“Your notion of letters pleases me much,” replies Miss Mitford, “as I see plainly that it is the result of the old prepossessions and partialities which do me so much honour and give me so much pleasure. But it would never have done. The sketches are too long, and necessarily too much connected for _real_ correspondence.... Besides, we are free and easy in these days, and talk to the public as a friend. Read _Elia_, or the _Sketch Book_, or Hazlitt’s _Table Talk_, or any popular book of the new school and you will find that we have turned over the Johnsonian periods and the Blair-ian formality, to keep company with the wigs and hoops, the stiff curtsys and low bows of our ancestors. Now the public—the reading public—is, as I said before, the correspondent and confidant of everybody. “Having thus made the best defence I can against your criticism, I proceed to answer your question, ‘Are the characters and descriptions true?’ Yes! yes! yes! As true as is well possible. You, as a great landscape painter, know that in painting a favourite scene you do a little embellish, and can’t help it; you avail yourself of happy accidents of atmosphere, and if anything be ugly you strike it out, or if anything be wanting you put it in. But still the picture is a likeness; and that this is a very faithful one you will judge when I tell you that a worthy neighbour of ours, a post-captain, who has been in every quarter of the globe and is equally distinguished for the sharp look-out and the _bonhomie_ of his profession, accused me most seriously of carelessness in putting ‘The Rose’ for ‘The Swan’ as the sign of our next-door neighbour, and was no less disconcerted at the _misprint_ (as he called it) of B. for R. in the name of our next town. _A cela près_ he declares the picture to be exact.” Miss Mitford thus prefaces her work in the first sketch entitled _Our Village_:— “Of all situations for a constant residence that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and cottage-like houses ... with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an anthill or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold.... [Where we] learn to know and to love the people about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons that we pass every day.