To us, we must acknowledge, this freshness of the heart and entire freedom of the imagination, is very delightful. Miss Mitford is not a critic; but she is something a great deal better and more agreeable. She is of too enjoyable a temperament for a critic; she has not a tinge of the malice or perversity of criticism in her genial nature. For this reason, her opinions are sometimes slightly heterodox, but it is always on the side of a good-will, and a hearty admiration of some gracious or gentle quality which she has been at the pains to discover, and which few people would take the trouble to look for. She speaks rapturously of Davis’ “Life of Curran;” has such innocent rural views of literature, that she thinks nobody reads Pope and Dryden now, and that George Darley is unknown as a poet to the English public; detects a close resemblance between the Irish novels of Banim and the romanticist creations of Victor Hugo, Sue, Dumas, and the rest of that school; thinks that few works are better worth reading than Moncton Milnes’ “Life of Keats,” not only for the sake of Keats, but of his “generous benefactors, Sir James Clarke and Mr. Severn;” regrets that certain works have fallen into oblivion, from which no effort of fashionable or literary patronage can redeem them; considers Willis, Lowell and Poe the great American poets; and hopes that Richardson’s novels and Walpole’s letters will never come to an end. Nobody’s judgment can suffer any damage from such amiable notions; and the world is always sure to derive benefit from the kindly spirit that overlooks a hundred defects and follies for the sake of a single virtue it finds hidden beneath them. We wish there were more Miss Mitfords, with her intellect, to set us so influential an example of toleration and a willingness to be pleased. She confesses that she was a spoilt child, and that papa spoilt her. It is evident, from what we have just said, that sudden and high as was the growth of her reputation, the public have not spoilt her. What the applause of critics and the admiration of her readers failed to do, papa did. “Not content with spoiling me in-doors, he spoilt me out. How well I remember his carrying me round the orchard on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-old feet, whilst the little hands hung on to his pig-tail, which I called my bridle—those were days of pig-tails—hung so fast, and lugged so heartily, that sometimes the ribbon would come off between my fingers, and send his hair floating, and the powder flying down his back.” The papa who thus made her first acquainted with the orchard, occupies a still more prominent space in her subsequent reminiscences. From him to whom she was indebted for her early love of nature, and the happy hours of childhood, she also derived the heaviest sorrow of her life. The story is strange and melancholy.