MITFORD, Mary Russell (1786-1855), born at Alresford, Hampshire, on the 16th of December 1786, retains an honourable place in English literature as the authoress of Our Village, a series of sketches of village scenes and characters unsurpassed in their kind, and after half a century of imitations as fresh as if they had been written yesterday. Washington Irving was Miss Mitford’s literary model, but her work is thoroughly original and spontaneous, the free outflow of a singularly charming character. The shortest account of her life would be incomplete without a reference to the scapegrace father who was the centre of her affections, and the “only begetter” of all that is most delightful and characteristic in her writing. Dr Mitford first spent his wife’s fortune in a few years; then he spent also in a few years the greater part of £20,000 which his daughter drew (in 1797, at the age of ten) as a prize in a lottery; then he lived, for most years of his life, on a small remnant of his fortune and the proceeds of his daughter’s literary industry. In the little village of Three Mile Cross, near Reading, in a small cottage which Miss Mitford says was “a fine lesson in condensation,” the doctor was the stay, support, and admiration of all the loafers in the neighbourhood, while his daughter, who had called herself his mamma, and treated him as her little boy from the time when she was herself a little girl, found an unfailing charm in his “friskings,” and was the loving slave of all his good-humoured exactions. The father kept fresh in his daughter the keen delight in incongruities, the lively sympathy with self-willed vigorous individuality, and the womanly tolerance of its excess which inspire so many of her sketches of character. The woman who lived in ...