Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/257

Rh much to say. "Christina, the Maid of the South Seas," was introduced to the public in six cantos; and we sadly fear the public found them half-a-dozen cantos too many. Those were the days when the imitative epidemic had Walter Scott's poetry for its fons et origo, when the press teemed with metrical romances quite equal in quantity, and gloriously unequal in quality, to the stories of William of Deloraine and Ellen of Douglas—with noble "Margarets of Anjou," and "Legends of Iona," and "Fights of Falkirk." Miss Mitford's verse is pronounced by Moir deficient in that nameless adaptation of expression to thought, which is accomplished by some "indescribable collocation of the best words in their best places." Yet, in one at least of her tragedies, she has been thought to rival Joanna Baillie herself. Tragedy perhaps ill squares with the popular notion of "Our Village" gossip; yet has she written and succeeded under the tutelage of Melpomene. At the "Feast of the Violets," Apollo exclaims:whereupon the Apollonic secretary, Leigh Hunt, observes,but is careful to add,

"Rienzi " and "Julian" were both attractive plays for a season, and, in reference to them, Allan Cunningham said that the author had witnessed that slope of wet faces, from the pit to the roof, which, according to Cowper, is the accompaniment of a well-written and well-acted tragedy. Her "Charles the First," produced under indifferent auspices, made less stir.

But it is to "manners-painting Mitford"—at home amidst her Hampshire and Berkshire haunts—that one turns with a more ready and abiding interest A pleasant depôt of rural characteristics is "Our Village"—with its close-packed inhabitants, insulated, as the author says, like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a convent, or sailors in a ship—everybody interested in everybody: a spot over which we are invited to ramble, and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, the birds, and mice, and squirrels—with the retired publican's tidy, square, red cottage; and the blacksmith's gloomy dwelling; and the village shop, multifarious as a bazaar, a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands, bacon, and everything except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment; and the village inn, white-washed and bow-windowed, with its portly landlord in his eternal red waistcoat; and the cottages up the hill, where the road winds, with its broad green borders and hedge-rows so thickly timbered; and the old farm-house on the common, with pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and backed by woody hills—the common itself half covered with low furze, and alive with cows and sheep, and two sets of cricketers. A delightful companion is the author along the high-ways and by-ways of her village;—there is something contagious in her keen delight at pioneering you about, and you get to walk with step well-nigh springy as her own upon the mazy