“Ah, me! in less than twenty years what was left of the produce of the ticket so strangely chosen? What? except the Wedgwood dinner service that my father had had made to commemorate the event, with the Irish harp within the border on one side, and his family crest on the other. That fragile and perishable ware long outlasted the more perishable money!” Miss Mitford relates these painful recollections with a serenity and patience that yield a lesson from which her readers may profit as largely as from the example of extravagance and recklessness which made so severe a demand on her feelings and her philosophy; and it is pleasant, after all her vicissitudes and jolting over the rough ways of the world, to find her in a tranquil cottage, in the midst of the scenery she loves, with her dog and her maid, her stick and her pony, enjoying as much felicity as can be reasonably looked for in the sunset of a chequered life. Scattered over the volumes without much heed of chronology or sequence, are many little personal scraps that will hereafter enter into her biography, from the light which they throw upon the cast and color of her training. The papa, who was so indifferent to money, who was addicted to such ruinous habits, and who in his general relations with society, seems to have sacrificed the comfort and repose of his home, was, nevertheless, the most devoted of fathers. From her earliest childhood to the last hour of his life, he treated her with an affectionate and caressing tenderness that, in spite of his manifest errors, leaves an amiable impression of his character behind. One of the incidents on which she dwells with the greatest satisfaction was her first visit to London; and the mode of it is not only illustrative of the comparatively primitive habits of the time, but of the simplicity of the man in his domestic life. Having occasion to come to London in the middle of July, he suddenly announced his intention of taking her up with him in his gig; and at this open fashion they started, stopping to dine at Crauford Bridge in a little inn—then a very famous posting-house—whose pretty garden and Portugal laurels she still remembers; and then on to Hatchett’s Hotel in Piccadilly, where she stood looking out of the window and wondering when the crowd would go by; and in the evening she was so unconscious of fatigue from this exciting journey that papa took her to the Haymarket to see a comedy—one of the comedies, she says, that George III. used to enjoy so heartily, although what sort of comedy it was we know not, unless, which we shrewdly suspect, it was a specimen of Colman the Younger, or of the Morton and Reynolds school. She had seen plays before in a barn—but never such a play as this. The whole description of this trip to London is as good in its way as anything Fielding himself could have done.