JAMES T. FIELDS: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: In old age.] I can never forget the little figure rolled up in two chairs in the little Swallowfield room, packed round with books up to the ceiling, on to the floor--the little figure with clothes on, of course, but of no recognized or recognizable pattern; and somewhere out of the upper end of the heap, gleaming under a great, deep, globular brow, two such eyes as I never, perhaps, saw in any other Englishwoman--though I believe she must have had French blood in her veins to breed such eyes, and such a tongue; for the beautiful speech which came out of that ugly (it was that) face, and the glitter and depth too of the eyes, like live coals--perfectly honest the while, both lips and eyes--these seemed to me to be attributes of the highest French, or rather Gallic, not of the highest Englishwoman. In any case, she was a triumph of mind over matter, of spirit over flesh. CHARLES KINGSLEY: _Letter to James Payn_, quoted in ‘Some Literary Recollections.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Pride in her plays.] She was much more proud of her plays (which had even then been well-nigh forgotten) than of the works by which she was so well known, and which at that time brought people from the ends of the earth to see her. JAMES PAYN: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Greater values of her tales.] I was early fond of her tales and descriptions, and have always regarded her as the originator of that new style of “graphic description” to which literature owes a great deal, however weary we may sometimes have felt of the excess in to which the practice of detail has run. Miss Austen has claims to other and greater honors; but she and Miss Mitford deserve no small gratitude for rescuing us from the folly and bad taste of slovenly indefiniteness in delineation. Miss Mitford’s tales appealed to a new sense, as it were, in a multitude of minds--greatly to the amazement of the whole circle of publishers who had rejected, in her works, as good a bargain as is often offered to publishers. Miss Mitford showed me at once that she undervalued her tales, and rested her claims on her plays. I suppose everybody who writes a successful tragedy must inevitably do this. Miss Mitford must have possessed some dramatic requisites, or her success could not have been so decided as it was; but my own opinion always was that her mind wanted the breadth, and her character the depth, necessary for genuine achievement in the highest enterprise of literature. HARRIET MARTINEAU: ‘Autobiography.’ * * * * *