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able). It is only when she is back again | women are obliged to bear, “relying with a among her green lanes, among her geran- blessed sanguineness on my poor endeavours, iums, that we can identify our friend. But has not, I believe, even inquired for a situawith such surroundings we know no English writer who is more supreme in her gentle way. It is not a great way. There is no tragedy here, and such notes of pain as must come into every human strain, are struck so softly, and come so tenderly into the brighter measure, that they sound no harsher than a sigh. But this flowery, leafy, sunny Berks, with its streams and its woods, its cottages and its country-folks, its simple ways and rural quiet, where was there ever any English country more clearly put upon paper? How real and vivid was the impression it made (we remember) upon one little north-country imagination ever so many years ago! The scent of the violets, and the rustle of the great branched trees, and every detail of the landscape came before us as if we had been there - nay, more powerfully than if we had been there, as imagination is always more exquisite than fact. For that intense and well-remembered delight, it is fit that we should render Miss Mitford all the thanks that words can express. It is not perhaps so high an intellectual enjoyment as that which is given, to a mind capable of appreciating them, by Miss Austen's wonderful pictures, yet the recollection is sweeter to the heart.

tion; and I do not press the matter, though I anxiously wish it, being willing to give one more trial to the theatre. If I could but get the assurance of earning for my dear father and mother a humble competence, I should be the happiest creature in the world. But for these dear ties I should never write another line, but go out in some situation as other destitute women do." This was her encouragement, poor soul, in undertaking what she calls the boldest attempt ever made by woman' a grand historical tragedy on the subject of Charles I. and Cromwell, a work which, after costing her infinite pains, was considered dangerous by the Lord Chamberlain, who refused his licence for its representation. She was at this time some years over thirty, at the height of a woman's powers, but not at the height of her hopes; for by that time life has begun to drag a little with the solitary. The only thing which mitigates our indignation against the father who, with "blessed sanguineness," could thus put himself upon his child's shoulders to be supported is, that he and the tenderer, sweeter mother filled her life at least with domestic happiness. "I hope," she adds, with quick compunction after the plaint we have just quoted,

Nothing could be more unlike the calm" there is no want of duty in my wishing existence of the author of "Pride and Preju- him to contribute his efforts with mine to dice" than the anxious harassed life led by our support." Mary Mitford. The fitful splendour which flickered about her youth had long disappeared. The little family, after various struggles to retain its position, had been driven out of the house which the father and mother had taken such pleasure in building, into a tiny cottage in a village street; and instead of the calm which so many people think erroneously, in our opinion- to be essential for all mental work, it was among cares of the most depressing kind that Miss Mitford took up as a profession the work which she had fondly dallied with through all her earlier years. "I may in time make something of my poor, poor brains," she cries, pathetically, after her first dramatic failure. "I am now chained to a desk eight, ten, twelve hours a-day at mere drudgery. All my thoughts of writing are for hard money. All my correspondence is on hard business. Ob, pity me! pity me! My very mind is sinking under the fatigue and anxiety.... My dear father," she adds at a later period, with that pitiful endurance of the meanness of the men belonging to them, and anxious endeavours to give it the best possible aspect to the world, which some

He was her first object all her life; and it is only by such a faint implied reproof as the above that she ever betrays to the outside world any sense of his sins against her. But her love for him was that of a mother rather than a daughter an anxious, protecting, not unsuspicious affection. She writes to him with expressions of fondness which sound exaggerated, though they are apparently natural to her - but always with a latent sense that he is naughty, and that there will be various matters to forgive and forget when he comes back from his rovings. A strange picture! One can see the two women at home in their anxious consultations - the mother and daughter, who think there is nobody like him in the world, and yet lay their kind heads together and wonder what he may be about - how he may be squandering their substance, what new burdens he may bring back to be made the best of. Yet what a handsome, fine, white-haired gentleman - -a father to be proud of does he appear in "Our Village," half seen in the sanctuary of his study, a magistrate and authority! Such a half-conscious, dear deception is common

enough among women whom the world few alleviations of a destiny that is wearing

thinks comfortably blind to all their idol's defects, not knowing, like a stupid world as it is, that it is their very keenness of sight which produces that mist of tender illusion thus hung up and held up to dazzle other eyes.

down my health and mind and spirits and strength- a life spent in efforts beyond my powers, and which will end in the workhouse or in Bedlam as the body or mind shall sink first. He ought to feel this, but he does not."

The success of the tragedies seems to There are many of these melancholy halfhave been a fitful and not very profitable complaints in the latter part of her, or kind of success; but "Our Village" went rather of her father's, life. Her destiny into fourteen editions in the course of a hangs very heavily upon her. She was not few years, and a fluctuating unsteady sort born, she feels, for such a fate; neither, of prosperity visited the cottage. They set she thinks, with natural generalizing, was up a pony and chaise, and by times were any woman ever intended to support a in good spirits; but it does not seem that family-forgetting, as was also quite natuMiss Mitford was ever fully reconciled to ral, how many women do. She goes over that stern necessity of labour, which to a little list of literary women, in her sad some people in this world is so great a moments, to prove this unsatisfactory thegrievance, and to some so great a blessing. ory. Mrs. Hofland is ill, Mrs. Hall is ill, She had been brought up in wealth and Miss Landon dead, and so on through a ease, for one thing, and had the feeling melancholy catalogue. As the master of upon her, however concealed, that the the house grew older and more infirm, life money which ought to have maintained grew ever harder and harder in the cottage herself and her family had been squandered. at Three Mile Cross. He who had never Besides, she was one of the Northumber- been considerate became exacting, and in land Mitfords, allied to very great people his demands upon her for personal tendance, indeed; and though there is no appearance forgot that she had to be the breadwinner of any contempt for her craft or its profes- as well as the nurse; while she, poor soul, sors naturally arising in her own mind, it worn to death with long hours of reading must have been a little hard to struggle to him, nursing him, watching his every against her father's feelings on the subject want, felt guilty and wretched to the botfeelings which remind us of one or two tom of her heart that she could not at the of Mr. Dickens's characters, of the digni- same time work for him, and carry on a fied Mr. Turvey drop and of Mr. Bray in double labour. For his sake she had given "Nicholas Nickleby." "My father," she up a prospect opened to her by the kindness writes, very kind to me in many respects, of some distant relatives, who proposed to very attentive if I'm ill, very solicitous that her to live with them and be their companmy garden should be nicely kept, that I ion "not a dependant, but a daughter." should go out with him and be amused, is They were people whom she liked and yet, so far as art, literature, and the drama trusted, and the arrangement would have are concerned, of a temper infinitely diffi- given her immediate ease and some permacult to deal with. He hates and despises nent provision; but she gives it up with a them and all their professors, looks on them sigh, in consideration of her father's comwith hatred and scorn, and is constantly fort. "To have left him here would have taunting me with my friends' and my been impossible," she says; "and if Mr. people, as he calls them, reproaching me Ragget had (as I believe he would) given if I hold the slightest intercourse with either him a home at Odiam, the sacrifice of his editor, artist, or actor, and treating with old habits, his old friends, the blameless frank contempt every one not of a certain self-importance which results from his stastation in the county. . . He ought to tion as chairman of the Reading Bench, remember," pleads the poor authoress, not and his really influential position in the without a certain feeling of caste in her own county, where we are much respected in person, and not sure that, after all, he may spite of our poverty, would have been far be right and she is demeaning herself, too much to ask or to permit." This possithat it is not for my own pleasure, but bility, accordingly, was given up; but as from a sense of duty, that I have been the weary years stole on, and the old man, thrown in the way of such persons; and he whose comforts must not be infringed whatshould allow for the natural sympathy of ever happened, descended lower and lower similar pursuits, and the natural wish to do into that feebleness of age in which even the little that one so poor and so powerless the generous and amiable become exacting can do to bring merit, and that of a very without knowing it, heavier and heavier high order, into notice. It is one of the clouds stole over the devoted daughter,

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and her weariness or perhaps the fact that her life by this time was cheered by female friends to whom she could utter her heart more freely - forces her into speech. "After all, a wretched life is mine," she cries in her despair. Health is gone; and if I can but last while my dear father requires me if the little money we have can but last - then it would matter little how soon I too were released. My life is only valuable, as being useful to him." And then come heartrending letters to the faithful friend, Mr. Harness, who lived to plan and partially edit these volumes, but who is dead since their publication. He was her trustee, and held in his hands the last remnant of her mother's fortune, and not very long before it had been necessary for her to write him a sharp, brief note, strangely concentrated in its pain and shame, begging him to receive no applications for any part of this money except such as came from herself. But when the last stage of this long struggle comes, the poor soul, who can see no future beyond her father's death, and cares for no provision, nor anticipates any want of one after that event, changes her tone; and she writes to him as follows, with a piteous pleading and remorseful self-accusation which goes to the

father as to gain time for writing what may support us. The season is coming on when he will be able to sit in the garden, and perhaps to see a few friends of an afternoon, and then this incessant reading will be less necessary to him. At all events, the thing must be done, and shall. It was a great weakness in me, a self-indulgence, not to do so before, for the fault is entirely mine. I believe, when these debts are paid, his own spirits will lose that terrible depression, broken only by excessive irritability, which has rendered this winter a scene of misery to himself

and a trial to me.

contemporary poets whom few people, we daresay, ever heard of, was put together in this time of rest. The book is a kind of an imposition to be given to the world under such a title, it must be allowed, but it is full of the most tender, charming little bits of cal calm. She tells us how she goes out autobiography aud a certain serene sabbati"almost daily "to" the charming green lane -the grassy, turfy, shady lane of which I have before made mention," attended by her little dog Fanchon, and her favourite "Do not fancy, my dear friend, that I cast little maid, with her books and writing-case. the slightest blame on my dear father. The de- There on "a certain green hillock, under jection and the violence belong to disease fully down-hanging elms, .. where we have as much as any other symptom. If anybody be partly found, partly scraped out for ourto blame, I am the person, for not having taken selves, a turfy seat and turfy table redolent care that he should have no anxiety-nothing of wild thyme, and a thousand fairy flowers, but age and infirmity. -to bear. God forgive delicious in its coolness, its fragrance, and me for my want of energy! for suffering myself its repose," the genial, tender old woman to be wholly engrossed by the easier duty of reading to him! I will not do so again. Once placed herself, undisturbed, as it was meet a week he goes into Reading to the bench, and she should be, by any care or trouble, taking then he rallies, and nobody seeing him then the full enjoyment of the country so dear to could imagine what the trial is at home; and her, and of the summer skies and summer with nobody but myself, it has been some ex-air, and all the greenness that she loved; cuse for getting through the day and the night as best I could; but it shall be so no longer. "Heaven bless you! do not refuse me this most urgent prayer, and do not think worse of me than you can help."

her as she had loved; but yet in a serene quiet, as of the evening, glad of the ease, and the stillness, and the dews; glad too, perhaps, that all was so near over, and night at hand, and sleep― the weary soul rests and muses and smiles upon the world which has not given her much, and yet is full of friends to her. After some fifteen years of this soft, cheerful solitude, she died, sixty-six years old, without further pang or grief, with kind people about her, and servants who loved her; but with everything that had been her very own gone before her into the other world.

with her favourite poets by her side, and the pen which she had no longer any need to ply as a drudge, and which she loved too, dearly, when she ceased to be its vassal. This last picture, drawn by her When the life of this man, who for own hand, is the most pleasant conclusion so many years has been the tyrant and in- that could be put to the much-troubled, tolerable burden of his daughter's ex-much-toiling life. New ties she was too istence, comes to an end, the reader is dis-old to form, and there was no child to love posed to turn away impatiently from her sorrow, and to feel a certain impulse of contradiction when among her tears she assures her friends that he must be happy, and that never a man had more humble reason to anticipate heaven. If a man may be so selfish, so cruel, so devoid of natural justice or compassion, and yet be sure of adoring love all his life and beaven at the end, what meaning is there in the distinction between right and wrong? we ask ourselves. To Mr. Harness, at least, there must have been a fierce and fine satisfaction in thus at last revealing to the world what manner of man he really was whom Mary Mitford made an We do not attempt to make any compariidol of, and of whom she has left so many son between these two lives, nor are the fond pictures that we, deceived, might have two minds to be compared. Miss Austen admired him too. When he was gone she was by much the greater artist, but the was very sad, as may be supposed: but sweetness of the atmosphere about her gradually recovered out of her sadness and humble contemporary was far above anytook comfort in her friends, and found at thing possible to the great novelist. In last after the long struggles of life, a peace-presence of the one we admire and wonder, ful evening, no longer worn with overwork, or filled with petty anxieties. The book called 66 Recollections of a Literary Life," which is not, so to speak, a book at all, but only a collection of her favourite scraps of poetry, from Percy's ballads down to sundry

watching the perfect work that by means so insignificant grows under her hands; while with the other we do little more than breathe the fresh air and the flowers, and identify one little spot of actual soil not created, but described. Yet the two figures

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thus accidentally placed together—unlike something towards restoring the ancient in mind and in fortune, yet so like in some standard which journalists tell us is so much points of fact-cast a certain light upon altered in these days; or may at least show each other, standing up each under the that the possibility of work for women is little span of sky and little lot of stars" not a thing of to-day, but had been found, that belongs to her by nature; women false and well done, with little fuss but tolerable to no instinct of womankind, as modest, as success, before any of the present agitators gentle, as little obtrusive as the humblest of that much-discussed subject were born housewife. Let us hope that their portraits to throw light upon an ignorant world. thus simultaneously reproduced may do

Fulfilment to the prayer was given –
In quiet death they lay,

And celebrated in high heaven
Their fiftieth wedding-day.

Tinsley's Magazine.

himself understood. "You may laugh," said the late Judge Theophilus Parsons, "at his law, and ridicule his language, but Dudley is, after all, the best Judge I ever knew in New Hampshire." A specimen of his style has been preserved in the following conclusion of one of his charges to the jury, grammatical peculiariities excepted:

"You have heard, gentlemen of the jury, what has been said in this case by the lawyers, the rascals; but no, I will not abuse them. It is their business to make a good case for their clients; they are paid for it; and they have done in this case well enough. But you and I, gentlemen of the jury, have something else to consider. They talk of law. Why, gentlemen, it is not law we want, but justice. They would govern us by the common law of England. Trust me, gentlemen, common sense is a much better guide for us the common sense of Raymond, Epping, Exeter and the other towns which have sent us here to try this case between two of our neighbors. A clear head and an honest heart are worth more than all the lawyers.

"There was one good thing said at the bar. It was from Shakspeare, an English player, I believe. No matter it is good enough almost to be in the Bible. It is this: Be just and fear not.' That, gentlemen, is the law in this case, and law enough in any case. 'Be just and fear A NEW HAMPSHIRE JUDGE OF THE OLDEN not.' It is our business to do justice between TIME.- John Dudley of Raymond. N. H., who the parties, not by any quirks of the law out was a Judge in that State from 1785 to 1809, of Coke or Blackstone, books that I never was a remarkable man. Having no legal ed-read, and never will; but by common sense ucation whatever, and but little learning of any kind, yet he possessed a discriminating mind, a retentive memory, a patience which no labor could tire, and integrity proof alike against "And now, Mr. Sheriff, take out the jury; threats and flattery. He was, says the Exeter and you, Mr. Foreman, do not keep us waiting News Letter, a resolute, strong-minded man, with idle talk, of which there has been too intent on doing substantial justice in every ing to do with the merits of the case. much already, about matters which have nothGive us case, though often indifferent to the forms and an honest verdict, of which, as plain, common requirements of law. He was withal, very heed-sense men, you need not be ashamed." less of grammar, but never failed to make

That is our business, and the curse of God is and common honesty as between man and man. upon us if we neglect, or evade, or turn aside from it.

Boston Journal.