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 hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the grave. Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn out by then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright little brain growing dim and very tired.

Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant and, incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen deservedly into oblivion. But we - some of us - do not forget and never want to forget Mary Russell Mitford. Her letters remain - the little friendly letters which came from her pen like balls of silvery down from a sun-ripened plant, and were wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved. There is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so natural, so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her overflowing sweetness, her beautiful spirit. And one book too remains - the series of sketches about the poor little hamlet, in which she lived so long and laboured so hard to support herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a cormorant. Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject, in a happy moment she took up this humble one lying at her own door and allowed her self to write naturally even as in her most intimate letters. This is the reason of the vitality of Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and reflected the author herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive nature, her bright playful humorous spirit. There is no thought, no mind stuff in it, and it is a classic! It is about the country, and she has so little observation that it might have been written in a town, out of a book, away from nature's sights and sounds. Her rustic characters are not comparable to those of a score or perhaps two or three score of other writers who treat of such subjects. The dialogue, when she makes them talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she puts in a little romance of her own making one regrets it. And so one might go on picking it all to pieces like a dandelion blossom. Nevertheless it endures, outliving scores of in a way better books on the same themes, because her own delightful personality manifests itself and shines in all these little pictures. This short passage describing how she took Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather cowslips in the meadows, will serve as an illustration.

They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became powerless, and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the most effective sedative, that grand soother and composer of women's distress, fails to comfort me today. I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do. . . . I will go to the meadows, the beautiful meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a cowslip ball. "Did you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?" "No." "Come away then; make haste! run, Lizzie!"

And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea, past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough." "I don't mind 'em," said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything, and showing by her attitude and manner some design of proving her courage by an attack on the largest of the herd, in the shape of a pull by the tail. "I don't mind 'em." "I know you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't chase the turkey-cock. Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder, Lizzie came.

In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a scrape. She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animal's grunting had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the yard.

The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.

What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and smell! Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her innocent raptures.

Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun and delight in everything on earth. We see in such a passage what her merit really is, the reason of our liking or "partiality" for her.

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