work, for although her books sold at high prices, her income did not keep pace with her father’s extravagances. In 1837, however, she received a civil list pension, and five years later her father died. A subscription was raised to pay his debts, and the surplus increased the daughter’s income. Miss Mitford eventually removed to a cottage at Swallowfield, near Reading, where she died on the 10th of January 1855.
Miss Mitford’s youthful ambition had been to be “the greatest English poetess,” and her first publications were poems in the manner of Coleridge and Scott (Miscellaneous Verses, 1810, reviewed by Scott in the Quarterly; Christine, a metrical tale, 1811; Blanche, 1813). Her play Julian was produced at Covent Garden, with Macready in the title-rôle, in 1823; The Foscari was performed at Covent Garden, with Charles Kemble as the hero, in 1826; Rienzi, 1828, the best of her plays, had a run of thirty-four nights, and Miss Mitford’s friend, Talfourd, imagined that its vogue militated against the success of his own play Ion. Charles the First was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, but was played at the Surrey Theatre in 1834. But the prose, to which she was driven by domestic necessities, has rarer qualities than her verse. The first series of Our Village sketches appeared in 1824, a second in 1826, a third in 1828, a fourth in 1830, a fifth in 1832. Our Village was several times reprinted; Belford Regis, a novel in which the neighbourhood and society of Reading were idealized, was published in 1835.
Her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852) is a series of causeries about her favourite books. Her talk was said by her friends, Mrs Browning and Hengist Horne, to have been even more amusing than her books, and five volumes of her Life and Letters, published in 1870 and 1872, show her to have been a delightful letter-writer.
MITFORD, WILLIAM (1744–1827), English historian, was the elder of the two sons of John Mitford, a barrister, who lived near Beaulieu, at the edge of the New Forest. Here, at Exbury House, his father’s property, Mitford was born on the 10th of February 1744. He was educated at Cheam School, under the picturesque writer William Gilpin, but at the age of fifteen a severe illness led to his being removed, and after two years of idleness Mitford was sent, in July 1761, as a gentleman commoner to Queen’s College, Oxford. In this year his father died, and left him the Exbury property and a considerable fortune. Mitford, therefore, being “very much his own master, was easily led to prefer amusement to study.” He left Oxford (where the only sign of assiduity he had shown was to attend the lectures of Blackstone) without a degree, in 1763, and proceeded to the Middle Temple. But when he married Miss Fanny Molloy in 1766, and retired to Exbury for the rest of his life, he made the study of the Greek language and literature his hobby and occupation. After ten years his wife died, and in October 1776 Mitford went abroad. He was encouraged by French scholars whom he met in Paris, Avignon and Nice to give himself systematically to the study of Greek history. But it was Gibbon, with whom he was closely associated when they both were officers in the South Hampshire Militia, who suggested to Mitford the form which his work should take. In 1784 the first of the volumes of his History of Greece appeared, and the fifth and last of these quartos was published in 1810, after which the state of Mitford’s eyesight and other physical infirmities, including a loss of memory, forbade his continuation of the enterprise, although he painfully revised successive new editions. While his book was progressing, Mitford was a member of the House of Commons, with intervals, from 1785 to 1818, and he was for many years verderer of the New Forest and a county magistrate; but it does not appear that he ever visited Greece. After a long illness, he died at Exbury on the 10th of February 1827. In addition to his History of Greece, he published a few smaller works, the most important of which was an Essay on the Harmony of Language, 1774. The style of Mitford is natural and lucid, but without the rich colour of Gibbon. He affected some oddities both of language and of orthography, for which he was censured and which he endeavoured to revise. But his political opinions were still more severely treated, since Mitford was an impassioned anti-Jacobin, and his partiality for a monarchy led him to be unjust to the Athenians. Hence his History of Greece, after having had no peer in European literature for half a century, faded in interest on the appearance of the work of Grote. Clinton, too, in his Fasti hellenici, charged Mitford with “a general negligence of dates,” though admitting that in his philosophical range “he is far superior to any former writer” on Greek history. Byron, who dilated on Mitford’s shortcomings, nevertheless declared that he was “perhaps the best of all modern historians altogether.” This Mitford certainly is not, but his pre-eminence in the little school of English historians who succeeded Hume and Gibbon it would be easier to maintain.
William Mitford’s cousin, the Rev. John Mitford (1781–1859), was editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine and of various editions of the English poets. For the Freeman-Mitfords, who were also relatives, see Redesdale, Earl of.
MITHILA, an ancient kingdom of India, corresponding to that portion of Behar lying N. of the Ganges, with an extension into Nepal, where was the capital of Janakpur. Its early history is obscure, but it has always been noted for its peculiar conservatism and the learning of its Brahmans. They form to this day one of the five classes of northern Brahmans, and their head is the Maharaja of Darbhanga. The language, known as Maithili, is a dialect of Bihari, with an archaic system of grammar and a literature of its own.
MITHRADATES, less correctly Mithridates, a Persian name derived from Mithras (q.v.), the sun-god, and the Indo-European root da, “to give,” i.e. “given by Mithras.” The name occurs also in the forms Mitradates (Herod. i. 110) and Meherdates (Tac. Ann. xii. 10). It was borne by a large number of Oriental kings, soldiers and statesmen. The earliest are Mithradates, the eunuch who helped Artabanus to assassinate Xerxes I. (Diod. xi. 69), and the Mithradates who fought first with Cyrus the Younger and after his death with Artaxerxes against the Greeks (Xen. Anab. ii. 5, 35; iii. 3, 1–10; iii. 4, 1–5), and is the ancestor of the kings of Pontus. The most important are three kings of Parthia of the Arsacid dynasty, and six (or four) kings of Pontus. There were also two kings of Commagene, two of the Bosporus and one of Armenia (A.D. 35–51).
Mithradates I. (Arsaces VI.), successor of his brother, Phraates I., came to the Parthian throne about 175 B.C. The first event of his reign was a war with Eucratides of Bactria, who tried to create a great Greek empire in the East. At last, when Eucratides had been murdered by his son about 150, Mithradates was able to occupy Kings of Parthia. some districts on the border of Bactria and to conquer Arachosia (Kandahar); he is even said to have crossed the Indus (Justin 41, 6; Strabo xi. 515, 517; cf. Orosius v. 4, 16; Diod. 33, 18). Meanwhile the Seleucid kingdom was torn by internal dissensions, fostered by Roman intrigues. Phraates I. had already conquered eastern Media, about Rhagae (Rai), and subjected the Mardi on the border of the Caspian (Justin 41, 5; Isidor. Charac. 7). Mithradates I. conquered the rest of Media and advanced towards the Zagros chains and the Babylonian plain. In a war against the Elymaeans (in Susiana) he took the Greek town Seleucia on the Hedyphon, and forced their king to become a vassal of the Parthians (Justin 41, 6; Strabo xv. 744). About 141 he must have become master of Babylonia. By Diodorus 33, 18 he is praised as a mild ruler; and the fact that from 140 he takes on his coins the epithet Philhellen (W. Wroth, Catalogue of the Coins of Parthia, p. 14 seq.; till then he only calls himself “the great king Arsakes”) shows that he tried to conciliate his Greek subjects. The Greeks, however, induced Demetrius II. Nicator to come to their deliverance, although he was much pressed in Syria by the pretender Diodotus Tryphon. At first he was victorious, but in 138 he was defeated. Mithradates settled him with a royal household in Hyrcania and gave him his daughter Rhodogune in marriage (Justin 36, 1, 38, 9; Jos. Ant. 13, 5, 11; Euseb. Chron. I. 257; Appian Syr. 67). Shortly afterwards Mithradates I. died, and was succeeded by his son Phraates II. He was the real founder of the Arsacid Empire.
Mithradates II. the Great, king of Parthia (c. 120–88 B.C.), saved the kingdom from the Mongolian Sacae (Tochari),
