During the past thirty-three years Mr. Mitchell has led the enviable life of a country gentleman--a life of agriculture tempered by literature and diversified by occasional excursions into the field of journalism. He has seen his numerous children grow up about him; he has entertained at his charming home many of our most distinguished _literati_; and he has kept open his communication with the reading public by a series of books and contributions to the periodical press, on farming, landscape-gardening, and the practical and æsthetic aspects of rural life. He edited “The Atlantic Almanac” for 1868 and 1869, and in the latter year accepted the editorship of _Hearth and Home_--a position which made it necessary for him to spend a part of every week in New York. He was one of the judges of industrial art at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and Commissioner from the United States at the Paris Exposition of 1878. His taste and experience in landscape-gardening have been called into play in the laying-out of the city park at East Rock, and at many private grounds in New Haven and elsewhere. Of late years the University has had the benefit of his services in one way and another. He has been one of the Council of the School of Fine Arts, since the establishment of that department, and has lectured before the School. In the fall and winter of 1884, he delivered a course of lectures on English literature to the students of the University; and the crowd of eager listeners that attended the series to the close showed that Mr. Mitchell had not lost that power of interesting and delighting young men which gave such wide currency to his “Reveries of a Bachelor” and “Dream Life” a generation ago. Among the other lectures and addresses delivered on various occasions--several of which are collected in “Bound Together,”--special mention may be made of the address on Washington Irving, which formed one of the pleasantest features of the centennial celebration at Tarrytown in 1883. Irving not only honored Mr. Mitchell with his personal friendship, but he was, in a sense, his literary master. For different as are the subjects upon which the two have written, Mr. Mitchell, more truly than any other American writer, has inherited the literary tradition of Irving’s time and school. There is the same genial and sympathetic attitude toward his readers; the same tenderness of feeling; and, in style, that gentle elaboration and that careful, high-bred English which contrasts so strikingly with the brusque, nervous manner now in fashion. Among the treasures of Mr. Mitchell’s correspondence, none, I will venture to say, are more highly valued by him than the letters from Washington Irving, although the collection contains epistles from Hawthorne, Holmes, Dickens, Greeley, and many other distinguished men. Other interesting _memorabilia_ are the roughly drawn plans of Bayard Taylor’s house and grounds at “Kennett,”