She must have had originally the most sunny of sunny natures. As it was, I have never seen anything like her vivacity and sweet cheerfulness during the early years when I knew her. She had a singular power of entertaining herself by her own stories; the keenness of an Irishwoman in relishing fun and repartee, strange turns of language, and bright touches of character. A fairer, kinder, more universal recipient of everything that came within the possibilities of her mind, I have never known. I think the only genuine author whose merits she was averse to admit was Hood; and yet she knew Rabelais, and delighted in ‘Elia.’ It was her real disposition to dwell on beauties rather than faults. Critical she could be, and as judiciously critical as any woman I have ever known, but she never seemed to be so willingly. When a poem was read to her, or a book given to her, she could always touch on the best passage, the bright point; and rarely missed the purpose of the work, if purpose it had. HENRY F. CHORLEY: ‘Autobiography, Memoir and Letters.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: “The victim of circumstances.”] Although I knew her history sufficiently well, I attributed to this particular daughter of Erin her share of the “wild sweet briery fence that round the flower of Erin dwells,” and felt conviction that for the unhappy circumstances of Lady Blessington’s early life, the sins of others, far more than her own, were responsible, and that she had been to a great extent the victim of circumstances. To that opinion I still hold--some thirty years after her death, and more than fifty since I first saw her. S. C. HALL: ‘Retrospect of a Long Life.’ FOOTNOTES: [11] She was over twenty-eight; she seems always to have looked younger than she actually was. [12] Leigh Hunt describes her in ‘The Feast of the Violets,’ as “A Grace after dinner--a Venus grown fat.” MARY RUSSELL MITFORD. 1787-1855. MARY RUSSELL MITFORD.