Read it through once

In this outline of qualifications for the writing of graceful prose Miss Mitford did herself scant justice, as time has proved; for while her verse is forgotten, it is her prose alone which has lived and by which she is remembered. Had personal bulk been the deciding factor, then, assuredly she would have been ruled out, for in a previous letter to Sir William—with whom, by the way, she was now on such intimate terms that personal matters of this sort were freely discussed—she had informed him of the “deplorable increase of my beautiful person. Papa talks of taking down the doors, and widening the chairs, and new hanging the five-barred gates, and plagues me so, that any one but myself would get thin with fretting. But I can’t fret; I only laugh, and that makes it worse. I beg you will get a recipe for _diminishing people_, and I will follow it; provided always it be not to get up early, or to ride on horseback, or to dance all night, or to drink vinegar, or to cry, or to be ‘_lady-like_ and melancholy,’ or not to eat, or laugh, or sit, or do what I like; because all these prescriptions have already been delivered by divers old women of both sexes, and constantly rejected by their contumacious patient.” And this she supplemented by likening herself to “a dumpling of a person tumbling about like a cricket ball on uneven ground, or a bowl rolling among nine-pins.”