Miss Mitford's critical taste leads her to an especial preference of what is distinct and intelligible in all the departments of literature. To some it may appear that she is more capable of doing justice to poetry of the secondary than of the higher and more spiritual order. However that may be, we, for our own part, congratulated ourselves on an escape from that vague and mystical criticism which is so prevalent in our day. There are two words which a certain class of writers never pronounce without going off into frenzy or delirious raving. "Shakspeare" is one of these words; the "Infinite" is the other. They have made the discovery that this poet or that painter talks or paints the "infinite." They find in every obscurity of thought, in every violence of passion, the "infinite." There is no such thing as "sound and fury signifying nothing." They always signify the "infinite." If there is the "infinite" in criticism, they certainly have reached it. In Goldsmith's time, it was "Shakspeare and the musical glasses;" it is now "Shakspeare and the Infinite." We suspect that the musical glasses were more amusing, and are sure that they had quite as much meaning. We go back to Woodcock Lane. We rather cruelly abridged our last extract, on purpose that we might have space for one other of the same description. We make no apology for clinging to this "personal gossip." Very few of the poetical quotations throughout the work have more of beauty and of pathos than the concluding paragraph of the next extract we shall give. _Apropos_ of Sir Philip Sydney's _Arcadia_, she makes us participators in her country rambles; and _apropos_ of these she introduces us to an old friend, a walking-stick--"pretty nearly as well known as ourselves in our Berkshire village." Some sixty years ago it was "a stick of quality," having belonged to a certain Duchess-Dowager of Atholl; but the circumstance that her own mother had taken to using it, during her latter days, had especially endeared it to her. "And then," as she observes with finest tact, "everybody knows how the merest trifles which have formed part of the daily life of the loved and lost, especially those things which they have touched, are cherished, and cared for, and put aside; how we dare not look upon them for very love; and how, by some accident that nobody can explain, they come to light in the course of time, and after a momentary increase of sadness, help to familiarise and render pleasant the memory by which they are endeared." This is very beautifully expressed, and it is the tone of right sentiment; truthful, natural, the unaffected sadness that tempers into a sweet and pleasant memory.