hat the mutual intercourse between the two
countries has lately been very great, to find how little you seem to
know of us. I suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of
this nation from certain publications which do very erroneously, if they
do at all, represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent
in England. The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue
of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of
consequence in bustle, and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of
each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their
abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their opinions. No such
thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make
the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great
cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and
are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the
only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number;
or that after all they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre,
hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

(1849-)

Mrs. Burnett has told the story of her childhood and tried to interpret
her own personality in her autobiographical story, 'The One I Knew Best
of All.' She has pictured a little English girl in a comfortable
Manchester home, leading a humdrum, well-regulated existence, with
brothers and sisters, nurse and governess. But an alert imagination
added interest to the life of this "Small Person," and from her nursery
windows and from the quiet park where she played she watched eagerly for
anything of dramatic or picturesque interest. She seized upon the
Lancashire dialect often overheard, as upon a game, and practiced it
until she gained the facility of use shown in her mining and factory
stories. One day the strong and beautiful figure of a young woman,
followed by a coarse and abusive father, caught her attention, and years
afterward she developed Joan Lowrie from the incident.

When the Hodgson family suffered pecuniary loss, and hoping to better
its fortunes came to America, then best known to Frances from the pages
of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' she was fifteen. A year or two later she began
to send her stories to various magazines. In 1867 the first of these
appeared. She did not however attain her great popularity until the
appearance of 'That