is 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 rega