in peace there, where the sun glances through the great elm trees in the beautiful churchyard of Swallowfield.
Miss Mitford's sketches in Our Village the nearest in form to Crabbe's pictures of country life were to come later still. Crabbe, though he adhered, with a wise knowledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet, is really a chief founder of the rural novel the Silas Marner and the Adam Bede of fifty years later. Pope was his earliest master in his art.
To those of a certain literary generation who read Miss Mitford's memoirs, how many such familiar presences and names must appear and reappear. Not least among them that of her biographer, Mr. Harness himself, who was so valued by his friends. Mrs. Kemble, Mrs. Sartoris, Charles Allston Collins, always talked of him with a great respect and tenderness.
This is closely, and indeed inseparably, connected with another of his eccentric tastes, a marked partiality for Lacedaemon, and a dislike of Athens. Mr Mitford's book has, I suspect, rendered these sentiments in some degree popular; and I shall, therefore, examine them at some length.
He was not tall; he walked rather lame; Miss Harness too was little, looking up at all the rest of the world with a kind round face and sparkling eyes fringed with thick lashes. Mary Mitford was indeed happy in her friends, as happy as she was unfortunate in her nearer relations. With much that is sad, there is a great deal of beauty and enjoyment in Miss Mitford's life.
But he was too prudent to be entangled in extended expeditions against them, and having made trial of their formidable strength, and made some demonstrations of the superiority of his own, he left them in possession of their wildernesses. Gibbon. Gibbon. Caldecott's Baber. Vid. Mitford's Greece, vol. viii. p. 86. Pritchard's Researches. The Tartars.
They had even succeeded in getting between a young seal and the water and speared it, so that there was something like jubilation in the camp on their return at the prospect of a fresh meal and better fare in future. But this was abruptly put an end to by the arrival of Slag and his comrade with the news of Mitford's disappearance.
It may even be a question whether, if any one did so, it would not detract from his own character, at least as much as it might add to the value of his writings. In one of his letters, Byron enumerates among the merits of Mitford's "History of Greece," "wrath and partiality," explaining that such ingredients make a man write "in earnest."
William Harness, was about to collect from Miss Mitford's correspondents, for publication, the letters she had written to them, he applied to me among others. I was obliged to withhold the correspondence for a reason that existed then; but I am no longer restrained from printing it now.
There are many parts of Miss Edgeworth's earlier stories, and of Miss Mitford's sketches and descriptions, and not a little of Mrs. Opie's, that exhibit the same fine and penetrating spirit of observations, the same softness and delicacy of hand, and unerring truth of delineation, to which we have alluded as characterizing the purer specimens of female art.
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