“Even in books I like a confined locality, and so do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot wheels of a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna and awaken at Madrid; it produces a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains; or to ramble with Mr. White over his own parish of Selborne and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds, mice and squirrels who inhabit them; or to sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his goats and his man Friday ... or to be ship-wrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovelier island—the island of Prospero and Miranda, and Calaban and Ariel, and nobody else ... that is best of all. And a small neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry or prose; a village neighbourhood such as this Berkshire hamlet in which I write, a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a fine eminence, with a road through it, always abounding in carts, horsemen and carriages, and lately enlivened by a stage-coach from B—— to S——, which passed through about ten days ago, and will, I suppose, return some time or other.” _Our Village_ soon made its mark, and towards the end of June Miss Mitford was able to write to Sir William Elford, “It sells well, and has been received by the literary world and reviewed in all the literary papers better than I, for modesty, dare to say.” Seven months later she wrote to the same friend, “The little prose volume has certainly done its work and made an opening for a longer effort. You would be diverted at some of the instances I could tell you of its popularity. Columbines and children have been named after Mayflower[9]; stage-coachmen and post-boys point out the localities; schoolboys deny the possibility of any woman’s having written the _Cricket Match_ without schoolboy help; and such men as Lord Stowell (Sir William Scott, the last relique, I believe, of the Literary Club) send to me for a key. I mean to try three volumes of tales next spring.... Heaven knows how I shall succeed! [Footnote 9: Her favourite greyhound.] “Of course I shall copy as closely as I can Nature and Miss Austen, keeping, like her, to genteel country life, or rather going a little lower perhaps, and I am afraid with more of sentiment and less of humour. I do not _intend_ to commit these delinquencies, mind—I _mean_ to keep as playful as I can; but I am afraid of their happening in spite of me.”