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 little wings too
much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak
flutterings over the surface of the ground. A wren, and she
had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain--that
dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any
reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day,
year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would