“Dear papa,” in the pride of his heart, insisted upon making an accomplished musician of her, and would “stick her up” to the piano, although she had neither ear, taste, nor application. Her master was Hook, the father of the facetious Theodore, and she was taught in the schoolroom where Miss Landon passed the greater part of her life. Luckily they shut her up in a room to make her practise the harp, and as it was full of books she fell to reading, and under these auspicious circumstances made her first acquaintance with the plays of Voltaire and Molière. She was caught in the fact of laughing till the tears ran down her cheeks over that passage in the “Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” where the angry father apostrophises the galley, “Que diable alloit-il faire dans cette galère!” As her good stars had it, she was detected in her delinquency by the husband of the schoolmistress, who happened to be a Frenchman, an adorer of Molière, and a hater of music, and who, instead of chiding her for her neglect of the instrument, dismissed the harp-mistress, and made the young student a present of a cheap edition of Molière, for her own reading, which she has to this hour, in twelve unbound, foreign-looking, little volumes. After these scenes, we find her in a cottage, at Taplow—at this time a grown-up lady—looking over a garden of honeysuckles, lilies, and roses, making excursions to Windsor, to Gray’s Lawn at Stoke Poges, to Burke’s at Beaconsfield, and to the College at Chalfont, where Milton found a refuge during the plague. We always associate Miss Mitford with cottages. We cannot imagine her living in a slated house, three stories high, with a carriage sweep, and steps up to the door—we cannot suffer her in our imagination to have any of the comforts and solidity of a well-built mansion about her; it must be a cottage, with its ivy creepers, its portico and latticed windows, and everything round it looking as green and rural as a wilderness of trees and shrubs, growing up luxuriantly in a warm, languid climate can make it. In short, we must smother her in flowers, or she is not the Miss Mitford that we know so well in the pastoral books she has written. Turning from the autobiographical passages which form so interesting a part of these volumes, there are a variety of literary sketches of an equally attractive kind. Miss Mitford runs over a wide field of books and recollections; and from her extensive acquaintance with literary people, and the desultory character of her reading, she supplies an abundant store of anecdote and remark. The following is new, and certainly very curious. The scene is an old, wooden, picturesque house, at Cambridge, in America, once the head quarters of Washington, but now the residence of Longfellow, the poet.