Related to Attorney General and politician Lord Redesdale, who became a patron, and to the historian William Mitford, he was born at Richmond, Surrey, on 13 August 1781.
He was the elder son of John Mitford (died 18 May 1806), commander of a vessel engaged in the China trade of the East India Company, by his second wife, Mary, eldest daughter of J. Allen of Clifton, Bristol.
After a brief experience as clerk in the army pay office, Mitford on 6 March 1801 matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, under the tutorship of Edward Copleston, with Reginald Heber as a close friend, and graduated B.A.
On 22 December 1808[1][2] he was ordained as a Church of England priest by Henry Bathurst, the bishop of Norwich, and was licensed to the curacy of Kelsale in Suffolk, though he was not a natural cleric.
He rented permanent lodgings in Sloane Street, London, where he enjoyed "the most perfect intimacy with Samuel Rogers for more than twenty years".
The library of English history, plays, and poetry was sold on 24 April 1860 and eleven following days, producing £2,999 2s.
[4] In 1833 Mitford began to contribute to the Gentleman's Magazine a series of articles on the old English poets and on sacred poetry, paying particular attention to the works of Prudentius.
During that year William Pickering purchased a share in the magazine, and a new series was started in January 1834: Mitford became editor.
[5] The Eton edition in 1847 of the poems contained An Original Life of Gray by Mitford, which was inserted in the subsequent impressions of 1852 and 1863.
58, in Matilda Charlotte Houstoun's A Woman's Memories and her Sylvanus Redivivus, and in John Glyde's New Suffolk Garland (1866); and some Remarks on the Mustard Tree of Scripture were preserved at the Dyce Library, South Kensington Museum.
Many of his letters afterwards passed to Edward FitzGerald, who collected and bound together Mitford's papers in the Gentleman's Magazine; the volume became the property of William Aldis Wright.
A letter from him on his notice of the early works of Mary Russell Mitford in the Quarterly Review, which was cropped by William Gifford, is in Friendships of Miss Mitford, and a communication on an ancient garden at Chelsea is in Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange's Village of Palaces.
Mitford married[6] at St. George's, Hanover Square, London, on 21 October 1814, Augusta, second daughter of Edward Boodle, of Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, London, who died at her son's house, Weston Lodge, Hampstead, on 25 December 1886, aged 92, and was buried at Hampstead cemetery on 29 December.
John Mitford Ling had a career in medicine, with his wife Mary Ann Pallant in Suffolk.