a Vellage Vayings & Roings, or My Villa age the unveighborlees fackbitingest, quar the seen shone is welcomest traces that ever in a Carey's Liby of Choice Literature Vol. 2. Vir ? 1886. The recent addition to the Idyll Series, Our Village," by Mary Russell Mited, is a well-known study of English lage life. In a letter to Miss Barrett he author wrote that she was never ithout pecuniary troubles. Her life was ue of worriment, for her father was a ambler, and besides losing his own forte he also gambled that of his wife nd daughter. It was this necessity for oney that forced Miss Mitford to start terary work. Her first poem was pubhed in 1810, and these verses went into second edition in England, and were idely read in America. She next put er pen to the drama, and she found that order to keep her parents and her ouse she would have to use In the widest se even her least literary gifts. Later n she turned her pen to a description of those charming scenes of country life o exclusively drawn, so full of a bright heerfulness, so redolent with fresh air, nt they have been our delight ever ince they appeared." These descriptions! he offered to Thomas Campbell for the New Monthly Magazine, but he rejected them, stating that they were not suffiiently "dignified" in comparison to the articles that appeared in the magazine. They were then given to a magazine enutled The Ladies' Magazine, which had a circulation then of about 250 copies. It Increased, however, to 2,000 when the first story of " Our Village was printed. The present volume (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.; Pp. 309; $2) is illustrated with color pletures. In one of the chapters one finds this beautiful description: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF MARY RUSSELL MITFORD. THERE are few names which fall with a plea- | santer sound upon the cars of those who adopt authors as friends, in recognition of the moral parity and geniality of feeling as much as of the original talent displayed in their works, than the name of MARY RUSSELL MITFORD. Happy thoughts and fresh images rise up when it is spoken; and yet we are a trifle too apt to think of it only as connected with all that is lovely in the rural scenery, and characteristic in the rural society of Southern England, and to forget that it also appertains to a dramatist of no common power, who has wrought in a period, when-if the theatres be deserted, and the popular acted drama have degenerated into melo-drama, burketta, and farce-the plays published exhibit far more signs of strength and promise, than were shown by those produced in the palmy days of Garrick, or the yet more glorious after-summer of the Kembles. It was at Christmas time, in the year 1789, that Miss Mitford was born, her birth-place being the little town of Alresford, Hampshire. She is descended on the father's side, from an ancient family in Northumberland, not remotely connected with nobility; and there is a quaint rhyme current in the north country, which promises the name a long duration : "Midford was Midford when Morpeth was nane, by imitation that genius has almost always in the first instance manifested itself. She withdrew herself from composition - read much, though without any decided aim or object, and would never (she thinks) have attempted authorship again, had not those vicissitudes of fortune, which try the metal of the sufferer no less searchingly than the sincerity of his friends, compelled her to come forth from her retreat, and honourably to exercise the talents with which she had been so largely gifted. It would be raising the veil too high to dwell upon the sequel; upon the rich reward of love, and respect, and consideration, which have repaid so zealous and unselfish a devotion of time and talent as Miss Mitford's life has shown. We have but to speak of the good which has come out of evil, in the shape of her writings; and we do this briefly and rapidly, because of the limited space within which we are restricted. Miss Mitford's principal efforts have been a series of tragedies. "The Two Foscari,"-" Julian," "Rienzi," -"Charles the First,"-have been all represented, and all well received-the third with signal success. Besides these may be mentioned two other tragedies, still in manuscript, "Inez de Castro" and "Otto of Wittelsbach," Miss Mitford's last, finest work. In all these plays there is strong vigorous writing, masculine in the free unshackled use of language, but wholly womanly in its purity from coarseness or license, and in the intermixture of those Her mother was the only daughter of Dr. Rus- incidental touches of softest feeling and finest obell, of Ashe, in Hampshire; this lady was a sin-servation, which are peculiar to the gentler sex. gularly good classical scholar, and it would have been strange if under such auspices, the education of her daughter had not been liberally planned and carefully completed. How delightfully Miss Mitford has chronicled her school pleasures and school feelings, during the years between the ages of ten and fifteen, passed by her at a London boarding-school of high repute, no one who has I read "Our Village" can have forgotten. By her own showing she was as shy as she was clever, after a somewhat original fashion-a keen lover of poetry and plays. And shortly after she left school, she showed the next evidence of talent, the possession of a creative as well as appreciative power, by publishing a volume of miscellaneous poems, which were favourably received; for in those days poetry was read. These, and other Juvenile effusions, now all but forgotten, were, at the time of their appearing, successful; but their young writer was herself dissatisfied with them; conscious, perhaps, that they were little more than imitations, and forgetting that it was A rich air of the south breathes over "Rienzi;” and in the " Charles," though the character of Cromwell will be felt to vibrate, it is, on the whole, conceived with a just and acute discernment of its real and false greatness-of the thousand contradictions which, in reality, make the son of the Huntingdon brewer a character too difficult, and mighty, for any one beneath a Shakspeare to exhibit. As also in Joanna Baillie's fine tragedies, the poetry of these plays is singularly fresh and unconventional; equally clear of Elizabethan quaintness and of modern Della-cruscanism, which, as some hold, indicate an exhausted and artificial state of society, in which the dramathe hearty, bold, natural drama - has no existence. At all events, it is now too much the fashion that every thing which is written for the stage shall be forgotten so soon as the actors employed in it have "fretted their hour." Were it otherwise, we should not have need to dwell, even thus briefly, upon the distinctive merits of Miss Mitford's tragedies. 3 |