Chapter VI: Miss Mitford (1)

That portrait hanging near Wordsworth's is next to seeing Mary Russell Mitford herself as I first saw her, twenty-three years ago, in her geranium-planted cottage at Three-Mile Cross. She sat to John Lucas for the picture in her serene old age, and the likeness is faultless. She had proposed to herself to leave the portrait, as it was her own property, to me in her will; but as I happened to be in England during the latter part of her life, she altered her determination, and gave it to me from her own hands.

Sydney Smith said of a certain quarrelsome person, that his very face was a breach of the peace. The face of that portrait opposite to us is a very different one from Sydney's fighter. Everything that belongs to the beauty of old age one will find recorded in that charming countenance. Serene cheerfulness most abounds, and that is a quality as rare as it is commendable. It will be observed that the dress of Miss Mitford in the picture before us is quaint and somewhat antiquated even for the time when it was painted, but a pleasant face is never out of fashion.

An observer of how old age is neglected in America said to me the other day, "It seems an impertinence to be alive after sixty on this side of the globe"; and I have often thought how much we lose by not cultivating fine old-fashioned ladies and gentlemen. Our aged relatives and friends seem to be tucked away, nowadays, into neglected corners, as though it were the correct thing to give them a long preparation for still narrower quarters. For my own part, comely and debonair old age is most attractive; and when I see the "thick silver-white hair lying on a serious and weather-worn face, like moonlight on a stout old tower," I have a strong tendency to lift my hat, whether I know the person or not.

"No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in an autumnal face."

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 in 1847, "You must know my friend, Miss Mitford. She lives directly on the line of your route to Oxford, and you must call with my card and make her acquaintance." I had lately been talking with Wordsworth and Christopher North and old Samuel Rogers, but my hunger at that time to stand face to face with the distinguished persons in English literature was not satisfied. So it was during my first "tourification" in England that I came to know Miss Mitford. The day selected for my call at her cottage door happened to be a perfect one on which to begin an acquaintance with the lady of "Our Village." She was then living at Three-Mile Cross, having removed there from Bertram House in 1820. The cottage where I found her was situated on the high road between Basingstoke and Reading; and the village street on which she was then living contained the public-house and several small shops near by. There was also close at hand the village pond full of ducks and geese, and I noticed several young rogues on their way to school were occupied in worrying their feathered friends. The windows of the cottage were filled with flowers, and cowslips and violets were plentifully scattered about the little garden. Miss Mitford liked to have one dog, at least, at her heels, and this day her pet seemed to be constantly under foot. I remember the room into which I was shown was sanded, and a quaint old clock behind the door was marking off the hour in small but very loud pieces. The cheerful old lady called to me from the head of the stairs to come up into her sitting-room. I sat down by the open window to converse with her, and it was pleasant to see how the village children, as they went by, stopped to bow and curtsey. One curly-headed urchin made bold to take off his well-worn cap, and wait to be recognized as "little Johnny". "No great scholar," said the kind-hearted old lady to me, "but a sad rogue among our flock of geese. Only yesterday the young marauder was detected by my maid with a plump gosling stuffed half-way into his pocket!" While she was thus discoursing of Johnny's peccadilloes, the little fellow looked up with a knowing expression, and very soon caught in his cap a gingerbread dog, which the old lady threw to him from the window. "I wish he loved his book as well as he relishes sweetcake," sighed she, as the boy kicked up his heels and disappeared down the lane.

Her conversation that afternoon, full of anecdote, ran on in a perpetual flow of good-humor, and I was shocked, on looking at my watch, to find I had stayed so long, and had barely time to reach the railway-station in season to arrive at Oxford that night. We parted with the mutual determination and understanding to keep our friendship warm by correspondence, and I promised never to come to England again without finding my way to Three-Mile Cross.

During the conversation that day, Miss Mitford had many inquiries to make concerning her American friends, Miss Catherine Sedgwick, Daniel Webster, and Dr. Chancing. Her voice had a peculiar ringing sweetness in it, rippling out sometimes like a beautiful chime of silver bells; and when she told a comic story, hitting off some one of her acquaintances, she joined in with the laugh at the end with great heartiness and _naïveté_. When listening to anything that interested her, she had a way of coming into the narrative with "Dear me, dear me, dear me," three times repeated, which it was very pleasant to hear.

From that summer 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. Her health had broken down years before, from too constant attendance on her invalid parents, and she was never certain of a well day. When her father died, in 1842, shamefully in debt (for he had squandered two fortunes not exactly his own, and was always one of the most improvident of men, belonging to that class of impecunious individuals who seem to have been born insolvent), she said, "Everybody shall be paid, if I sell the gown off my back or pledge my little pension." And putting her shoulder to the domestic wheel, she never nagged for an instant, or gave way to despondency.

She was always cheerful, and her talk is delightful to remember. From girlhood she had known and had been intimate with most of the prominent writers of her time, and her observations and reminiscences were so shrewd and pertinent that I have scarcely known her equal.

Carlyle tells us "nothing so lifts a man from all his mean imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration"; and Miss Mitford admired to such an extent that she must have been lifted in this way nearly all her lifetime. Indeed she erred, if she erred at all, on this side, and overpraised and over-admired everything and everybody whom she regarded. When she spoke of Beranger or Dumas or Hazlitt or Holmes, she exhausted every term of worship and panegyric. Louis Napoleon was one of her most potent crazes, and I fully believe, if she had been alive during the days of his downfall, she would have died of grief. When she talked of Munden and Bannister and Fawcett and Emery, those delightful old actors for whom she had 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 favorites, and tried to make me, through her representation of him, feel what a spirit there was in the man. Although she had been prostrated by the hard work and increasing anxieties of forty years of authorship, when I saw her she was as fresh and independent as a skylark. She was a good hater as well as a good praiser, and she left nothing worth saving in an obnoxious reputation.

I 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 flavor 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.

"I am a terrible forgetter of dates," she used to say, when any one asked her of the _time when_; but for the _manner how_ she was never at a loss. "Poor Haydon!" she began. "He was an old friend of mine, and I am indebted to Sir William Elford, one of my dear father's correspondents during my girlhood, for a suggestion which sent me to look at a picture then on exhibition in London, and thus was brought about my knowledge of the painter's existence. He, 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 school-room a thousand times told, than such good-humored condescension from a clever man of the world to a girl almost young enough to be his granddaughter. I owe much to that correspondence, and, amongst other debts, the acquaintance of Haydon. Sir William's own letters were most charming,--full of old-fashioned courtesy, of quaint humor, and of pleasant and genial criticism on literature and on art. An amateur-painter himself, painting interested him particularly, and he often spoke much and warmly of the young man from Plymouth, whose picture of the 'Judgment of Solomon' was then on exhibition in London. 'You must see it,' said he, 'even if you come to town on purpose.'"--The reader of Haydon's Life will remember that Sir William Elford, in conjunction with a Plymouth banker named Tingecombe, ultimately purchased the picture. The poor artist was overwhelmed with astonishment and joy when he walked into the exhibition-room and read the label, "Sold," which had been attached to his picture that morning before he arrived. "My first impulse," he says in his Autobiography, "was gratitude to God."

"It so happened," continued Miss Mitford, "that I merely passed through London that season, and, being detained by some of the thousand and one nothings which are so apt to detain women in the great city, 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 wished 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 'Judgment of Solomon.' I am no great judge of painting; but that picture impressed me then, as it does now, as excellent in composition, in color, 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 seemed, unaccountably to us at first, to give much pleasure to the only gentleman who had remained in the room,--a young and very distinguished-looking person, who had watched with evident amusement our negotiation with the doorkeeper. Beyond indicating the best position to look at the picture, he had no conversation with us; but 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 by appointment 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. Perhaps your American word _bright_ expresses better than any other his appearance and manner. His figure, short, slight, elastic, and vigorous, looked still more light and youthful from the little sailor's-jacket and snowy trousers which formed his painting costume. His complexion was clear and healthful. His forehead, broad and high, out of all proportion to the lower part of his face, gave an unmistakable character of intellect to the finely placed head. Indeed, he liked to observe that the gods of the Greek sculptors owed much of their elevation to being similarly out of drawing! The lower features were terse, succinct, and powerful,--from the bold, decided jaw, to the large, firm, ugly, good-humored mouth. His very spectacles aided the general expression; they had a look of the man. But how shall I attempt to tell you of his brilliant conversation, of his rapid, energetic manner, of his quick turns of thought, as he flew on from topic to topic, dashing his brush here and there upon the canvas? Slow and quiet persons were a good deal startled by this suddenness and mobility. He left such people far behind, mentally and bodily. But his talk was so rich and varied, so earnest and glowing, his anecdotes so racy, his perception of character so shrewd, and the whole tone so spontaneous and natural, that the want of repose was rather recalled afterwards than felt at the time. The alloy to this charm was a slight coarseness of voice and accent, which contrasted somewhat strangely with his constant courtesy and high breeding. Perhaps this was characteristic. A defect of some sort pervades his pictures. Their great want is equality and congruity,--that perfect union of qualities which we call _taste_. His apartment, especially at that period when he lived in his painting-room, was in itself a study of the most picturesque kind. Besides the great picture itself, for which there seemed hardly space between the walls, it was crowded with casts, lay figures, arms, tripods, vases, draperies, and costumes of all ages, weapons of all nations, books in all tongues. These cumbered the floor; whilst around hung smaller pictures, sketches, and drawings, replete with originality and force. With chalk he could do what he chose. I remember he once drew for me a head of hair with nine of his sweeping, vigorous strokes! 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 this sketch, gave rise to our long correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged. Everybody feels that his life, as told by Mr. Taylor, with its terrible catastrophe, is a stern lesson to young artists, an awful warning that cannot be set aside. Let us not forget that amongst his many faults are qualities which hold out a bright example. His devotion to his noble art, his conscientious pursuit of every study connected with it, his unwearied industry, his love of beauty and of excellence, his warm family affection, his patriotism, his courage, and his piety, will not easily be surpassed. Thinking of them, let us speak tenderly of the ardent spirit whose violence would have been softened by better fortune, and who, if more successful, would have been more gentle and more humble."

And so with her vigilant and appreciative eye she saw, and thus in her own charming way she talked of, the man whose name, says Taylor, as a popularizer of art, stands without a rival among his brethren.

She loathed mere dandies, and there were no epithets too hot for her contempts 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."

There was no half-way with her, and she never could have said with M---- S----, when a certain visitor left the room one day after a call, "If we did not _love_ our dear friend Mr. ---- so much, shouldn't we hate him tremendously!" Her neighbor, John Ruskin, she thought as eloquent a prose-writer as Jeremy Taylor, and I have heard her go on in her fine way, giving preferences to certain modern poems far above the works of the great masters of song. Pascal says that "the heart has reasons that reason does not know"; and Miss Mitford was a charming exemplification of this wise saying.

Her dogs and her geraniums were her great glories. She used to write me long letters about Fanchon, a dog whose personal acquaintance I had made some time before, while on a visit to her cottage. Every virtue under heaven she attributed to that canine individual; and I was obliged to allow in my return letters, that, since our planet began to spin, nothing comparable to Fanchon had ever run on four legs. I had also known Flush, the ancestor of Fanchon, intimately, and had been accustomed to hear wonderful things of that dog; but Fanchon had graces and genius unique. Miss Mitford would have joined with Hamerton in his gratitude for canine companionship, 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."

Her fondness for rural life, one may well imagine, was almost unparalleled. I have often been with her among the wooded lanes of her pretty country, listening for 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 had fallen in love with nature when a little child, and had studied the landscape till she knew familiarly every flower and leaf which grows on English soil. She delighted in rural vagabonds of every sort, especially in gypsies; and as they flourished in her part of the country, she knew all their ways, and had charming stories to tell of their pranks and thievings. She called them "the commoners of nature"; and once I remember she pointed out to me on the road a villanous-looking youth on whom she smiled as we passed, as if he had been Virtue itself in footpad disguise. 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 but speak."

She _understood_ how to enjoy rural occupations and rural existence, and she had no patience with her friend Charles Lamb, who preferred the town. Walter Savage Landor addressed these lines to her a few months before she died, and they seem to me very perfect and lovely in their application:--

"The hay is carried; and the hours
Snatch, as they pass, the linden flow'rs;
And children leap to pluck a spray
Bent earthward, and then run away.
Park-keeper! catch me those grave thieves
About whose frocks the fragrant leaves,
Sticking and fluttering here and there,
No false nor faltering witness bear.

"I never view such scenes as these
In grassy meadow girt with trees,
But comes a thought of her who now
Sits with serenely patient brow
Amid deep sufferings: none hath told
More pleasant tales to young and old.
Fondest was she of Father Thames,
But rambled to Hellenic streams;
Nor even there could any tell
The country's purer charms so well
As Mary Mitford.
Verse! go forth
And breathe o'er gentle breasts her worth.
Needless the task ... but should she see
One hearty wish from you and me,
A moment's pain it may assuage,--
A rose-leaf on the couch of Age."

And Harriet Martineau pays her respects to my friend in this wise: "Miss Mitford's descriptions of scenery, brutes, and human beings have such singular merit, that she may be regarded as the founder of a new style; and if the freshness wore off with time, there was much more than a compensation in the fine spirit of resignation and cheerfulness which breathed through everything she wrote, and endeared her as a suffering friend to thousands who formerly regarded her only as a most entertaining stranger."

What lovely drives about England I have enjoyed with Miss Mitford as my companion and guide! We used to arrange with her trusty Sam for a day now and then in the open air. He would have everything in readiness at the appointed hour, and be at his post with that careful, kind-hearted little maid, the "hemmer of flounces," all prepared to give the old lady a fair start on her day's expedition. Both those excellent servants delighted to make their mistress happy, and she greatly rejoiced in their devotion and care. Perhaps we had made our plans to visit Upton Court, a charming old house where Pope's Arabella Fermor had passed many years of her married life. On the way thither we would talk over "The Rape of the Lock" and the heroine, Belinda, who was no other than Arabella herself. Arriving on the lawn in front of the decaying mansion, we would stop in the shade of a gigantic oak, and gossip about the times of Queen Elizabeth, for it was then the old house was built, no doubt.

Once I remember Miss Mitford carried me on a pilgrimage to a grand old village church with a tower half covered with ivy. We came to it through laurel hedges, and passed on the way a magnificent cedar of Lebanon. It was a superb pile, rich in painted glass windows and carved oak ornaments. Here Miss Mitford ordered the man to stop, and, turning to me with great enthusiasm, said, "This is Shiplake Church, where Alfred Tennyson was married!" Then we rode on a little farther, and she called my attention to some of the finest wych-elms I had ever seen.

Another day we drove along the valley of the Loddon, and she pointed out the Duke of Wellington's seat of Strathfieldsaye. As our pony trotted leisurely over the charming road, she told many amusing stories of the Duke's economical habits, and she rated him soundly for his money-saving propensities. The furniture in the house she said was a disgrace to the great man, and she described a certain old carpet that had done service so many years in the establishment that no one could tell what the original colors were.

But the mansion most dear to her in that neighborhood was the residence of her kind 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 neighbors as the Russells. If she were unusually ill, they were the first to know of it and come at once to her aid. Little attentions, so grateful to old age, they were always on the alert to offer; and she frequently told me that their affectionate kindness had helped her over the dark places of life more than once, where without their succor she must have dropped by the way.

As a letter-writer, Miss Mitford has rarely been surpassed. Her "Life, as told by herself in Letters to her Friends," is admirably done in every particular. Few letters in the English language are superior to hers, and I think they, will come to be regarded as among the choicest specimens of epistolary literature. When her friend, the Rev. 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. Miss Mitford's first letter to me was written in 1847, and her last one came only a few weeks before she died, in 1855. I am inclined to think that her correspondence, so full of point in allusions, so full of anecdote and recollections, will be considered among her finest writings. Her criticisms, not always the wisest, were always piquant and readable. She had such a charming humor, and her style was so delightful, that her friendly notes had a relish about them quite their own. In reading some of them here collected one will see that she overrated my little services as she did those of many of her personal friends. I shall have hard work to place the dates properly, for the good lady rarely took the trouble to put either month or year at the head of her paper.

She began her correspondence with me before I left England after making her acquaintance, and, true to the instincts of her kind heart, the object of her first letter was to press upon my notice the poems of a young friend of hers, and she was constantly saying good words for unfledged authors who were struggling forward to gain recognition. No one ever lent such a helping hand as she did to the young writers of her country.

The recognition which America, very early in the career of Miss Mitford, awarded her, she never forgot, and she used to say, "It takes ten years to make a literary reputation in England, but America is wiser and bolder, and dares say at once, 'This is fine.'"

Sweetness of temper and brightness of mind, her never-failing characteristics, accompanied her to the last; and she passed on in her usual cheerful and affectionate mood, her sympathies uncontracted by age, narrow fortune, and pain.

A plain substantial cross marks the spot in the old churchyard at Swallowfield, where, according to her own wish, Mary Mitford lies sleeping. It is proposed to erect a memorial in the old parish church to her memory, and her admirers in England have determined, if a sufficient sum can be raised, to build what shall be known as "The Mitford Aisle," to afford accommodation for the poor people who are not able to pay for seats. Several of Miss Mitford's American friends will join in this beautiful object, and a tablet will be put up in the old church commemorating the fact that England and America united in the tribute.

LETTERS, 1848-1849.

Three-mile Cross, December 4, 1848.

Dear Mr. Fields: My silence has been caused by severe illness. For
more than a twelvemonth my health has been so impaired as to leave
me a very poor creature, almost incapable of any exertion at all
times, and frequently suffering severe pain besides. So that I have
to entreat the friends who are good enough to care for me never to
be displeased if a long time elapses between my letters. My
correspondents being so numerous, and I myself so utterly alone,
without any one even to fold or seal a letter, that the very
physical part of the task sometimes becomes more fatiguing than I
can bear. I am not, generally speaking, confined to my room, or even
to the house; but the loss of power is so great that after the short
drive or shorter walk which my very skilful medical adviser orders,
I am too often compelled to retire immediately to bed, and I have
not once been well enough to go out of an evening during the year
1848. Before its expiration I shall have completed my sixty-first
year; but it is not age that has so prostrated me, but the hard work
and increasing anxiety of thirty years of authorship, during which
my poor labors were all that my dear father and mother had to look
to, besides which for the greater part of that time I was constantly
called upon to attend to the sick-bed, first of one aged parent and
then of another. Few women could stand this, and I have only to be
intensely thankful that the power of exertion did not fail until the
necessity of such exertion was removed. Now my poor life is (beyond
mere friendly feeling) of value to no one. I have, too, many
alleviations,--in the general kindness of the neighborhood, the
particular goodness of many admirable friends, the affectionate
attention of a most attached and intelligent 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. Among the books which I have been
reading with the greatest interest is the Life of Dr. Channing, and
I can hardly tell you the glow of gratification with which I found
my own name mentioned, as one of the writers in whose works that
great man had taken pleasure. The approbation of Dr. Channing is
something worth toiling for. I know no individual suffrage that
could have given me more delight. Besides this selfish pleasure and
the intense interest with which I followed that admirable thinker
through the whole course of his pure and blameless life, I have
derived another and a different satisfaction from that work,--I mean
from its reception in England. I know nothing that shows a greater
improvement in liberality in the least liberal part of the English
public, a greater sweeping away of prejudice whether national or
sectarian, than the manner in which even the High Church and Tory
party have spoken of Dr. Channing. They really seem to cast aside
their usual intolerance in his case, and to look upon a Unitarian
with feelings of Christian fellowship. God grant that this spirit
may continue! Is American literature 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. We have had two
volumes lately that will interest your countrymen: Mr. Milnes's Life
of John Keats, that wonderful youth whose early death was, I think,
the greatest loss that English poetry ever experienced. Some of the
letters are very striking as developments on character, and the
richness of diction in the poetical fragments is exquisite. Mrs.
Browning is still at Florence with her husband. She sees more
Americans than English.

Books here are sadly depreciated. Mr. Dyce's admirable edition of
Beaumont and Fletcher, brought out two years ago at £6 12_s._ is now
offered at £2 17_s._

Adieu, dear Mr. Fields; forgive my seeming neglect, and believe me
always most faithfully yours,

M.R. MITFORD.

(No date, 1849.)

Dear Mr. Fields: I cannot tell you how vexed I am at this mistake
about letters, which must have made you think me careless of your
correspondence and ungrateful for your kindness. The same thing has
happened to me before, I may say often, with American letters,--with
Professor Norton, Mrs. Sigourney, the Sedgwicks,--in short I always
feel an insecurity in writing to America which I never experience in
corresponding with friends on the Continent; France, Germany,
Italy, even Poland and Russia, are comparatively certain. Whether it
be the agents in London who lose letters, or some fault in the
post-office, I cannot tell, but I have twenty times experienced the
vexation, and it casts a certain discouragement over one's
communications. However, I hope that this letter will reach you, and
that you will be assured that the fault does not lie at my door.

During the last year or two my health has been declining much, and I
am just now thinking of taking a journey to Paris. My friend, Henry
Chorley of the Athenaeum, the first musical critic of Europe, is
going thither next month to assist at the production of Meyerbeer's
Prophète at the French Opera, and another friend will accompany me
and my little maid to take care of us; so that I have just hopes
that the excursion, erenow much facilitated by railways, may do me
good. I have always been a great admirer of the great Emperor, and
to see the heir of Napoleon at the Elysée seems to me a real piece
of poetical justice. I know many of his friends in England, who all
speak of him most highly; one of them says, "He is the very
impersonation of calm and simple honesty." I hope the nation will be
true to him, but, as Mirabeau says, "there are no such words as
'jamais' or 'toujours' with the French public."

10th of June, 1849.

I have been waiting to answer your most kind and interesting letter,
dear Mr. Fields, until I could announce to you a publication that
Mr. Colburn has been meditating and pressing me for, but which,
chiefly I believe from my own fault in not going to town, and not
liking to give him or Mr. Shoberl the trouble of coming here, is now
probably adjourned to the autumn. The fact is that I have been and
still am very poorly. We are stricken in our vanities, and the only
things that I recollect having ever been immoderately proud of--my
garden and my personal activity--have both now turned into causes of
shame and pity; the garden, declining from one bad gardener to
worse, has become a ploughed field,--and I myself, from a severe
attack of rheumatism, and since then a terrible fright in a
pony-chaise, am now little better than a cripple. However, if there
be punishment here below, there are likewise
consolations,--everybody is kind to me; I retain the vivid love of
reading, which is one of the highest pleasures of life; and very
interesting persons come to see me sometimes, from both sides of the
water,--witness, dear Mr. Fields, our present correspondence. One
such person arrived yesterday in the shape of Doctor ----, who has
been working musical miracles in Scotland, (think of making singing
teachers of children of four or five years of age!) and is now on
his way to Paris, where, having been during seven years one of the
editors of the National, he will find most of his colleagues of the
newspaper filling the highest posts in the government. What is the
American opinion of that great experiment; or, rather, what is
yours? I wish it success from the bottom of my heart, but I am a,
little afraid, from their total want of political economy (we have
not a school-girl so ignorant of the commonest principles of demand
and supply as the whole of the countrymen of Turgot from the
executive government downwards), and from a certain warlike tendency
which seems to me to pierce through all their declarations of peace.
We hear the flourish of trumpets through all the fine phrases of the
orators, and indeed it is difficult to imagine what they will do
with their _soi-disant ouvriers_,--workmen who have lost the habit
of labor,--unless they make soldiers of them. In the mean time some
friends of mine are about to accompany your countryman Mr. Elihu
Burritt as a deputation, and doubtless M. de Lamartine will give
them as eloquent an answer as heart can desire,--no doubt he will
keep peace if he can,--but the government have certainly not
hitherto shown firmness or vigor enough to make one rely upon them,
if the question becomes pressing and personal. In Italy matters seem
to be very promising. 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. _Apropos_ of public events, all London is talking of
the prediction of an old theological writer of the name of Fleming,
who in or about the year 1700 prophesied a revolution in France in
1794 (only one year wrong), and the fall of papacy in 1848 at all
events.

Ever yours, M.R.M.

(No date, 1849)

DEAR MR. FIELDS: I must have seemed very ungrateful in being so long
silent. But your magnificent present of books, beautiful in every
sense of the word, has come dropping in volume by volume, and only
arrived complete (Mr. Longfellow's striking book being the last)
about a fortnight ago, and then it found me keeping my room, as I am
still doing, with a tremendous attack of neuralgia on the left side
of the face. I am getting better now by dint of blisters and tonic
medicine; but I can answer for that disease well deserving its bad
eminence of "painful." It is however, blessed be God! more
manageable than it used to be; and my medical friend, a man of
singular skill, promises me a cure.

I have seen things of Longfellow's as fine as anything in Campbell
or Coleridge or Tennyson or Hood. After all, our great lyrical poets
are great only for half a volume. Look at Gray and Collins, at your
own edition of the man whom one song immortalized, at Gerald
Griffin, whom you perhaps do not know, and at Wordsworth, who,
greatest of the great for about a hundred pages, is drowned in the
flood of his own wordiness in his longer works. To be sure, there
are giants who are rich to overflowing through a whole shelf of
books,--Shakespeare, the mutual ancestor of Englishmen and
Americans, above all,--and I think the much that they did, and did
well, will be the great hold on posterity of Scott and of Byron.
Have you happened to see Bulwer's King Arthur? It astonished me very
much. I had a full persuasion that, with great merit in a certain
way, he would never be a poet. Indeed, he is beginning poetry just
at the age when Scott, Southey, and a host of others, left it off.
But he is a strange person, full of the powerful quality called
_will_, and has produced a work which, although it is not at all in
the fashionable vein and has made little noise, has yet
extraordinary merit. When I say that it is more like Ariosto than
any other English poem that I know, I certainly give it no mean
praise.

Everybody is impatient for Mr. George Ticknor's work. The subject
seems to me full of interest. Lord Holland made a charming book of
Lope de Vega years ago, and Mr. Ticknor, with equal qualifications
and a much wider field, will hardly fail of delighting England and
America. Will you remember me to him most gratefully and
respectfully? He is a man whom no one can forget. As to Mr.
Prescott, I know no author now, except perhaps Mr. Macaulay, whose
works command so much attention and give so much delight. I am
ashamed to send you so little news, but I live in the country and
see few people. The day I caught my terrible Tic I spent with the
great capitalist, Mr. Goldsmidt, and Mr. Cobden and his pretty wife.
He is a very different person from what one expects,--graceful,
tasteful, playful, simple, and refined, and looking absolutely
young. I suspect that much of his power springs from his genial
character. I heard last week from Mrs. Browning; she and her husband
are at the Baths of Lucca. Mr. Kenyon's graceful book is out, and I
must not forget to tell you that "Our Village" has been printed by
Mr. Bohn in two volumes, which include the whole five. It is
beautifully got up and very cheap, that is to say, for 3 _s._ 6 _d._
a volume. Did Mr. Whittier send his works, or do I owe them wholly
to your kindness? If he sent them, I will write by the first
opportunity. Say everything for me to your young friend, and believe
me ever, dear Mr. F---- most faithfully and gratefully yours, M.R.M.

1850.

(No date.)

I have to thank you very earnestly, dear Mr. Fields, for two very
interesting books. The "Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal" are, I
suppose, a sort of Lady Willoughby's Diary, so well executed that
they read like one of the imitations of Defoe,--his "Memoirs of a
Cavalier," for instance, which always seemed to me quite as true as
if they had been actually written seventy years before. Thank you
over and over again for these admirable books and for your great
kindness and attention. What a perfectly American name Peabody is!
And how strange it is that there should be in the United States so
many persons of English descent whose names have entirely
disappeared from the land of their fathers. Did you get my last
unworthy letter? I hope you did. It would at all events show that
there was on my part no intentional neglect, that I certainly had
written in reply to the last letter that I received, although
doubtless a letter had been lost on one side or the other. I live so
entirely in the quiet country that I have little to tell you that
can be interesting. Two things indeed, not generally known, I may
mention: that Stanfield Hall, the scene of the horrible murder of
which you have doubtless read, was the actual birthplace of Amy
Robsart,--of whose tragic end, by the way, there is at last an
authentic account, both in the new edition of Pepys and the first
volume of the "Romance of the Peerage"; and that a friend of mine
saw the other day in the window of a London bookseller a copy of
Hume, ticketed "An Excellent Introduction to Macaulay." The great
man was much amused at this practical compliment, as well he might
be. I have been reading the autobiographies of Lamartine and
Chateaubriand, as well as Raphael, which, although not avowed, is of
course and most certainly a continuation of "Les Confiances." 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 as a lady-killer, and put
the details not merely into a book, but into a feuilleton!

The Brownings are living quite quietly at Florence, seeing, I
suspect, more Americans than English. Mrs. Trollope has lost her
only remaining daughter; arrived in England only time enough to see
her die.

Adieu, dear Mr. Fields; say everything for me to Mr. and Mrs.
Ticknor, and Mr. and Mrs. Norton. How much I should like to see you!

Ever faithfully yours, M.R.M.

(February, 1850.)

You will have thought me either dead or dying, my dear Mr. Fields,
for ungrateful I hope you could not think me to such a friend as
yourself, but in truth I have been in too much trouble and anxiety
to write. This is the story: I live alone, and my servants become,
as they are in France, and ought, I think, always to be, really and
truly part of my family. A most sensible young woman, my own maid,
who waits upon me and walks out with me, (we have another to do the
drudgery of our cottage,) has a little fatherless boy who is the pet
of the house. I wonder whether you saw him during the glimpse we had
of you! He is a fair-haired child of six years old, singularly quick
in intellect, and as bright in mind and heart and temper as a
fountain in the sun. He is at school in Reading, and, the small-pox
raging there like a pestilence, they sent him home to us to be out
of the way. The very next week my man-servant was seized with it,
after vaccination of course. Our medical friend advised me to send
him away, but that was, in my view of things, out of the question;
so we did the best we could,--my own maid, who is a perfect Sister
of Charity in all cases of illness, sitting up with him for seven
nights following, for one or two were requisite during the delirium,
and we could not get a nurse for love or money, and when he became
better, then, as we had dreaded, our poor little boy was struck
down. However, it has pleased God to spare him, and, after a long
struggle, he is safe from the disorder and almost restored to his
former health. But we are still under a sort of quarantine, for,
although people pretend to believe in vaccination, they avoid the
house as if the plague were in it, and stop their carriages at the
end of the village and send inquiries and cards, and in my mind they
are right. To say nothing of Reading, there have been above thirty
severe cases, after vaccination, in our immediate neighborhood, five
of them fatal. I had been inoculated after the old style, my maid
had had the small-pox the natural way and the only one who escaped
was a young girl who had been vaccinated three times, the last two
years ago. Forgive this long story; it was necessary to excuse my
most unthankful silence, and may serve as an illustration of the way
a disease, supposed to be all but exterminated, is making head again
in England.

Thank you a thousand and a thousand times for your most delightful
books. Mr. Whipple's Lectures are magnificent, and your own Boston
Book could not, I think, be beaten by a London Book, certainly not
approached by the collected works of any other British
city,--Edinburgh, for example.

Mr. Bennett is most grateful for your kindness, and Mrs. Browning
will be no less enchanted at the honor done her husband. It is most
creditable to America that they think more of our thoughtful poets
than the English do themselves.

Two female friends of mine--Mrs. Acton Tindal, a young beauty as
well as a woman of genius, and a Miss Julia Day, whom I have never
seen, but whose verses show extraordinary purity of thought,
feeling, and expression--have been putting forth books. Julia Day's
second series she has done me the honor to inscribe to me,
notwithstanding which I venture to say how very much I admire it,
and so I think would you. Henry Chorley is going to be a happy man.
All his life long he has been dying to have a play acted, and now he
has one coming out at the Surrey Theatre, over Blackfriars Bridge.
He lives much among fine people, and likes the notion of a Faubourg
audience. Perhaps he is right. I am not at all afraid of the play,
which is very beautiful,--a blank-verse comedy full of truth and
feeling. I don't know if you know Henry Chorley. He is the friend of
Robert Browning, and the especial favorite of John Kenyon, and has
always been a sort of adopted nephew of mine. Poor Mrs. Hemans loved
him well; so did a very different person, Lady Blessington,--so that
altogether you may fancy him a very likeable person; but he is much
more,--generous, unselfish, loyal, and as true as steel, worth all
his writings a thousand times over. If my house be in such condition
as to allow of my getting to London to see "Old Love and New
Fortune," I shall consult with Mr. Lucas about the time of sitting
to him for a portrait, as I have promised to do; for, although there
be several extant, not one is passably like. John Lucas is a man of
so much taste that he will make a real old woman's picture of it,
just with my every-day look and dress.

Will you make my most grateful thanks to Mr. Whipple, and also to
the author of "Greenwood Leaves," which I read with great pleasure,
and say all that is kindest and most respectful for me to Mr. and
Mrs. George Ticknor. I shall indeed expect great delight from his
book.

Ever, dear Mr. Fields, most gratefully yours,

M.R.M.

We have had a Mr. Richmond here, lecturing and so forth. Do you know
him? I can fancy what Mr. Webster would be on the Hungarian
question. To hear Mr. Cobden talk of it was like the sound of a
trumpet.

Three-mile Cross, November 25, 1850.

I have been waiting day after day, dear Mr. Fields, to send you two
books,--one new, the other old,--one by my friend, Mr. Bennett; the
other a volume [her Dramatic Poems] long out of print in England,
and never, I think, known in America. I had great difficulty in
procuring the shabby copy which I send you, but I think you will
like it because it is mine, and comes to you from friend to friend,
and because there is more of myself, that is, of my own inner
feelings and fancies, than one ever ventures to put into prose. Mr.
Bennett's volume, which is from himself as well as from me, I am
sure you will like; most thoroughly would like each other if ever
you met. He has the poet's heart and the poet's mind, large,
truthful, generous, and full of true refinement, delightful as a
companion, and invaluable as a man.

After eight years' absolute cessation of composition, Henry Chorley,
of the Athenaeum, coaxed me last summer into writing for a Lady's
Journal, which he was editing for Messrs. Bradbury and Evans,
certain Readings of Poetry, old and new, which will, I suppose, form
two or three separate volumes when collected, buried as they now are
amongst all the trash and crochet-work and millinery. They will be
quite as good as MS., and, indeed, every paper will be enlarged and
above as many again added. 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. I gave one copy to a most intelligent Quaker
lady, and have another in the house at this moment for Mrs. Walter,
widow and mother of the two John Walters, father and son, so well
known as proprietors of the Times. 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. Of course, dear friend,
this is strictly between you and me, because it would greatly damage
the work to have the few fragments that have appeared as yet brought
forward without revision and completion in their present detached
and crude form.

This England of ours is all alight and aflame with Protestant
indignation against popery; the Church of England being likely to
rekindle the fires of 1780, by way of vindicating the right of
private judgment. I, who hold perfect freedom of thought and of
conscience the most precious of all possessions, have of course my
own hatred to these things. Cardinal Wiseman has taken advantage of
the attack to put forth one of the most brilliant appeals that has
appeared in my time; of course you will see it in America.

Professor Longfellow has won a station in England such as no
American poet ever held before, and assuredly he deserves it. Except
Beranger and Tennyson, I do not know any living man who has written
things so beautiful. I think I like his Nuremburg best of all. Mr.
Ticknor's great work, too, has won golden opinions, especially from
those whose applause is fame; 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
colored with your own skies and woods and waters. Lord Carlisle, the
most accomplished of our ministers and the most amiable of our
nobles, is giving this very week to the Leeds Mechanics' Institute a
lecture on his travels in the United States, and another on the
poetry of Pope.