Read it through once

For ourselves, after reading between the lines of Miss Mitford’s life, we strongly suspect that if young William Harness had been able to overcome his prejudice against the Doctor, and proposed to his old playmate, he would have been accepted. “Mr. Harness was never married,” says his friend and biographer, the Rev. A. G. L’Estrange, “but I have heard that there was some romance and disappointment in his early life. In speaking of celibacy, he was wont to say, ‘There is always some story connected with it.’” Whether this romance and disappointment was connected with Miss Mitford is a matter upon which we cannot speak with certainty, but we are prepared to assert, upon the first-hand authority of one who knew Miss Mitford most intimately and was in the closest relationship with her, that, after her father (who was always first), William Harness was the one man of her life—and this not merely because of their similarity of tastes and pursuits upon which marriage might have set a crown of greater value than either ever achieved, or could have achieved alone—the man to whom she regularly turned for sympathy and counsel in the years which followed her parents’ death, and to whom her thoughts were constantly turning when her end was near.