Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth

by Maria Edgeworth

  Lady Scott one day expressed her surprise that Scott and Miss Edgeworth had not met when the latter was in Edinburgh in 1803. “Why,” said Sir Walter, with one of his queer looks, “you forget, my dear, Miss Edgeworth was not a lion then, and my mane, you know, was not grown at all.” [Footnote: Life of George Ticknor.]

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  MARIA to MISS HONORA EDGEWORTH. ABBOTSFORD, July 31, 1823.

  I take a pen merely to say that I will not write! I have so much to say, that I dare not trust myself, as I am still so far from strong, I must not venture to play tricks with that health which it cost my dear, kind nurses so much to preserve. I am as careful of myself as any creature can be without becoming an absolute, selfish egotist. Lady Scott is really so watchful and careful of me, that even when my own family guardian angels are not on either or both sides of me, I can do no wrong, and can come to no harm.

  It is quite delightful to see Scott in his family in the country: breakfast, dinner, supper, the same flow of kindness, fondness, and genius, far, far surpassing his works, his letters, and all my hopes and imagination. His castle of Abbotsford is magnificent, but I forget it in thinking of him.

  To MR. RUXTON. ABBOTSFORD, Aug. 9, 1823.

  I remember that you requested one of our party to write a few lines from Abbotsford. I think I mentioned to my aunt or Sophy the impression which I first experienced from Sir Walter Scott’s great simplicity of manner, joined to his wonderful superiority of intellect. This impression has been strengthened by all I have seen of him since. In living with him in the country, I have particularly liked his behaviour towards his variety of guests, of all ranks, who come to his hospitable castle. Many of these are artists, painters, architects, mechanists, antiquarians, people who look up to him for patronage — none of them permitted to be hangers on or parasites; his manners perfectly kind and courteous, yet such as to command respect; and I never heard any one attempt to flatter him. I never saw an author less of an author in his habits. This I early observed, but have been the more struck with it the longer I have been with him. He has, indeed, such variety of occupations, that he has not time to think of his own works: how he has time to write them is the wonder. You would like him for his love of trees; a great part of his time out of doors is taken up in pruning his trees. I have within this hour heard a gentleman say to him, “You have had a good deal of experience in planting, Sir Walter; do you advise much thinning, or not?”—”I should advise much thinning, but little at a time. If you thin much at a time, you let in the wind, and hurt your trees.”

  I hope to show you a sketch of Abbotsford Sophy has made — better than any description. Besides the Abbey of Melrose, we have seen many interesting places in this neighbourhood. To-day we have been a delightful drive through Ettrick Forest, and to the ruins of Newark — the hall of Newark, where the ladies bent their necks of snow to hear the Lay of the Last Minstrel. Though great part of Ettrick Forest was cut down years ago, yet much of it has grown up again to respectable height, and many most beautiful oak, ash, and alder trees remain. We had a happy walk by the river, and after refreshing ourselves with a luncheon in a summer-house beautifully situated, we went to look at the ruins of Newark. It was a pity that this fine old building was let to go to ruin, which it has done only within the last seventy years. The late Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, to whom it belonged, had in their youth lived abroad, and were so ignorant about their own estate in Scotland, that when they first came to live here they supposed there were no trees, and no wood they thought could be had, and brought with them, among other things, a barrel full of skewers for the cook.

  It is very agreeable to observe how many friends of long standing Scott has in this neighbourhood: they have been here, and we have been at their houses: very good houses, and the style of living excellent. Except one Prussian prince and one Swiss baron, no grand foreign visitors have been here; indeed, this house is in such a state of painting and papering, and carpenters finishing new rooms and chasing the inhabitants out of the old, that it was impossible to have much company.

  Sir Walter’s eldest son was here for some days — now gone back to Sandhurst; he is excessively shy, very handsome, not at all literary, but he has sense and honourable principle, and is very grateful to those who were kind to him in Ireland. His younger brother, Charles, who is now at home, has more easy manners, is more conversible, and has more of his father’s literary taste. I am sorry to say we are to leave Abbotsford the day after to-morrow; but the longer we stay the more sorry we shall feel to go. We had intended to have paid a visit to Lady Selkirk at St. Mary’s Isle, but this would be a hundred miles out of our way, and I have no time for it, which I regret, as I liked very much the little I saw of Lady Selkirk in London.

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  After visits at Glasgow and Dalwharran, Miss Edgeworth and her sisters returned to Ireland.

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  To MRS. RUXTON. EDGEWORTHSTOWN, Nov. 20, 1823.

  It is a long time since I have written to you, always waiting a day longer for somebody’s coming or going, or sailing or landing. You ask what I am doing: nothing, but reading and idling, and paving a gutter and yard to Honora’s pig-stye, and school-house. What have I been reading? The “Siege of Valencia,” by Mrs. Hemans, which is an hour too long, but it contains some of the most beautiful poetry I have read for years. I have read Quin’s letters from Spain, entertaining; the review of it in the Quarterly is by Blanco White. Dr. Holland’s letters continue to be as full of information and interest as ever, though he is a married man. Tell Sophy that the subject of electricity and electro-magnetism is every day affording new facts, and all the philosophers on the Continent are busy about it. Sir Humphry Davy had a narrow escape of breaking his neck by a fall down stairs, but he is not hurt, tout an contraire. I had a letter, written in very good English, the other day from M. de Staël; he is now in London, and tells me the French and the Holy Alliance are tyrannising sadly at Geneva, and have ordered all the Italian patriots who had taken refuge there to decamp. There is one of these, Count Somebody or other, whose name I cannot persuade myself to get up to look for, whom M. de Staël wishes I would take by the hand in London, and what I am to do with him when I have him by the hand I don’t know.

  I had a letter from Walter Scott, who has been delighted with the history of Caraboo, [Footnote: Caraboo is alluded to in St. Roman’s Well, published in the autumn of this year. Sir Walter had never heard of her till Miss Edgeworth told her history to him at Abbotsford.] which I sent to him: a pamphlet published at the time. He says that nobody with a reasonable head could attempt to calculate the extent of popular credulity, and observes that she, like all the great cheats who have imposed upon mankind, was touched with insanity, half knave, half mad, at last the dupe of her own acting of enthusiasm.

  Prince Hohenlohe and the pamphlets, pro and con, occupy us much. Crampton’s second edition of his I think excellent. Some very curious facts have been brought out of the effect of the imagination upon the bodily health. And while Scott is writing novels to entertain the world, and the philosophers in France trying experiments on electro-magnetism, Davy tumbling down stairs, and Denham and Co. in Africa looking for the Niger, here is all London rushing out to look at the cottage in which a swindler lived who murdered another swindler, and buying bits of the sack in which the dead body was put! Have your newspapers given what we have had in the Morning Chronicle? views of Roberts’s cottage and the pond with Thurtell and Hunt dragging the body out of it? Shakespear understood John Bull right well, and always gave him plenty of murders and dead bodies. I am glad there are no Irishmen in this base as well as savage gang.

  To MISS RUXTON. PAKENHAM HALL, Jan. 21.

  We, my mother, Lovell, Fanny, and I, came here yesterday, glad to see Lord Longford surrounded by his friends in old Pakenham Hall hospitable style, — he always cordial, unaffected, and agreeable. The house has been completely new-modelled, chimneys taken down from top to bottom, rooms turned about from lengt
hways to broad-ways, thrown into one another, and out of one another, and the result is that there is a comfortable excellent drawing-room, dining-room, and library, and the bedchambers are admirable. Mrs. Smyth, of Gaybrook, and her daughter are here, and Mr. Knox; and I have been so lucky as to be seated next to him at dinner yesterday, and at breakfast this morning; he is very agreeable when he speaks, and when he is silent it is “silence that speaks.”

  Lady Longford [Footnote: Georgiana, daughter of the first Earl Beauchamp.] has been very attentive to us. She has the finest and most happy open-faced children I ever saw — not the least troublesome, yet perfectly free and at their case with the company and with their parents.

  A box will be left in Dublin for you on Monday morning. There is no telling you how happy I have been getting ready and packing and fussing about the said box for you, flying about the house from the library to the garret. And all for what? When Sophy, whom I beg to be the unpacker, opens it, you will see a certain dabbed-up crooked pasteboard tray in which are four frills for you: I hemmed every inch of them myself, to give them the only value they could have in your eyes.

  To MRS. BANNATYNE. EDGEWORTHSTOWN, Feb. 16, 1824.

  My dear Mr. and Mrs. Bannatyne — my dear Mrs. Starke and Miss Bannatyne, and Andrew and Dugald, and all of you kind friends, put your heads close together to hear a piece of intelligence which will, I know, rejoice your kind hearts.

  Our dear Sophy and your dear Sophy is going to be married to a person whom her mother, and every one of her own family completely approve, who has been tenderly attached to her for some time, whose principles, understanding, manners, and honourable manly character are such as to deserve such a wife as I may proudly say he will have in Sophy. His birth, family connections, and fortune are all such as we could wish. The gentleman is a cousin of our own Captain Barry Fox; he is an officer, but will probably leave the army, and settle in his own country; we hope within reach of us. He has been so kind and considerate about poor Lucy, so anxious not to deprive her too suddenly of her beloved, and best of nurses, that he has endeared himself the more to us all.

  To MRS. RUXTON. EDGEWORTHSTOWN, March 18, 1824.

  The indissoluble knot is tied! What an awful ceremony it is! What an awful deed! How can parents bear to be at the weddings of their children where it is not a marriage of their own free choice? and how can a woman herself pronounce that solemn vow when she is marrying for money, or for grandeur, or from any earthly motive but the pure heart? — a purer heart than my sister Sophy’s I do believe never approached the altar, nor was the hand ever given more entirely with the free heart. There was no one at the wedding but our own family, Mr. Fox, Francis Fox, and William Beaufort. We six ladies went in the carriage immediately after breakfast to the church, where the gentlemen were waiting for us. The churchyard, and church of course, crowded with the poor people of the village, but as we drove out of our own lawn into Mr. Keating’s, there was as little annoyance from starers as possible. William Beaufort married them, as had been Sophy’s particular wish. The sun shone out with a bright promise at the moment her marriage was completed. Barry handed her into his chaise, the most commodious, prettiest, and plainest carriage I ever saw, and away they drove.

  To MRS. O’BEIRNE. [Footnote: The Bishop of Meath died in 1823; and Mrs. O’Beirne and her daughters went to reside in England.] BLACK CASTLE, July 6, 1824.

  In the little drawing-room at Black Castle, where we have been so often happy together; in the little drawing-room to which you have so often brought me to see my dear aunt, I now write to you, my dear friend, to tell you how much I miss you. I feel a perpetual want of that part of my happiness in this dear place which I owed to its neighbourhood to another dear place to which I cannot now bear to go. Once, and but once, in the two months I have been here have I been there; when the indispensable civility of returning a formal visit required it, and then I felt it to be as much, if not more, than I was able to do, with the composure I felt to be proper. The sitting in that red drawing-room and missing everything I had so loved — the saloon, the lawn — I really could not speak, and heartily glad I was when I got away.

  My plans of going to England this summer have been all broken up: you know how, as you have heard of the death of my dear sister Anna, [Footnote: Anna Edgeworth, Maria’s whole sister, had married Dr. Beddoes in 1794.] at Florence; the account of her loss reached me just when I was joyfully expecting an answer to a letter full of projects which she never lived to read. GOD’S will be done. We expect my nieces, Anna and Mary, at Edgeworthstown as soon as they return from Italy.

  To MISS HONORA EDGEWORTH. EDGEWORTHSTOWN, July 17, 1824.

  I hope this will find you at Cheltenham with Barry and Sophy, and Fanny; my mother and Margaret set off this fine morning for Black Castle, and Lucy is now in the dining-room, her bed aslant across the open middle window, the grass plot new-mown, and a sweet smell of fresh hay. They are drawing home the hay, and men are driving past the windows on empty cars, or leading loaded ones. The roses are still in full blow on the trellis. Aunt Bess sitting by Lucy talking of the beautiful thorns in the Phoenix Park, and I am sitting on the other side of Lucy’s bed by the pillar.

  Margaret Ruxton when here was eager to pay her compliments to Peggy Tuite; her husband has written for her to go to him, and she is now “torn almost in two between the wish to go to her husband and her lothness to leave her old mother.” She gave Margaret and me the history of her losing and finding her wedding ring. “Sure I knew my luck would change when I found my wedding ring that I lost four years ago — down in the quarry. I went across the fields to feed the pig, and looked and looked till I was tired, and then concluded I had given it to the pig mixed up and that he had swallowed it for ever — it was a real gold ring. But the men that was clearing out the rubbage in the quarry found it and adjourned to the public house to share the luck of it. My brother got scent of it and went directly to inform the man that found it whose the ring was, and demanded it; he wouldn’t hear of giving it back, and sold it to a pensioner there above; my brother set off with himself to the priest and told all, and the priest summoned the man and the pensioner, and my brother, and in the presence of an honest man, Mr. Sweeny, warned the pensioner to restore the wedding ring, since my brother could tell the tokens on it. ‘It’s the woman’s wedding ring to remind her of her conjugal duties, and it’s sacrilege to take it.’ But the man that sold it was hardened, and the pensioner said he had paid for it, and so says the priest to Keegan, that’s the master of the quarry men, ‘Turn this man out of the work, he is a bad man and he will corrupt the rest. And, Peggy Tuite, I advise you and your brother to go straight to Major Bond and summon these men.’” Then she described the trial, when Tuite “swore to the tokens where it had been crushed by a stone, and the goldsmith’s mark, and the Major held it between him and the light and plainly noticed the crush and the battered marks, and handing me the ring said, ‘Peggy Tuite, this is your ring sure enough.’”

  To MRS. RUXTON. EDGEWORTHSTOWN, August 16, 1824.

  We have heard from Sophy Fox, who tells us that they have been delighted with their journey to Aberystwith, especially the devil’s bridge. Can you tell me why the devil has so many bridges, sublime and beautiful, in every country of the habitable world? Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées to his Satanic majesty would be a place of great business, profit and glory, and would require a man of first-rate abilities. Lucy has painted a beautiful portrait of her bullfinch, picking at a bunch of white currants — the currants would, I am sure, be picked by any live bird.

  Tell me how you like Haji Baba.

  To MISS HONORA EDGEWORTH. EDGEWORTHSTOWN, August 28, 1824.

  I am impatient to set my dear Aunt Mary’s [Footnote: After the death of her sister Charlotte in 1822, Mrs. Mary Sneyd resided occasionally with her brother in England till 1828, when she returned finally to Edgeworthstown, where she remained for the rest of her life, deeply attached to all the family, but regarding her niece Hono
ra as peculiarly her own child.] mind free from the anxiety I am sure she feels about her decision to stay in England this winter; whatever disappointment and regret I felt was mitigated by her beautifully kind and tender note.

  Your entertaining account of the archery meeting at Lord Bagot’s came yesterday evening. What a magnificent entertainment, and in what good taste! It was a delightful house for a fête champêtre.

  The Roman Catholic Bishop, M’Gaurin, held a confirmation the day before yesterday, and dined here on a God-send haunch of venison. Same day Mr. Hunter arrived, and Mr. Butler came with young Mr. Hamilton, an “admirable Crichton” of eighteen; a real prodigy of talents, who Dr. Brinkley says may be a second Newton — quite gentle and simple. Mr. and Mrs. Napier arrived on Wednesday, and spent two most agreeable days with us; he is an extremely well-informed man, and both are perfectly well-bred. Mr. Butler and Mr. Hamilton suited them delightfully. Mr. Butler and Mr. Napier found they were both Oxford men, and took to each other directly. Mr. Napier’s conversation is quite superior and easy. Those two days put me in mind of former times. Hunter is very happy here in spite of his cockney prejudices; he says Harry and Lucy must be ready by October.

  To MRS. RUXTON. Jan. 1, 1825.