"No such intimate and sympathetic portrayal of village life had been given before, and perhaps it needed a woman's sympathetic eye for little things to show the way. Of the professional story-teller on the alert for a sensation there is as little as of the professional novelist on the watch for a lesson." _Belford Regis_, a series of country and town sketches, was written soon after the completion of _Our Village_. Here again is the happy blending of nature and humanity; the same fusion of truth and fiction. As Belford Regis is "Our Market Town," there is a wider range of characters, as different classes are represented; and a more intimate view, since the same people appear in more than one story. Stephen Lane, the butcher, and his wife are often met with. He is so fat that "when he walks, he overfills the pavement, and is more difficult to pass than a link of full-dressed misses or a chain of becloaked dandies." Of Mrs. Lane she writes: "Butcher's wife and butcher's daughter though she were, yet was she a graceful and gracious woman, one of nature's gentlewomen in look and in thought." There was Miss Savage, "who was called a sensible woman because she had a gruff voice and vinegar aspect"; and Miss Steele, who was called literary, because forty years ago she made a grand poetical collection. Miss Mitford even does justice to Mrs. Hollis, the fruiterer and the village gossip; "There she sits, a tall, square, upright figure, surmounted by a pleasant, comely face, eyes as black as a sloe, cheeks as rounds as an apple, and a complexion as ruddy as a peach, as fine a specimen of a healthy, hearty English tradeswoman, the feminine of John Bull, as one would desire to see on a summer's day.... As a gossip she was incomparable. She knew everybody and everything; had always the freshest intelligence, and the newest news; her reports like her plums had the bloom on them, and she would as much have scorned to palm upon you an old piece of scandal as to send you strawberries that had been two days gathered." A reviewer in the _Athenæum_ thus criticises the book: "If (to be hypercritical) the pictures they contain be a trifle too sunny and too cheerful to be real--if they show more generosity and refinement and self-sacrifice existing among the middle classes than does exist,--too much of the meek beauty, too little of the squalidity of humble life,--we love them none the less, and their authoress all the more." In _Belford Regis_ we miss the fields, the brooks, the flowers, and the sky, which made the charm of _Our Village_. In some respects it is a more ambitious book, but it has not the perennial charm of _Our Village_.