Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth/Volume 2/Letter 12
To MRS. RUXTON.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, March 21.
The Archbishop of Tuam breakfasted here this morning and sat with Lucy in her room: he said he thought he should be the better all his life for having seen such an example of patience and resignation in so young a person. He says he was amused during the Queen's trial by the sight of the processions in honour of Her Majesty: the glass manufacturers with their brilliant wares, ladies in landaus with feathers, the most extraordinary figures; and the Queen complains that her garden has been destroyed and all her furniture broken by her polite visitors.
March 29.
So you like to hear of all our little doings, so I will tell you that, about eight o'clock, Fanny being by that time up and dressed, and at her little table, Harriet comes and reads to me Madame de Sevigné's letters, of which I never tire; and I almost envy Fanny and Harriet the pleasure of reading them for the first time. After breakfast I take my little table into Lucy's room, and write there for an hour; she likes to have me in her room, though she only hears the scribble, scribble: she is generally reading at that hour, or doing Margaret's delight—algebra. I am doing the Sequel to Frank. Walking, reading, and talking fill the rest of the day. I do not read much, it tires my eyes, and I have not yet finished the Life of Wesley: I think it a most curious, entertaining, and instructive book. A Life of Pitt by the Bishop of Winchester is coming out: he wrote to Murray about it, who asked his friends, "Who is George Winton, who writes to me about publishing Pitt's Life?"
April 21.
Enclosed is a letter from our friend the American Jewess,[1] written in a spirit of Christian charity and kindness which it were to be wished that all Christians possessed. It has given me exquisite pleasure; and you know I never feel great pleasure without instantly wishing that you should share it. Lovell has asked this good Jewess and her futur to come here, if she should visit Europe. He is at home now, and kind as ever to every creature within reach of his benevolence.
We have been reading Fleury's Memoirs of Napoleon. Get it in French: it is very interesting, or we never could have got through it in the wretched translation to which we were doomed.
Tell Sophy that Peggy Tuite, who turned into Peggy Mulheeran, has had a dead child. When my mother said to her brother, "Do not let people crowd in and heat her room," "Oh, ma'am, sure I am standing at the door since three in the morning, sentinel, to keep them out," the tears dropping from his eyes fast on the ground as he spoke. And all the time the old ould mother Tuite (who doats on Mrs. Ruxton-dear) was sitting rocking herself to and fro, and "crying under the big laurel, that Peggy might not hear her."
You may all praise erysipelas as much as you please, but I never desire to see or feel it again. Our boy, Mick Duffy, has been ill with it these ten days. Honora said to his father, Brian, "How can you be so fond of Michael; now that he lives with us, you hardly ever see him!" "Oh, how could I but be fond of him, the crater that sends me every guinea he gets!"
July 8.
So Buonaparte is dead! and no change will be made in any country by the death of a man who once made such a figure in the world! He who commanded empires and sovereigns, a prisoner in an obscure island, disputing for a bottle of wine, subject to the petty tyranny of Sir Hudson Lowe! I regret that England permitted that trampling upon the fallen. What an excellent dialogue of the dead might be written between Buonaparte and Themistocles!
Ages ago I sent Bracebridge Hall to Merrion Street for you: have you got it? Next week another book will be there for you—an American novel Mrs. Griffith sent to me, The Spy; quite new scenes and characters, humour and pathos, a picture of America in Washington's time; a surgeon worthy of Smollett or Moore, and quite different from any of their various surgeons; and an Irishwoman, Betty Flanagan, incomparable.
August 3.
What do you think is my employment out of doors, and what it has been this week past? My garden? no such elegant thing; but making a gutter! a sewer and a pathway in the street of Edgeworthstown; and I do declare I am as much interested about it as I ever was in writing anything in my life. We have never here yet found it necessary to have recourse to public contribution for the poor, but it is necessary to give some assistance to the labouring class; and I find that making the said gutter and pathway will employ twenty men for three weeks.
Did you ever hear these two excellent Tory lines made by a celebrated Whig?
- As bees alighting upon flowerets cease to hum,
- So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb.
August 8.
We are all in the joy of Francis'[2] arrival: Pakenham at the tea-table has been standing beside him feeding him with red currants well sugared, and between every currant he told us, as well as he could, the history of his journey. "Talbot," Lord Talbot's son, who is his schoolfellow at the Charterhouse, was so kind as to go outside, that Francis might have an inside place at night. He met with so much good-nature from first to last in his journey, he wonders how people can be so good-natured. *** Many of Maria Edgeworth's friends in England having invited her to visit them, she determined to spend the winter there, and set out in October with her former travelling companions, Fanny and Harriet, the two eldest daughters of the fourth Mrs. Edgeworth.