Mary as a child was shy and silent before strangers, but withal very observant. Writing of the impressions made upon her mind by some of the French _émigré_ coteries with which she had come in contact, she says: “In truth they formed a motley group [whose] contrasts and combinations were too ludicrous not to strike irresistibly the fancy of an acute observing girl whose perception of the ludicrous was rendered keener by the invincible shyness which confined the enjoyment entirely to her own breast.” But is it not to the experiences gained by such quiet, shy children as herself and Charlotte Brontë that we owe much of our knowledge of life and its surroundings? It is the listeners not the talkers that can hand down this knowledge to us. Miss Mitford’s talents were varied, and we owe to her pen some stirring dramas which were performed with much éclat on the London stage, and in which John Kemble and Macready took the leading parts. The public were astonished to learn that it was a gentle lady living in a remote Berkshire village who was thus moving the great London audiences. A shrewd American critic of the day remarks: “In all these plays there is strong, vigorous writing—masculine in the free unhashed use of language—but wholly womanly in its purity from coarseness or licence and in the inter-mixture of those incidental touches of softest feeling and finest observation which are peculiar to the gentler sex.” It has been said of Miss Mitford by one who knew her that “as a letter-writer she has rarely been surpassed, and that her correspondence, so full as it is of point in allusions, so full of anecdote and of recollections, will be considered among her finest writings.” Even her hasty notes, we are told, “had a relish about them quite their own.” It is interesting to find the views she herself entertained on the subject of letter-writing as given in her _Recollections of a Literary Life_. It runs as follows: “Such is the reality and identity belonging to letters written at the moment and intended only for the eye of a favourite friend, that probably any genuine series of epistles were the writer ever so little distinguished would ... possess the invaluable quality of individuality which so often causes us to linger before an old portrait of which we know no more than that it is a Burgomaster by Rembrandt or a Venetian Senator by Titian. The least skilful pen when flowing from the fulness of the heart ... shall often paint with as faithful and life-like a touch as either of those great masters.”