An edition of her collected works was published in Philadelphia in the year 1841, which is prefaced by a short biography of the author written by James Crissy. It is pleasant therein to read his warm-hearted appreciation of her literary genius. He speaks of Miss Mitford as “a dramatist of no common power.” “In all her plays,” he says, “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 its touches [of the] softest feeling and finest observation.” He goes on, however, to say: “But the claims of Miss Mitford to swell the list of _inventors_ [of new styles in literature] rest upon yet firmer grounds. They rest upon those exquisite sketches by which she has created a school of writing, homely but not vulgar, familiar but not breeding contempt.... Wherein the small events and the simple characters of rural life are made interesting by the truth and sprightliness with which they are represented.” In the Introduction to her “Dramatic Works,” Miss Mitford thus closes a detailed account of the composition and production of her plays:— “So much for the Tragedies. There would have been many more such but that the pressing necessity of earning money, and the uncertainties and the delays of the drama, at moments when delay or disappointment weighed upon me like a sin, made it a duty to turn away from the lofty steep of Tragic Poetry to the everyday path of Village Stories.” * * * * * À propos of these words and knowing that Miss Mitford’s greatest power lay in the writing of those very Village Stories, we would quote the words of Tennyson:— “Not once or twice in our fair island story The path of duty was the way to glory.” CHAPTER XXVII FOREIGN NEIGHBOURS “One of the prettiest dwellings in our neighbourhood,” writes Miss Mitford in one of her stories, “is the Lime Cottage at Burley-Hatch. It consists of a low-browed habitation, so entirely covered with jessamine, honeysuckle, passion-flowers and china roses, as to resemble a bower, and is placed in the centre of a large garden. On either side of the neat gravel walk which leads from the outer gate to the door of the cottage stand the large and beautiful trees to which it owes its name; spreading their strong, broad shadow over the turf beneath, and sending, on a summer afternoon, their rich spring fragrance half across the irregular village green.... “Such is the habitation of Thérèse de G., an _émigrée_ of distinction, whose aunt having married an English officer, was luckily able to afford her niece an asylum during the horrors of the Revolution, and to secure to her a small annuity and the Lime Cottage after her death. There she has lived for five-and-thirty years, gradually losing sight of her few and distant foreign connections, and finding all her happiness in her pleasant home and her kind neighbours—a standing lesson in cheerfulness and contentment.