that "useless old beau," King Harwood. The description of the good town itself is perhaps better still; we become as familiar with its ins and outs as though we had paid rent and taxes there, and had run up long bills with Mrs. Tomkins for double Gloucester, or privately effected a barter with her of unsold (alas, unsaleable) copies of our last "octavo, cloth boards," for base instalments of butter and eggs.
Miss Mitford's scattered contributions to annuals and magazines, who shall reckon up? With her, literary occupation is evidently a labour of love. Literature has ever been to her at once a passion and a solace—from the days when she found such sweetness in the stolen waters of Corneille and Racine, to the present time, when she corresponds so zealously with unnumbered dons in the republic of letters. How cordial and catholic her taste is, in estimating the merits of "all the talents," may be seen in her latest work, "Recollections of a Literary Life" (1851). The book is a disappointing book, if taken up, as naturally it is, in the expectation of enjoying a connected biographical narrative. It is a thing of shreds and patches—an omniumgatherum of waifs and strays—a melange of tid-bits, ana and analecta from scribes and scribblers, old and new, native and foreign, known and unknown. The "courteous reader" is told in the preface—why was he not told in the title-page?—that he must just take the three volumes for what they are—"an attempt to make others relish a few favourite writers as heartily as" Miss Mitford has relished them herself. However, having once recovered from the sense of being "at sea," through the "false colours" hung out at the mainmast of this contraband trader, we settle down to enjoy such stores as it carries, including, perchance, occasional scraps of dry remainder ship-biscuit. And after all, books of this kind are valuable, as introducing to more general society the names and works of neglected or unrecognised authors; as in this case, those of witty, accomplished, refined Mackworth Praed, and the rising American poet-doctor, Oliver Holmes; and Daniel Webster's forensic oratory, little known in the Old Country; and the slenderly-observed merits of John Kenyon and George Darley, Catherine Fanshaw and Thomas Davis, besides such old-fashioned performances as "Cowley's Essays" (which the world should not, and which Miss Mitford will not, willingly let die), and "Richardson's Correspondence," and "Holcroft's Memoirs:" the last, by the way, is worthily lauded by Tom Moore in his "Diary," as a model of a literary roan's personal recollections, and has recently acquired something of its due popularity by being reprinted in Messrs. Longman's well-selected "Traveller's Library."
It is to be hoped that Miss Mitford will yet, with many another work, give us a more methodical and detailed history of herself—the present memoir being a misnomer. Seems it so?
Seems, madam? nay, it is; we know not seems.
