long. We come sooner to the point and
avoid elegant circumlocutions. But one is struck, among other things,
by the keener literary zest of those days, and by the immense numbers
of MSS. and tragedies in circulation, all of which their authors
confidingly send from one to another. There are also whole flights of
travelling poems flapping their wings and uttering their cries as they
go.

An enthusiastic American critic who comes over to England emphasises the
situation. Mr. Willis's 'superlative admiration' seems to give point
to everything, and to all the enthusiasm. Miss Austen's Collins himself
could not have been more appreciative, not even if Miss de Burgh had
tried her hand at a MS.... Could he--Mr. Willis--choose, he would have
tragedy once a year from Miss Mitford's pen. 'WHAT an intoxicating life
it is,' he cries; 'I met Jane Porter and Miss Aikin and Tom Moore and a
troop more beaux esprits at dinner yesterday! I never shall be content
elsewhere.'

Miss Mitford's own letters speak in a much more natural voice.

'I never could understand what people could find to like in my letters,'
Miss Mitford writes, 'unless it be that they have a ROOT to them.' The
root was in her own kind heart. Miss Mitford may have been wanting a
little in discrimination, but she was never wanting in sympathy. She
seems to have loved people for kindness's sake indiscriminately as if
they were creations of her own brain: but to friendliness or to trouble
of any sort she responds with fullest measure. Who shall complain if
some rosy veil coloured the aspects of life for her?

'Among the many blessings I enjoy,--my dear father, my admirable mother,
my tried and excellent friends,--there is nothing for which I ought to
thank God so earnestly as for the constitutional buoyancy of spirits,
the aptness to hope, the will to be happy WHICH I INHERIT FROM MY
FATHER,' she writes. Was ever filial piety so irritating as hers? It is
difficult to bear, with any patience, her praises of Dr. Mitford. His
illusions were no less a part of his nature than his daughter's, the one
a self-centred absolutely selfish existence, the other generous, humble,
beautiful. She is hardly ever really angry except when some reports get
about concerning her marriage. 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.