it through several editions. It is reviewed in the Quarterly, vol. cxiii. Besides this may be consulted Lockhart's "graphic account" of him in Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, vol. iii. p. 256; a long chapter in one of Gilfillan's Galleries; two most excellent papers on his poetry in Hogg's Instructor, contributed, if I mistake not, by the Rev. P. Landreth, of Cupar Fifanorum. There is also a scarce volume entitled Heartbreak: the Trials of Literary Life j or Recollections of Christopher North (1859, 8vo).
There is a good story told of "Christopher" and one other of his daughters, on the occasion of her being sought to wife by William Edmonstoune Aytoun, author of Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, the mock-heroical tragedy of Firmilian (that well-directed attack on the "spasmodic school" of poetry), the Bon Gualtier Ballads (in conjunction with Theodore Martin), and successor to Wilson himself in the editorship of Blackwood's Magazine. "You must speak to papa," naturally said the young lady, when the amorous swain proposed. Aytoun acquiesced; but too diffident to attack the sire himself, the young lady undertook the task. Christopher was agreeable; but, said he, "if your suitor is so shamefaced, I had better write my reply, and pin it to your back." He did so, and the young lady returned to the drawing-room, where the expectant lover read the answer to his request,—"With the author's compliments!"
XII.— MARY RUSSELL MITFORD.
"In our village,"—I take the description as I find it, for it is a capital imitation of the manner and style of the subject of this notice,—"we have an authoress too, and her name is Mary Mitford. Now, let nobody suppose that Mary, on account of the pretty alliteration of her name, is one of the fine and romantic young ladies who grace pastorals in prose and verse. On the contrary, our Mary is a good-humoured spinster of a certain age, inclined, we do not know whether with her own consent, or not, to embonpoint, and the very reverse of picturesqueness. There are, however, very few girls in our village, or twenty villages beyond it, that can dress up so pretty a basket of good-looking and sweet-smelling natural flowers, all of the true English soil, not foreign and flaunting like the flaring dahlias that one class of bouquet-gatherers thrust under our noses with so much pretence, nor smelling of turf and whiskey like the strong-scented bog-lilies which are offered to us by the basket-women of the provinces; nor yet at all resembling the faded imitation roses picked up in secondhand saloons, and vended as genuine posies by draggletail damsels, who endeavour to pass themselves off" as ladies' maids, generally without character. And Mary's basket is arranged in so neat, so nice, so trim, so comely, or, to say all in one word, so very English a manner, that it is a perfect pleasure to see her hopping with it to market."
This amiable and accomplished lady was born at Alresford, in Hampshire, December 16, 1786. Her father, George Mitford, M.D., appears to have been one of those men who manifest an extraordinary talent in getting rid of money;—in whose cases the total disappearance, "without
