Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. MISS MITFORD. I MUST now make a digression, or rather an interpolation, to introduce two eminent literary personages, to whom I owe a great deal, but the world much more. My introduction to them took place before I went to college, but mention of them has necessarily been postponed, so as not to interfere with the natural sequence of matters. A desk lies before me, of plain make, but mighty size: one that used to hold all sorts of things, from caterpillars (which never spun a thread) to ' cribs,' when I was a boy at school; but which, for more than a quarter of a century, has held, ' those dead leaves which keep their green, the noble letters of the dead.' Their writers were no ordinary men and women ; they have all left name and fame behind them; but that which smells sweeter to me and blossoms in their dust, is their unfailing kindness. It is not because they are deadKINDNESS OF MEN OF LETTERS. 75 and gone that I feel so sure of this. With me Death has never afforded, as it does with so many folks, a cheap asylum for unpleasant people: I think none the better of them for having gone, though I am sincerely glad they went, for I am sure they would not have gone could they have helped it. But when I think of these my Mentors (which most of them were), my heart brims full of gracious memories. I contrast their behaviour to the Young and Struggling with the harshness of the Lawyer, the hardness of the Man of Business, the contempt of the Man of the World, and am proud to belong to their calling. There are intelligent persons who make a living out of their fellow-creatures by pretending to read character in handwriting. It would be rather hard upon their art to send them half a dozen letters out of this desk. What would they make, I wonder, for example, out...