'Among the many blessings I enjoy,--my dear father, my admirable mother, my tried and excellent friends,--there is nothing for which I ought to thank God so earnestly as for the constitutional buoyancy of spirits, the aptness to hope, the will to be happy WHICH I INHERIT FROM MY FATHER,' she writes. Was ever filial piety so irritating as hers? It is difficult to bear, with any patience, her praises of Dr. Mitford. His illusions were no less a part of his nature than his daughter's, the one a self-centred absolutely selfish existence, the other generous, humble, beautiful. She is hardly ever really angry except when some reports get about concerning her marriage. There was an announcement that she was engaged to one of her own clan, and the news spread among her friends. The romantic Mrs. Hofland had conjured up the suggestion, to Miss Mitford's extreme annoyance. It is said Mrs. Hofland also married off Miss Edgeworth in the same manner. Mary Mitford found her true romance in friendship, not in love. One day Mr. Kenyon came to see her while she was staying in London, and offered to show her the Zoological Gardens, and on the way he proposed calling in Gloucester Place to take up a young lady, a connection of his own, Miss Barrett by name. It was thus that Miss Mitford first made the acquaintance of Mrs. Browning, whose friendship was one of the happiest events of her whole life. A happy romance indeed, with that added reality which must have given it endurance. And indeed to make a new friend is like learning a new language. I myself have a friend who says that we have each one of us a chosen audience of our own to whom we turn instinctively, and before whom we rehearse that which is in our minds; whose opinion influences us, whose approval is our secret aim. All this Mrs. Browning seems to have been to Miss Mitford. 'I sit and think of you and of the poems that you will write, and of that strange rainbow crown called fame, until the vision is before me.... My pride and my hopes seem altogether merged in you. At my time of life and with so few to love, and with a tendency to body forth images of gladness, you cannot think what joy it is to anticipate....' So wrote the elder woman to the younger with romantic devotion. What Miss Mitford once said of herself was true, hers was the instinct of the bee sucking honey from the hedge flower. Whatever sweetness and happiness there was to find she turned to with unerring directness.