After this little excursion into Woodcock Lane, we are introduced to Messrs Beaumont and Fletcher. The quotations from these authors we should have no object in reproducing here. One thing we cannot help noticing. Both on this and on some other occasions we are struck by an omission, by a silence. Though she may think fit to represent these dramatists as her favourite companions, we are morally certain that it was a far greater than either of them who was generally her delight and her study in that shady solitude. Could we have looked over the page as she sate there leaning so amiably against that "rugged elm," we are sure that it would have been Shakspeare that we should have found in her hands. But why no word of Shakspeare? We think we can conjecture the cause of this omission; and, if our surmise is correct, we quite sympathise with the feeling that led to it. Miss Mitford is a sincere and ardent admirer of Shakspeare; she must be so--in common with every intelligent person who reads poetry at all. But Miss Mitford likes to keep her senses; has a shrewd, quiet intelligence; has little love for what is vague or violent in criticism any more than in poetry; and she has felt that the extravagant, rhodomontade style of panegyric now prevalent upon our greatest of poets, reduced her to silence. She could not out-Herod Herod; she could not outbid these violent declaimers who speak of Shakspeare as if he were a god, who admire all they read which bears his name--the helter-skelter entangled confusion and obscurity, the wretched conceit, the occasional bombast--admire all, and thereby prove they have no right to any admiration whatever. She was, therefore, like many others who love and reverence him most, reduced to silence. Some years hence a sensible word may be written of Shakspeare. At present, he who would praise with discrimination must apparently place himself in the rank of his detractors.