Having said thus much in the absence of a definite purpose, we ought to permit the authoress to explain herself upon this head. "The title of this book," she says in the preface, "gives a very imperfect idea of the contents. Perhaps it would be difficult to find a short phrase that would accurately describe a work so miscellaneous and so wayward; a work where there is far too much of personal gossip and of local scene-painting for the grave pretension of critical essays, and far too much of criticism and extract for anything approaching in the slightest degree to autobiography. The courteous reader must take it for what it is." We hope to rank amongst "courteous readers," and will "take it for what it is." _Recollections of a Literary Life_ was a title which promised too much; but there was no help for it: a title the book must have, and we can easily understand that, under certain circumstances, the choice of a name may be a very difficult matter. Whatever name may best become it, the book is, without doubt, full of pleasant and agreeable reading. A better companion for the summer's afternoon we could not recommend. That "personal gossip" of which the preface speaks, is written in the most charming manner imaginable; and it will be impossible, we think, for any one, however familiar with our literature, not to meet, amongst the quotations, with some which he will sincerely thank the authoress for having brought before him. Having thus discharged our critical conscience by insisting, perhaps with a more severe impartiality than the case demanded, on the one apparent defect in the very structure and design of this book, we have now only to retrace our steps through it, pausing where the matter prompts an observation, or where it affords an apt example of the kind of interest which pervades it. And first we must revert to that "personal gossip," to which we have a decided predilection, and in which Miss Mitford pre-eminently excels: in her hands it becomes an art. Here is something about "Woodcock Lane." She is about to introduce her old favourites, Beaumont and Fletcher, and carries us first to a certain pleasant retreat where she was accustomed to read these dramatists. "I pore over them," she says, "in the silence and solitude of a certain green lane, about half a mile from home; sometimes seated on the roots of an old fantastic beech, sometimes on the trunk of a felled oak, or sometimes on the ground itself, with my back propped lazily against a rugged elm." "In that very lane," she continues, "am I writing on this sultry June day, luxuriating in the shade--the verdure, the fragrance of hay-field and bean-field, and the absence of all noise, except the song of birds, and that strange mingling of many sounds, the whir of a thousand forms of insect life, so often heard among the general hush of a summer noon....