Our authoress has been unwilling to launch herself on the full stream or current of her own personal reminiscences and feelings, to write what would be, in fact, little else than an autobiography; she has shrunk back, afraid of the charge of being too personal, too egotistical. A delicacy and sensitiveness very natural; and yet the very nature of her subject required that she should brave this charge. It was not a mere selection of extracts and quotations, accompanied by a few critical remarks, which she intended to give us. If this had been her sole, original, and specific purpose, we venture to say that it would have been, in many respects, a very different series of extracts she would have brought together. Now, if Miss Mitford had boldly recalled her own intellectual history--giving us the favourite passages of her favourite authors, as they were still living in her memory and affections, (for of that which has _ceased_ to be admired the faintest glance is sufficient)--she would have produced a far superior work to that which lies before us. Or if, discarding altogether her own personal history, she had merely gone into her library, and, pulling down from the shelves a certain number of favourite authors, had selected from each what she most approved, accompanying her quotations with some critical and biographical notices, and arranging them in something like harmonious order, so that we should not be tossed too abruptly from one author to another of quite different age and character, she could not have failed, here also, of producing a work complete of its kind. In the first case, we should have had the unity and the interest of a continuous and personal narrative; in the second case, we should have had a higher order of selections and criticisms; the beauty of the quotation would have been the sole motive for inserting it; and her clear critical faculty would have been unbiassed by the amiable partialities of friendship. As we cannot tell, however, with what anticipations the reader may open a book of this description, (which, in its premises, must be always more or less vague,) we are perhaps altogether wrong in supposing that he is likely to feel any disappointment whatever. There is much in it which cannot fall to interest him. But if he does experience to any degree this feeling of disappointment, it will be traceable to the simple fact we have been pointing out--the want of a settled plan or purpose in the work itself. No one knows better than Miss Mitford that, if a writer is not quite determined in the scope and object of his own book, he is pretty sure to leave a certain indistinct and unsatisfactory impression on his reader.