What considerations, then, had weight with Miss Hill when she decided to write Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings? Three emerge from the rest, and may be held of paramount importance. In the first place. Miss Mitford was a lady; in the second, she was born in the year 1787; and in the third, the stock of female characters who lend themselves to biographic treatment by their own sex is, for one reason or another, running short. For instance, little is known of Sappho, and that little is not wholly to her credit.