All that vile design of doing good, or making out this to be wrong and that to be right, ... I hold ... to be the most fatal fault of all fiction nowadays.... It was the one fault of Miss Edgeworth that she wrote to a text. How much better she wrote without one she showed in ‘Belinda.’ All the greatest writers of fiction are pure of that sin--Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Jane Austen; and are not these precisely the writers who do most good as well as give most pleasure? M. R. MITFORD: _Letter to Mr. D. Starkey_, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Religious belief.] There would be a tacit hypocrisy, a moral cowardice, if I were to stop here, and not to confess, what I think you must suspect, although by no chance do I ever talk about it--that I do not, or rather cannot, believe all that the Church requires. I humbly hope that it is not necessary to do so, and that a devout sense of the mercy of God, and an endeavor, however imperfectly and feebly, to obey the great precepts of justice and kindness, may be accepted in lieu of that entire faith which, in me, _will not_ be commanded. You will not suspect me of thoughtlessness in this matter; neither, I trust, does it spring from intellectual pride. Few persons have a deeper sense of their own weakness; few, indeed, can have so much weakness of character to deplore and strive against. M. R. MITFORD: _Letter to Rev. Wm. Harness_, in the former’s ‘Life,’ by L’Estrange. * * * * * [Sidenote: A tedious illness.] [Sidenote: Continued pleasure in nature.] I am still very lame, carried, or rather lifted, step by step up and down stairs and into bed, and unable to stir when recumbent, almost to move when seated. Besides this, I am all over as sore as if I were pounded in a mortar, and, although quite as cheerful as ever, yet paying for temporary excitement by exceeding weakness afterwards. In short, I am as infirm, as feeble, and as lively as it is well possible for a woman to be. I am got into the air, and I enjoy it so much, that I cannot but hope that it must eventually do me good. It seems to me that never was the marriage of May and June, which is always the loveliest moment of the year, so beautiful as now. The richness of the foliage in our deep-wooded lanes, the perfume of the bean-fields, the luxuriant blossoming of all sorts of flowering trees. I have some lilacs of both colors, especially the white, which I would match against those of which Horace Walpole was so fond at Strawberry Hill. M. R. MITFORD: _Letter to Mr. D. Starkey_, June 2nd, 1853, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Delighted with a glow-worm.]