an. Others in the place who remembered her said the
same--that she was very pleasant and sweet. We know that she was sweet
and charming, but unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not
give that impression. They represent her as a fat common-place looking
person, a little vulgar perhaps. I fancy the artists were bunglers. I
possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made of her face by a dear
old lady friend of mine, now dead, about the year 1851 or 2. My friend
had a gift for portraiture in a peculiar way. When she saw a face that
greatly interested her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street,
anywhere, it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she
would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known persons are
wonderfully good. She was staying in the country with a friend who drove
with her to Swallowfield to call on Miss Mitford, and on her return to
her friend's house she made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait
I can see the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which
she undoubtedly possessed.

But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own province, my
small plot--a poor pedestrian's unimportant impressions of places and
faces; all these p's come by accident; and this I put in parenthetically
just because an editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't
abide and wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical. Let
us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who
knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass away every year and in a
little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that
falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some
one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful
thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another
generation of all she was and did?

She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an
extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything that came from her pen had
an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing
she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly did
write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books
and books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor because
it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, "You cannot fly
like an eagle with the wings of a wren." She was driven to fly, and gave
her