We found Miss Mitford living literally in a cottage, neither _ornée_ nor poetical--except inasmuch as it had a small garden crowded with the richest and most beautiful profusion of flowers--where she lives with her father, a fresh, stout old man who is in his seventy-fifth year. She herself seemed about fifty, short and fat, with very gray hair, perfectly visible under her cap, and neatly arranged in front. She has the simplest and kindest of manners, and entertained us for two hours with the most animated conversation, and a great variety of anecdotes, without any of the pretensions of an author by profession, and without any of the stiffness that generally belongs to single ladies of her age and reputation. GEORGE TICKNOR: _Journal_, July 26th, 1835, in ‘Life, Letters and Journals.’ Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1876. * * * * * [Sidenote: Her one complaint of her father.] My father--very kind to me in many respects, very attentive if I’m ill, very solicitous that my garden should be nicely kept, that I should go out with him and be amused--is yet, so far as art, literature and the drama are concerned, of a temper infinitely difficult to deal with. He hates and despises them, and all their professors ...; and is constantly taunting me with my “friends” and my “people” (as he calls them), reproaching me if I hold the slightest intercourse with author, editor, artist, or actor, and treating with frank contempt every one not of a certain station in the county. I am entirely convinced that he would consider Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Walter Scott, and Mrs. Siddons as his inferiors. Always this is very painful--strangely painful. MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to Rev. William Harness_, in the former’s ‘Life,’ by L’Estrange. * * * * * [Sidenote: Hard life.] After frittering away the whole day, incessantly on foot, or otherwise fatiguing herself, at his beck and call, and receiving his friends, and reading him to sleep in the afternoons till she had no voice left, the hour came when she might put him to bed. But her own day’s work still remained to be done. It was not a sort of work which could be done by powers jaded like hers, without some stimulus or relief; and hence the necessity of doses of laudanum to carry her through her task. When the necessity ceased by the death of her father, her practice of taking laudanum ceased; but her health had become radically impaired, and her nervous system was rendered unfit to meet any such shock as that which overthrew it at last. Miss Mitford so toiling by candle-light, while the hard master who had made her his servant all day was asleep in the next room, is as painful an instance of the struggles of human life as the melancholy of a buffoon, or the heart-break--that “secret known to all”--of a boasting Emperor of all the Russias. HARRIET MARTINEAU: ‘Biographical Sketches.’ New York: Leypoldt & Holt, 1869.