File:Mary Russell Mitford (1872) (14580085860).jpg

Identifier: portraitgallery02duyc (find matches)
Title: Portrait gallery of eminent men and women of Europe and America. With biographies
Year: 1872 (1870s)
Authors: Duyckinck, Evert A. (Evert Augustus), 1816-1878
Subjects: Biography, Portraits Biography Portraits
Publisher: New York : Johnson, Fry and company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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nt and amiability, of rare per-sonal beauty, addicted to dissipationand extravagance, already, at twenty-five, reduced to poverty, and ambitiousof expensive living. The only child ofthis union, born two years after themarriage, at the date we have given,at her mothers house, was the siibjectof this notice, Mary Russell Mitford. She early exhibited great precocityof intellect. Before she was threeyears old, she was able to read, when,as she playfully tells us in her Recol-lections of a Literary Life, my fatherwould perch me on the breakfast-tableto exhibit that one accomplishment tosome admiring guest, who admired allthe more, because, a small, puny child,looking far younger than I really was,nicely dressed, as only children gener-ally are, and gifted with an afiluenceof curls, I might have passed for thet^vin sister of my own great doll.The subjects chosen for these recita-tions were her fathers favorite leadingarticles in the Whig newspapers ofthe day,—a rather severe infliction on
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MARY RUSSELL MITFORD
A. A. >C^-^.^ the infant mind; hut the child ))adher reward when she called uj^on hermother in turn to repeat for her the Children in the Wood, a balladwhich she looked for after every per-formance, just as the piping Lullfiuchthat hung in the window, looked forhis lump of sugar after going through God save the King—the two casesbeing exactly parallel. One day, hermother being out of the way, her fa-ther, whose memory was not so wellstored, had to hunt up the ballad inBishop Percys.Collection. The bookwas retained by the maid at the childsrequest, to be at hand for use; andthus, liy the time she was four or fiveyears old, she read the ballads herself,and grew into admiration of the workwhich, more than any other, has influ-enced the modern poetry of England.Her associations, too, at this time,were of the most delightful character. The breakfast room, as she recalls it, where I first possessed myself of mybeloved ballads, was a lofty and sjja-cious apartment, literally lined withb

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