The Sun.
London, England, 1855-01-16 00:00:00

DKATI3 OF MISS MITFORD.

After a long period of decline and helpless suffering.
cheerfully borne, the author of "Our Village" died at
Swallowfield Cottage, near Reading, on Wednesday last
aged—as a memorandum furnished by herself some years
ago assures us-66_ years. She was born in 1789 at
Alresford, in Hampshire. Her mother was an heiress,
and the daughter of Dr. Russell, of Ashe, in Hampshire
a man of scholarship and letters. Her father, belonging
to the Mitfords of Northumberland, was, as her own
"Reminiscences " have told us, a sanguine, cheerful and
speculative man, who tried physic, played at whist, spent
every one's money, and something more, and madeevery
living crcetuio about him love him, loud to him, and
forgive him. To this love and to his extravagance his
daughter's life was sacrificed. Every fortune that came in
his way, including a 20,000/. prize won in the lottery, was
wasted, gaily and plausibly, by Dr. Mitford, and while yet
a girl, with all the impulses of a poetess, but with all the
reserve of an old-fashioned gentlewoman string within
her, his daughter was placed in the position of one who
had to " stave off" want and sorrow from the parent to
whom she was devoted, by turning her choice and pe-
culiar gifts to account in authorship. Educated in a
London bearding.school—which seems to have had the
peculiar gift of " bringing out" poetesses—Miss Mitford
first presented herself to the public in three volumes of
postry—one a South Sea romance, after the fashion of
Scott. It was by chance that she afterwards fell on
the veins of a country life, scenery, and manners, on the
one hand—and on the other, of high tragic passion and
action, which " Our Village" and her plays in verse
severally represent. The story of these has been told
too frequently and too minutely by herself in late
publications which have passed through our bands
for it to be necessary to dwell more minutely on them
now, or to enumerate the works that made a labourer's
cottage with a duchess's " flower garden," three
miles of Reading, a place of pilgrimage to some of
the highest and most apcomplished persons in Eu-
rope. But we must add, that Miss Mitford's works
did not represent all her gifts, produced as they
were under sharp pressure, and at moments when it
was fitter that the body of a delicate woman should have
been at rest, rather than that her fancy should have
been goaded into exertion. Her letters were charming ;
her conversation was shrewd, racy, and elegant, full of
pertinence 'in its allusions, full of anecdote in its recol-
lections. She was a faithful and cheering friend to those
she loved. She bore up against the trials of a hard and
ill-understood life with a sweetness and vivacity such as
could have made strangers imagine that there was no•
thing to bear. She was well read in English and
French literature. Not long after her father's death,
her own health, which had been shaken by the dutiful
attendance on him began to fail ; and the illness which
carried her away was slow, painful, and dispiriting.
But her sweetness of temper and her brightness of mind
never failed her to the last, since only a few hours before
the news of her decease reached her friends, they had
received from her greeting and tokens in her own hand-
writing—showing, not merely that the old kind heart
was sot soured by suffering, but that her sympathies
had not been contracted by narrow fortunes, age, and
pain. There are few of whom surviving friends will long
think so affectionately and so cheerfully as of Mary
Rused. Mitford. Her name has an honoured place in
the library of healthy and real English literature,