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A BOOK OF SIBYLS 
 
 MRS BARBAULD MISS EDGEWORTH 
 
 MRS OPIE MISS AUSTEN 
 
 BY 
 
 MISS THACKEEAY 
 
 (MBSJIICHMOND RITCHIE) 
 
 LONDON 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 1883 
 
 \_AU rights reserved] 
 
[Reprinted from the CornhiU Magazine] 
 
 •I • • ••:••♦•• 
 
 • •" • • ••*••• 
 
 •,. • ./• '•• ••••• ••.«, 
 
TO 
 MRS OLIPHANT 
 
 My little record would not seem to me m any way 
 complete without your name, dear Sibyl of our ovm, 
 cmd as J write it here, I am grateful to know that to 
 mime and, me it is not only the name of a Sibyl with 
 deep visions f but oj a friend to us all 
 
 A, I. B. 
 
 886609 
 
Digitized by the Internet Arciiive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/bookofsibylsmrsbOOritcrich 
 
PEE FACE 
 
 Not long ago, a party of friends were sitting at luncheon 
 in a suburb of London, when one of them happened to 
 make some reference to Maple Grrove and Selina, and 
 to ask in what county of England Maple Grrove was 
 situated. Everybody immediately had a theory. Only 
 one of the company (a French gentleman, not well 
 acquainted with English) did not recognise the allusion. 
 A lady sitting by. the master of the house (she will, I 
 hope, forgive me for quoting her words, for no one else 
 has a better right to speak them) said, ' What a curious 
 sign it is of Jane Austen's increasing popularity ! Here 
 are five out of six people sitting round a table, nearly 
 a hundred years after her death, who all recognise at 
 once a chance allusion to an obscure character in one 
 of her books.' 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 It seemed impossible to leave out Jane Austen's 
 dear household name from a volume which concerned 
 women writing in the early part of this century, and 
 although the essay which is called by her name has 
 already been reprinted, it is added with some alteration 
 in its place with the others. 
 
 Putting together this little book has been a great 
 pleasure and interest to the compiler, and she wishes 
 once more to thank those who have so kindly sheltered 
 her during her work, and lent her books and papers 
 and letters concerning the four writers whose works and 
 manner of being she has attempted to describe ; and 
 she wishes specially to express her thanks to the Baron 
 and Baroness von Hugel, to the ladies of Miss Edge- 
 worth's family, to Mr. Harrison, of the London Library, 
 to the Miss Keids, of Hampstead, to Mrs. Field and her 
 daughters, of Squire's Mount, Hampstead, to Lady Buxton, 
 Mrs. Brookfield, Miss Alderson, and Miss Shirreff. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MRS. BARBAULD [1743-1825] 1 
 
 MARIA EDGEWORTH [1767-1849] 51 
 
 MRS. OPIE [1769-1853] 149 
 
 JANE AUSTEN [1775-1817] . . . . . .^ . 197 
 
A BOOK OF SIBYLS. 
 
 3IRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 1743-1825. 
 
 * I've heard of the lady, and good words went with her name.' 
 
 Measure for Measure, 
 I 
 
 I. 
 
 'The first poetess I can recollect /^iV Mr s>'Barbaiild, with 
 whose works I became acquUinte4-^b$ior6 'ti^os^ lof atiy 
 other author, male or female — when I was learning to 
 spell words of one syllable in her story-books for children.' 
 So says Hazlitt in his lectures on living poets. He goes 
 on to call her a very pretty poetess, strewing flowers of 
 poesy as she goes. 
 
 The writer must needs, from the same point Qf view as 
 Hazlitt, look upon Mrs. Barbauld with a special interest, 
 having also first learnt to read out of her little yellow 
 books, of which the syllables rise up one by one again with 
 a remembrance of the hand patiently pointing to each in 
 
2 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 turn ; all this recalled and revived after a lifetime by the 
 sight of a rusty iron gateway, behind which Mrs. Barbauld 
 once lived, of some old letters closely covered with a wavery 
 writing, of a wide prospect that she once delighted to look 
 upon. Mrs. Barbauld, who loved to share her pleasures, 
 used to bring her friends to see the great view from the 
 Hampstead hill-top, and thus records their impressions : — 
 
 ' I dragged Mrs. A. up as I did you, my dear, to our 
 Prospect Walk, from whence we have so extensive a view. 
 
 ' Yes,' said she, ' it is a very fine view indeed for a 
 flat country.' 
 
 ' While, on the other hand, Mrs. B. gave us such a 
 dismal account of the, precipices, mountains, and deserts 
 she encountered, 'tha^'-you would have thought she had 
 beenj ou 'ttv3 '^iltotjiaj't<Qf /the Alps.' 
 
 The old Hampstead highroad, starting from the plain, 
 winds its way resolutely up the steep, and brings you past 
 red-brick houses and walled-in gardens to this noble out- 
 look ; to the heath, with its fresh, inspiriting breezes, its 
 lovely distances of far-off waters and gorsy hollows. At 
 whatever season, at whatever hour you come, you are 
 pretty sure to find one or two votaries — poets like Mrs. 
 Barbauld, or commonplace people such as- her friends — 
 watching before this great altar of nature ; whether by early 
 morning rays, or in the blazing sunset, or when the even- 
 
MJ^S. BARBAULD. 3 
 
 ing veils and mists with stars come falling, while the lights 
 of London shine far away in the valley. Years after Mrs. 
 Barbaiild wrote, one man, pre-eminent amongst poets, used 
 to stand upon this hill-top, and lo ! as Turner gazed, a 
 whole generation gazed with him. For him Italy gleamed 
 from behind the crimson stems of the fir-trees ; the spirit 
 of loveliest mythology floated upon the clouds, upon the 
 many changing tints of the plains ; and, as the painter 
 watched the lights upon the distant hills, they sank into 
 his soul, and he painted them down for us, and poured 
 his dreams into our awakening hearts. 
 
 He was one of that race of giants, mighty men of 
 humble heart, who have looked from Hampstead and 
 Highgate Hills. Here Wordsworth trod ; here sang 
 Keats's nightingale ; here mused Coleridge ; and here came 
 Oarlyle, only yesterday, tramping wearily, in search of 
 some sign of his old companions. Here, too, stood kind 
 Walter Scott, under the elms of the Judges' Walk, and 
 perhaps Joanna Baillie was by his side, coming out from 
 her pretty old house beyond the trees. Besides all these, 
 were a whole company of lesser stars following and sur- 
 rounding the brighter planets — muses, memoirs, critics, 
 poets, nymphs, authoresses — coming to drink tea and 
 to admire the pleasant suburban beauties of this modern 
 Parnassus. A record of many of their names is still 
 
 B 2 
 
4 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 to be found, appropriately enough, in the catalogue 
 of the little Hampstead library which still exists, which 
 was founded at a time when the very hands that wrote the 
 books may have placed the old volumes upon the shelves. 
 Present readers can study them at their leisure, to the 
 clanking of the horses' feet in the courtyard outside, and 
 the splashing of buckets. A few newspapers lie on the 
 table — stray sheets of to-day that have fluttered up the 
 hill, bringing news of this bustling now into a past 
 serenity. The librarian sits stitching quietly in a window. 
 An old lady comes in to read the news ; but she has for- 
 gotten her spectacles, and soon goes away. Here, instead 
 of asking for ' Vice Versa,' or Ouida's last novel, you in- 
 stinctively mention ' Plays of the Passions,' Miss Burney's 
 ' Evelina,' or some such novels ; and Mrs. Barbauld's works 
 are also in their place. When I asked for them, two 
 pretty old Quaker volumes were put into my hands, with 
 shabby grey bindings, with fine paper and broad margins, 
 such as Mr. Kuskin would approve. Of all the inhabitants 
 of this bookshelf Mrs. Barbauld is one of the most appro- 
 priate. It is but a few minutes' walk from the library in 
 Heath Street to the old corner house in Church Kow where 
 she lived for a time, near a hundred years ago, and all 
 round about are the scenes of much of her life, of her 
 friendships and interests. Here lived her friends and 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 5 
 
 neighbours; here to Church Kow came her pupils and 
 admirers, and, later still, to the pretty old house on Kosslyn 
 Hill. As for Church Kow, as most people know, it is an 
 avenue of Dutch red-faced houses, leading demurely to the 
 old church tower, that stands guarding its graves in the 
 flowery churchyard. As we came up the quiet place, the 
 sweet windy drone of the organ swelled across the blossoms 
 of the spring, which were lighting up every shabby corner 
 and hillside garden. Through this pleasant confusion of 
 past and present, of spring-time scattering blossoms upon 
 the graves, of old ivy walks and iron bars imprisoning 
 past memories, with fragrant fumes of lilac and of elder, 
 one could picture to oneself, as in a waking dream, two 
 figures advancing from the corner house with the ivy 
 walls — distinct, sedate — passing under the old doorway. I 
 could almost see the lady, carefully dressed in many fine 
 muslin folds and frills with hooped silk skirts, indeed, but 
 slight and graceful in her quick advance, with blue eyes, 
 with delicate sharp features, and a dazzling skin. As for 
 the gentleman, I pictured him a dapper figure, with dark 
 eyes, dressed in black, as befitted a minister even of dis- 
 senting views. The lady came forward, looking amused 
 by my scrutiny, somewhat shy I thought — was she going to 
 speak ? And by the same token it seemed to me the 
 gentleman was about to interrupt her. But Margaret, my 
 
6 ' MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 young companion, laughed and opened an umbrella, or a 
 cock crew, or some door banged, and the fleeting visions 
 of fancy disappeared. 
 
 Many well-authenticated ghost stories describe the 
 apparition of bygone persons, and lo ! when the figm-e 
 vanishes, a letter is left behind ! Some such experience 
 seemed to be mine when, on my return, I found a packet 
 of letters on the hall table — letters not addressed to me,, 
 but to some unknown Miss Belsham, and signed and sealed 
 by Mrs. Barbauld's hand. They had been sent for me to 
 read by the kindness of some ladies now living at Hamp- 
 stead, who afterwards showed me the portrait of the lady, 
 who began the world as Miss Betsy Belsham and wha 
 ended her career as Mrs. Kenrick. It is an oval miniature, 
 belonging to the times of powder and of puff, representing 
 not a handsome, but an animated countenance, with 
 laughter and spirit in the expression ; the mouth is large, 
 the eyes are dark, the nose is short. This was the confi- 
 dante of Mrs. Barbauld's early days, the faithful friend of 
 her latter sorrows. The letters, kept by 'Betsy' with 
 faithful conscientious care for many years, give the story 
 of a whole lifetime with unconscious fidelity. The gaiety 
 of youth, its impatience, its exuberance, mad sometimes 
 bad taste ; the wider, quieter feelings of later life ; the 
 courage of sorrowful times ; long friendship deepening the 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 7 
 
 tender and faithful memories of age, when there is so 
 little left to say, so much to feel — all these things are 
 there. 
 
 II. 
 
 Mrs. Barbauld was a schoolmistress, and a schoolmaster's 
 wife and daughter. Her father was Dr. John Aikin, D.D. ; 
 her mother was Miss Jane Jennings, of a good Northampton- 
 shire family — scholastic also. Dr. Aikin brought his wife 
 home to Knibworth, in Leicestershire, where he opened a 
 school which became very successful in time. Mrs. Bar- 
 bauld, their eldest child, was born here in 1743, and was 
 christened Anna Lsetitia, after some lady of high degree 
 belonging to her mother's family. Two or three years 
 later came a son. It was a quiet home, deep hidden in 
 the secluded rural place; and the little household lived its 
 own tranquil life far away from the storms and battles and 
 great events that were stirring the world. Dr. Aikin kept 
 school ; Mrs. Aikin ruled her household with capacity, and 
 not without some sternness, according to the custom of the 
 time. It appears that late in life the good lady was dis- 
 tressed by the backwardness of her grandchildren at four 
 or five years old. ' I once, indeed, knew a little girl,' so 
 wrote Mrs. Aikin of her daughter, ' who was as eager to 
 learn as her instructor could be to teach her, and who at 
 
8 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 two years old could read sentences and little stories, in her 
 wise book, roundly and without spelling, and in half a 
 year or more could read as well as most women ; but I 
 never knew such another, and I believe I never shall.' It 
 was fortunate that no great harm came of this premature 
 forcing, although it is difficult to say what its absence 
 might not have done for Mrs. Barbauld. One can fancy 
 the little assiduous girl, industrious, impulsive, interested 
 in everything — in all life and all nature — drinking in, on 
 every side, learning, eagerly wondering, listening to all 
 around with bright and ready wit. There is a pretty 
 little story told by Mrs. Ellis in her book about Mrs. 
 Barbauld, how one day, when Dr. Aikin and a friend ' were 
 conversing on the passions,' the Doctor observes that joy 
 cannot have place in a state of perfect felicity, since it 
 supposes an accession of happiness. 
 
 ' I think you are mistaken, papa,' says a little voice 
 from the opposite side of the table. 
 
 ' Why so, my child ? ' says the Doctor. 
 
 ' Because in the chapter I read . to you this morning, 
 in the Testament, it is said that " there is more joy in 
 heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety 
 and nine just persons that need no repentance.'^ ' 
 
 Besides her English Testament and her early reading, 
 the little girl was taught by her mother to do as little 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 9 
 
 daughters did in those days, to obey a somewhat austere 
 rule, to drop curtsies in the right place, to make beds, to 
 preserve fruits. The father, after demur, but surely not 
 without some paternal pride in her proficiency, taught the 
 child Latin and French and Italian, and something of 
 Greek, and gave her an acquaintance, with English litera- 
 ture. One can imagine little Nancy with her fair head 
 bending over her lessons, or, when playing time had come, 
 perhaps a little lonely and listening to the distant voices 
 of the schoolboys at their games. The mother, fearing 
 she might acquire rough and boisterous manners, strictly 
 forbade any communication with the schoolboys. Some- 
 times in after days, speaking of these early times and of 
 the constraint of many bygone rules and regulations, Mrs. 
 Barbauld used to attribute to this early formal training 
 something of the hesitation and shyness which troubled 
 her and never entirely wore off. She does not seem to 
 have been in any great harmony with her mother. One 
 could imagine a fanciful and high-spirited chijd, timid 
 and dutiful, and yet strong-willed, secretly rebelling against 
 the rigid order of her home, and feeling lonely for want of 
 liberty and companionship. It was true she had birds 
 and beasts and plants for her playfellows, but she was of a 
 gregarious and sociable nature, and she was unconsciously 
 longing for something more, and perhaps feeling a 
 
lo MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 want in her early life which no silent company can 
 supply. 
 
 She was about fifteen when a great event took place. 
 Her father was appointed classical tutor to the Warrington 
 Academy, and thither the little family removed. We 
 read that the Warrington Academy was a Dissenting 
 college started by very eminent and periwigged person- 
 ages, whose silhouettes Mrs. Barbauld herself afterwards 
 cut out in sticking-plaster, and whose names are to this 
 day remembered and held in just esteem. They were 
 people of simple living and high thinking, they belonged 
 to a class holding then a higher place than now in the 
 world's esteem, that of Dissenting ministers. The Dis- 
 senting ministers were fairly well paid and faithfully 
 followed by their congregations. The college was started 
 under the auspices of distinguished members of the 
 community. Lord Willoughby of Parham, the last 
 Presbyterian lord, being patron. Among the masters 
 were to be found the well known names of Dr. Doddridge; 
 of Gilbert Wakefield, the reformer and uncompromising 
 martyr ; of Dr. Taylor, of Norwich, the Hebrew scholar \ 
 of Dr. Priestley, the chemical analyst and patriot, and 
 enterprising theologian, who left England and settled in 
 America for conscience and liberty's sake. 
 
 Many other people, neither students nor professors. 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. ii 
 
 used to come to Warrington, and chief among them 
 in later years good John Howard with MSS. for his friend 
 Dr. Aikin to correct for the press. Now for the first time 
 Mrs. Barbauld (Miss Aikin she was then) saw something 
 of real life, of men and manners. It was not likely that 
 she looked back with any lingering regret to Knibworth, 
 or would have willingly returned thither. A story in one of 
 her memoirs gives an amusing picture of the manners of 
 a young country lady of that day. Mr. Haines, a rich 
 farmer from Knib worth, who had been greatly struck by 
 Miss Aikin, followed her to Warrington, and ' obtained a 
 private audience of her father and begged his consent to 
 be allowed to make her his wife.' The father answered 
 ' that his daughter was there walking in the garden, and 
 he might go and ask her himself.' ' With what grace the 
 farmer pleaded his cause I know not,' says her biographer 
 and niece. ' Out of all patience at his unwelcome impor- 
 tunities, my aunt ran nimbly up a tree which grew by the 
 garden wall, and let herself down into the lane beyond.' 
 
 The next few years must have been perhaps the 
 happiest of Mrs. Barbauld's life. Once when it was 
 nearly over she said to her niece, Mrs. Le Breton, from 
 whose interesting account I have been quoting, that she 
 had never been placed in a situation which really suited 
 her. As one reads her sketches and poems, one is struck 
 
12 MRS. BARBAULi:. 
 
 by some sense of this detracting influence of which she 
 complains : there is a certain incompleteness and slight- 
 ness which speaks of intermittent work, of interrupted 
 trains of thought. At the same time there is a natural 
 buoyant quality in much of her writing which seems like 
 a pleasant landscape view seen through the bars of a 
 window. There may be wider prospects, but her eyes are 
 bright, and this peep of nature is undoubtedly delightful. 
 
 III. 
 
 The letters to Miss Belsham begin somewhere about 
 1768. The young lady has been paying a visit to Miss 
 Aikin at Warrington, and is interested in everyone and 
 everything belonging to the place. Miss Aikin is no less 
 eager to describe than Miss Belsham to listen, and 
 accordingly a whole stream of characters and details of 
 gossip and descriptions in faded ink come flowing across 
 their pages, together with many expressions of affection 
 and interest. * My dear Betsy, I love you for discarding 
 the word Miss from your vocabulary,' so the packet begins, 
 and it continues in the same strain of pleasant girlish 
 chatter, alternating with the history of many bygone 
 festivities, and stories of friends, neighbours, of beaux and 
 partners ; of the latter genus, and of Miss Aikin's efforts 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 13 
 
 to make herself agreeable, here is a sample : — ' I talked 
 to him, smiled upon him, gave him my fan to play with,* 
 says the lively young lady. ' Nothing would do ; he was 
 grave as a philosopher, I tried to raise a conversation : 
 " 'Twas fine weather for dancing." He agreed to my 
 observation. " We had a tolerable set this time.'* 
 Neither did he contradict that. Then we were both 
 silent — stupid mortal thought I ! but unreasonable as he 
 appeared to the advances that I made him, there was one 
 object in the room, a sparkling object which seemed to 
 attract all his attention, on which he seemed to gaze with 
 transport, and which indeed he hardly took his eyes off 
 the whole time .... The object that I mean was his 
 shoebuckle.' 
 
 One could imagine Miss Elizabeth Bennett writing in 
 some such strain to her friend Miss Charlotte Lucas after 
 one of the evenings at Bingley's hospitable mansion. 
 And yet Miss Aikin is more impulsive, more romantic 
 than Elizabeth. ' Wherever you are, fly letter on the 
 wings of the wind,' she cries, 'and tell my dear Betsy 
 what ? — only that I love her dearly.' 
 
 Miss Nancy Aikin (she seems to have been Nancy in 
 these letters, and to have assumed the more dignified 
 Lsetitia upon her marriage) pours out her lively heart, 
 laughs, jokes, interests herself in the sentimental affairs 
 
14 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 of the whole neighbourhood as well as in her own. 
 Perhaps few young ladies now-a-days would write to their 
 confidantes with the announcement that for some time 
 past a young sprig had been teasing them to have him. 
 This, however, is among Miss Nancy's confidences. She 
 also writes poems and pux d^esprit, and receives poetry 
 in return from Betsy, who calls herself Camilla, and 
 pays her friend many compliments, for Miss Aikin in her 
 reply quotes the well-known lines : — 
 
 Who for another's brow entwines the bays, 
 And where she well might rival stoops to Praise. 
 
 Miss Aikin by this time has attained to all the dignity of 
 a full-blown authoress, and is publishing a successful book 
 of poems in conjunction with her brother, which little 
 book created much attention at the time. One day the 
 Muse thus apostrophises Betsy : ' Shall we ever see her 
 amongst us again?' says my sister (Mrs. Aikin). My 
 brother (saucy fellow) says, ' I want to see this girl, I think 
 (stroking his chin as he walks backwards and forwards in 
 the room with great gravity). I think we should admire 
 one another.' 
 
 ' When you come among us,' continues the warm- 
 hearted friend, ' we shall set the bells a-ringing, bid adieu 
 to care and gravity, and sing " be joyful." ' And finally, 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 15 
 
 ■after some apologies for her remiss correspondence, ' I left 
 my brother writing to you instead of Patty, poor soul. 
 Well, it is a clever thing too, to have a husband to write 
 one's letters for one. If I had one I would be a much 
 better correspondent to you. I would order him to write 
 every week.' 
 
 And, indeed, Mrs. Barbauld was as good as her word, 
 und did not forget the resolutions made by Miss Aikin in 
 1773. In 1774 comes some eventful news: 'I should 
 bave written to you sooner had it not been for the uncer- 
 tainty and suspense in which for a long time I have been 
 involved ; and since my lot has been fixed for many busy 
 engagements which have left me few moments of leisure. 
 They hurry me out of my life. It is hardly a month that 
 I have certainly known I should fix on Norfolk, and now 
 •next Thursday they say I am to be finally, irrevocably 
 married. Pity me, dear Betsy ; for on the day I fancy 
 when you will read this letter, will the event take place 
 which is to make so great an era in my life. I feel de- ^. 
 pressed, and my courage almost fails me. Yet upon the 
 whole I have the greatest reason to think I shall be happy, 
 shall possess the entire affection of a worthy man, whom 
 my father and mother now entirely and heartily approve. 
 The people where we are going, though strangers, have 
 behaved with the greatest zeal and affection ; and I think 
 
1 6 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 we have a fair prospect of being useful and living comfort- 
 ably in that state of middling life to which I have been 
 accustomed, and which I love.' 
 
 And then comes a word which must interest all who 
 have ever cared and felt grateful admiration for the works 
 of one devoted human being and true Christian hero. 
 Speaking of her father's friend, John Howard, she says 
 with an almost audible sigh ; ' It was too late, as you say, 
 or I believe I should have been in love with Mr. Howard. 
 Seriously, I looked upon him with that sort of reverence and 
 love which one should have for a guardian angel. Grod bless 
 him and preserve his health for the health's sake of thou- 
 sands. And now farewell,' she writes in conclusion : ' I 
 shall write to you no more under this name ; but under any 
 name, in every situation, at any distance of time or place, 
 I shall love you equally and be always affectionately yours, 
 tho' not always, A. Aikin.' 
 
 Poor lady ! The future held, indeed, many a sad and 
 unsuspected hour for her, many a cruel pang, many a dark 
 and heavy season, that must have seemed intolerably 
 weary to one of her sprightly and yet somewhat indolent 
 nature, more easily accepting evil than devising escape 
 from it. But it also held many blessings of constancy, 
 friendship, kindly deeds, and useful doings. She had not 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. jy 
 
 devotion to give such as that of the good Howard whom 
 she revered, but the equable help and sympathy for 
 others of an open-minded and kindly woman was hers. 
 Her marriage would seem to have been brought about 
 by a romantic fancy rather than by a tender affection. 
 Mr. Barbauld's mind had been once unhinged ; his pro- 
 testations were passionate and somewhat dramatic. We 
 are told that when she was warned by a friend, she only 
 said, ' But surely, if I throw him over, he will become 
 crazy again ; ' and from a high-minded sense of pity, she 
 was faithful, and married him against the wish of her 
 brother and parents, and not without some misgivings her- 
 self. He was a man perfectly sincere and honourable ; 
 but, from his nervous want of equilibrium, subject all his 
 life to frantic outbursts of ill-temper. Nobody ever knew 
 what his wife had to endure in secret ; her calm and 
 restrained manner must have effectually hidden the con- 
 stant anxiety of her life ; nor had she children to warm 
 her heart, and brighten up her monotonous existence. 
 Little Charles, of the Eeading-book, who is bid to come 
 hither, who counted so nicely, who stroked the pussy cat, 
 and who deserved to listen to the delightful stories he was 
 told, was not her own son but her brother's child. When 
 he was born, she wrote to entreat that he might be given 
 over to her for her own, imploring her brother to spare him 
 
1 8 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 to her, in a pretty and pathetic letter. This was a mother 
 yearning for a child, not a schoolmistress asking for a 
 pupil, though perhaps in after times the two were somewhat 
 combined in her. There is a pretty little description of 
 Charles making great progress in 'climbing trees and 
 talking nonsense : ' ' I have the honour to tell you that our 
 Charles is the sweetest boy in the world. He is perfectly 
 naturalised in his new situation ; and if I should make any 
 blunders in my letter, I must beg you to impute it to his 
 standing by me and chattering all the time.' And how 
 pleasant a record exists of Charles's chatter in that most 
 charming little book written for him and for the babies of 
 babies to come I There is a sweet instructive grace in it 
 and appreciation of childhood which cannot fail to strike 
 those who have to do with children and with Mrs. Barbauld's 
 books for them : children themselves, those best critics of 
 all, delight in it. 
 
 ' Where's Charles ? ' says a little scholar every morning 
 to the writer of these few notes. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Soon after the marriage, there had been some thought 
 of a college for young ladies, of which Mrs. Barbauld was 
 to be the principal ; but she shrank from the idea, and in a 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 19 
 
 letter to Mrs. Montagu she objects to the scheme of higher 
 education for women away from their natural homes. ' I 
 should have little hope of cultivating a love of knowledge 
 in a young lady of fifteen who came to me ignorant and 
 uncultivated. It is too late then to begin to learn. The 
 empire of the passions is coming on. Those attachments 
 begin to be formed which influence the happiness of future 
 life. The care of a mother alone can give suitable atten- 
 tion to this important period.' It is true that the rigid- 
 ness of her own home had not prevented her from making 
 a hasty and unsuitable marriage. But it is not this which 
 is weighing on her mind. ' Perhaps you may ij^ink,' she 
 says, ' that having myself stepped out of the bounds of 
 female reserve in becoming an author, it is with an ill 
 grace that I offer these statements.' 
 
 Her argmnents seem to have been thought conclusive 
 in those days, and the young ladies' college was finally trans- 
 muted into a school for little boys at Palgrave, in Norfolk, 
 and thither the worthy couple transported themselves. 
 
 One of the letters to Miss Belsham is thus dated : — 
 ' The Wik of July^ in the village of Palgrave (the 
 pleasantest village in all England), at ten 0^ clock, all 
 alone in my great parlour, Mr. Barbauld being studying 
 a sermon, do I begin a letter to my dear Betsy, ^ 
 
 When she first married, and travelled into Norfolk to 
 c 2 
 
20 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 keep school at Palgrave, nothing could have seemed more 
 tranquil, more contented, more matter-of-fact than her life 
 as it appears from her letters. Dreams, and fancies, and 
 gay illusions and excitements have made way for the 
 somewhat disappointing realisation of Mr. Barbauld with 
 his neatly turned and friendly postscripts — a husband, 
 polite, devoted, it is true, but somewhat disappointing all 
 the same. The next few years seem like years in a hive 
 — storing honey for the future, and putting away — in- 
 dustrious, punctual, monotonous. There are children's 
 lessons to be heard, and school-treats to be devised. She 
 sets them to act plays and cuts out paper collars for 
 Henry IV. ; she always takes a class of babies entirely her 
 own. (One of these babies, who always loved her, became 
 Lord Chancellor Denman ; most of the others took less 
 brilliant, but equally respectable places, in after life.) 
 She has also household matters and correspondence not to 
 be neglected. In the holidays, they make excursions to 
 Norwich, to London, and revisit their old haunts at 
 Warrington. In one of her early letters, soon after her 
 marriage, she describes her return to Warrington. 
 
 ' Dr. Enfield's face,' she declares, ' is grown half a foot 
 longer since I saw him, with studying mathematics, and 
 for want of a game of romps; for there are positively 
 none now at Warrington but grave matrons. I who 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 21 
 
 have but half assumed the character, was ashamed of the 
 levity of my behaviour.' 
 
 It says well indeed for the natural brightness of the 
 lady's disposition that with sixteen boarders and a satis- 
 factory usher to look after, she should be prepared for 
 a game of romps with Dr. Enfield. 
 
 On another occasion, in 1777, she takes little Charles 
 away with her. ' He has indeed been an excellent traveller,' 
 she says; 'and though, like his great ancestor, some 
 natural tears he shed, like him, too, he wiped them soon. 
 He had a long sound sleep last night, and has been very 
 busy to-day hunting the puss and the chickens. And 
 now, my dear brother and sister, let me again thank you 
 for this precious gift, the value of which we are both more 
 and more sensible of as we become better acquainted with 
 his sweet disposition and winning manners.' 
 
 She winds up this letter with a postscript : — 
 
 * Everybody here asks, " Pray, is Dr. Dodd really to be 
 executed ? " as if we knew the more for having been at 
 Warrington.' 
 
 Dr. Aikin, Mrs. Barbauld's brother, the father of 
 little Charles and of Lucy Aikin, whose name is well 
 known in literature, was himself a man of great parts, 
 industry, and ability, working hard to support his family. 
 He alternated between medicine and literature all his life. 
 
22 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 When his health failed he gave up medicine, and settled 
 at Stoke Newington, and busied himself with periodic 
 literature ; meanwhile, whatever his own pursuits may- 
 have been, he never ceased to take an interest in his 
 sister's work and to encourage her in every way. 
 
 It is noteworthy that few of Mrs. Barbauld's earlier 
 productions equalled what she wrote at the very end of 
 her life. She seems to have been one of those who ripen 
 with age, growing wider in spirit with increasing years. 
 Perhaps, too, she may have been influenced by the change 
 of manners, the reaction against formalism, which was 
 growing up as her own days were ending. Prim she may 
 have been in manner, but she was not a formalist by nature ; 
 and even at eighty was ready to learn to submit to accept 
 the new gospel that Wordsworth and his disciples had 
 given to the world, and to shake off the stiffness of early 
 training. 
 
 It is idle to speculate on what might have been if 
 things had happened otherwise; if the daily stress of 
 anxiety and perplexity which haunted her home had been 
 removed — difficulties and anxieties which may well have 
 absorbed all the spare energy and interest that under 
 happier circumstances might have added to the treasury 
 of English literature. But if it were only for one ode 
 written when the distracting cares of over seventy years 
 
MRS. BARBAULD, 23 
 
 were ending, when nothing remained to her but the 
 essence of a long past, and the inspirations of a still 
 glowing, still hopeful, and most tender spirit, if it were 
 only for the ode called ' Life,' which has brought a sense 
 of ease and comfort to so many, Mrs. Barbauld has indeed 
 deserved well of her country-people and should be held in 
 remembrance by them. 
 
 Her literary works are, after all, not very voluminous. 
 She is best known by her hymns for children and her 
 early lessons, than which nothing more childlike has ever 
 been devised ; and we can agree with her brother, Dr. 
 Aikin, when he says that it requires true genius to enter 
 so completely into a child's mind. 
 
 After their first volume of verse, the brother and sister 
 had published a second in prose, called 'Miscellaneous 
 Pieces,' about which there is an amusing little anecdote in 
 Eogers's ' Memoirs.' Fox met Dr. Aikin at dinner. 
 
 ' " I am greatly pleased with your ' Miscellaneous 
 Pieces,' " said Fox. Aikin bowed. " I particularly admire," 
 continued Fox, " your essay ' Against Inconsistency in our 
 Expectations.' " 
 
 ' " That," replied Aikin, " is my sister's." 
 
 ' " I like much," returned Fox, " your essay ' On Mo- 
 nastic Institutions.' " 
 
 ' " That," answered Aikin, " is also my sister's." 
 
24 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 ' Fox thought it best to say no more about the 
 book.' 
 
 These essays were followed by various of the visions 
 and Eastern pieces then so much in vogue ; also by 
 political verses and pamphlets, which seemed to have 
 made a great sensation at the time. But Mrs. Barbauld's 
 turn was on the whole more for domestic than for literary 
 life, although literary people always seem to have had a 
 great interest for her. 
 
 During one Christmas which they spent in London, 
 the worthy couple go to see Mrs. Siddons; and Mrs. 
 Chapone introduces Mrs. Barbauld to Miss Burney. ' A 
 very unaffected, modest, sweet, and pleasing young lady,' 
 says Mrs. Barbauld, who is always kind in her descriptions. 
 Mi'S. Barbauld's one complaint in London is of the fatigue 
 from hairdressers, and the bewildering hurry of the great 
 city, where she had, notwithstanding her quiet country 
 life, many ties, and friendships, and acquaintances. Her 
 poem on ' Corsica ' had brought her into some relations 
 with Boswell ; she also knew Groldsmith and Dr. Johnson. 
 Here is her description of the ' Grreat Bear : ' — 
 
 ' I do not mean that one which shines in the sky over 
 your head ; but the Bear that shines in London — a great 
 rough, surly animal. His Christian name is Dr. Johnson. 
 'Tis a singular creature ; but if you stroke him he will 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 25 
 
 not bite, and though he growls sometimes he is not ill- 
 humoured.' 
 
 Johnson describes Mrs. Barbauld as suckling fools and 
 chronicling small beer. There was not much sympathy 
 between the two. Characters such as Johnson's harmonise 
 best with the enthusiastic and easily influenced. Mrs. 
 Barbauld did not belong to this class ; she trusted to her 
 own judgment, rarely tried to influence others, and took a 
 matter-of-fact rather than a passionate view of life. She 
 is as severe to him in her criticism as he was in his judg- 
 ment of her : they neither of them did the other justice. 
 ' A Christian and a man-about-town, a philosopher, and a 
 bigot acknowledging life to be miserable, and making it 
 more miserable through fear of death.' So she writes of 
 him, and all this was true ; but how much more was also 
 true of the great and hypochondriacal old man ! Some 
 years afterwards, when she had been reading Boswell's 
 long-expected ' Life of Johnson,' she wrote of the book : — 
 ' It is like going to Ranelagh ; you meet all your acquain- 
 tances ; but it is a base and mean thing to bring thus 
 every idle word into judgment.' In our own day we too 
 have our Boswell and our Johnson to arouse discussion and 
 indignation. 
 
 ' Have you seen Boswell's " Life of Johnson ? " He calls 
 it a Flemish portrait, and so it is — two quartos of a man's 
 
26 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 conversation and petty habits. Then the treachery and 
 meanness of watching a man for years in order to set 
 down every unguarded and idle word he uttered, is incon- 
 ceivable. Yet with all this one cannot help reading a 
 good deal of it.' This is addressed to the faithful Betsy, 
 who was also keeping school by that time, and assuming 
 brevet rank in consequence. 
 
 Mrs. Barbauld might well complain of the fatigue from 
 hairdressers in London. In one of her letters to her 
 friend she thus describes a lady's dress of the period : — 
 
 ' Do you know how to dress yourself in Dublin ? If 
 you do not, I will tell you. Your waist must be the cir- 
 cumference of two oranges, no more. You must erect a 
 structure on your head gradually ascending to a foot high, 
 exclusive of feathers, and stretching to a penthouse of most 
 horrible projection behind, the breadth from wing to 
 wing considerably broader than your shoulder, and as many 
 different things in your cap as in Noah's ark. Verily, I 
 never did see such monsters as the heads now in vogue. 
 I am a monster, too, but a moderate one.' 
 
 She must have been glad to get back to her home, to 
 her daily work, to Charles, climbing his trees and talking 
 his nonsense. 
 
 In the winter of 1 784 her mother died at Palgrave. 
 It was Christmas week ; the old lady had come travelling 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 27 
 
 four days through the snow in a postchaise with her 
 maid and her little grandchildren, while her son rode on 
 horseback. But the cold and the fatigue of the journey, 
 and the discomfort of the inns, proved too much for Mrs. 
 Aikin, who reached her daughter's house only to die. Just 
 that time three years before Mrs. Barbauld had lost her 
 father, whom she dearly loved. There is a striking letter 
 from the widowed mother to her daughter recording the 
 event. It is almost Spartan in its calmness, but neverthe- 
 less deeply touching. Now she, too, was at rest, and after 
 Mrs. Aikin's death a cloud of sadness and depression seems 
 to have fallen upon the household. Mr. Barbauld was 
 ailing ; he was suffering from a nervous irritability 
 which occasionally quite unfitted him for his work as a 
 schoolmaster. Already his wife must have had many 
 things to bear, and very much to try her courage and 
 cheerfulness ; and now her health was also failing. It was 
 in 1775 that they gave up the academy, which, on the 
 whole, had greatly flourished. It had been established 
 eleven years ; they were both of them in need of rest and 
 change. Nevertheless, it was not without reluctance that 
 they brought themselves to leave their home at Palgrave. 
 A successor was found only too quickly for Mrs. Barbauld 's 
 wishes; they handed over their pupils to his care, and 
 went abroad for a year's sunshine and distraction. 
 
28 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 What a contrast to prim, starched scholastic life at 
 Palgrave must have been the smiling world, and the land 
 flowing with oil and wine, in which they found themselves 
 basking ! The vintage was so abundant that year that the 
 country people could not find vessels to contain it. ' The 
 roads covered with teams of casks, empty or full according 
 as they were going out or returning, and drawn by oxen 
 whose strong necks seemed to be bowed unwillingly under 
 the yoke. Men, women, and children were abroad ; some 
 cutting with a short sickle the bunches of grapes, some 
 breaking them with a wooden instrument, some carrying 
 them on their backs from the gatherers to those who 
 pressed the juice; and, as in our harvest, the gleaners- 
 followed.' 
 
 From the vintage they travel to the Alps, ' a sight so 
 majestic, so totally different from anything I had seen 
 before, that I am ready to sing nunc dimittis,^ she writes.. 
 They travel back by the south of France and reach Paris 
 in June, where the case of the Diamond Necklace is being 
 tried. Then they return to Engla^, waiting a day at 
 Boulogne for a vessel, but crossing from theace in less than 
 four hours. How pretty is her description of England as 
 it strikes them after their absence ! * And not without 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 29 
 
 pleasing emotion did we view again the green swelling 
 hills covered with large sheep, and the winding road 
 bordered with the hawthorn hedge, and the English vine 
 twirled round the tall poles, and the broad Medway covered 
 with vessels, and at last the gentle yet majestic Thames/ 
 
 There were Dissenters at Hampstead in those days, as 
 there are still, and it was a call from a little Unitarian 
 congregation on the hillside who invited Mrs. Barbauld to 
 become their minister, which decided the worthy couple to 
 retire to this pleasant suburb. The place seemed promising 
 enough ; they were within reach of Mrs. Barbauld's brother, 
 Dr. Aikin, now settled in London, and to whom she was 
 tenderly attached. There were congenial people settled 
 all about. On the high hill-top were pleasant old houses 
 to live in. There was occupation for him and literary 
 interest for her. 
 
 They are a sociable and friendly pair, hospitable, glad 
 to welcome their friends, and the acquaintance, and critics, 
 and the former pupils who come toiling up the hill to visit 
 them. Kogers comes to dinner ' at half after three.' They 
 have another poet for a neighbour. Miss Joanna Baillie ; 
 they are made welcome by all, and in their turn make 
 others welcome ; they do acts of social charity and kindness 
 wherever they see the occasion. They have a young 
 Spanish gentleman to board who conceals a taste for 
 
30 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 ' seguars.' They also go up to town from time to time. 
 On one occasion Mr. Barbauld repairs to London to choose 
 a wedding present for Miss Belsham, who is about to be 
 married to Mr. Kenrick, a widower with daughters. He 
 chose two slim Wedgwood pots of some late classic 
 model, which still stand, after many dangers, safely on 
 either side of Mrs. Kenrick's portrait in Miss Keid's draw- 
 ing-room at Hampstead. Wedgwood must have been a 
 personal friend : he has modelled a lovely head of Mrs. 
 Barbauld, simple and nymph-like. 
 
 Hampstead was no further from London in those days 
 than it is now, and they seem to have kept up a constant 
 communication with their friends and relations in the 
 great city. They go to the play occasionally. ' I have 
 not indeed seen Mrs. Siddons often, but I think I never saw 
 her to more advantage,' she writes. ' It is not, however, 
 seeing a play, it is only seeing one character, for they have 
 nobody to act with her.' 
 
 Another expedition is to Westminster Hall, where 
 Warren Hastings was then being tried for his life. 
 
 ' The trial has attracted the notice of most people who 
 are within reach of it. I have been, and was very much 
 struck with all the api^aratus and pomp of justice, with 
 the splendour of the assembly which contained everything 
 distinguished in the nation, with the grand idea that the 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 31 
 
 equity of the English was to pursue crimes committed at 
 the other side of the globe, and oppressions exercised 
 towards the poor Indians who had come to plead their 
 cause ; but all these fine ideas vanish and fade away as one 
 observes the progress of the cause, and sees it fall into the 
 summer amusements, and take the place of a rehearsal of 
 music or an evening at VauxhalL' 
 
 Mrs. Barbauld was a Liberal in feeling and conviction ; 
 she was never afraid to speak her mind, and when the 
 French Kevolution first began, she, in common with many 
 others, hoped that it was but the dawning of happier 
 times. She was always keen about public events ; she 
 wrote an address on the opposition to the repeal of the 
 Test Act in 1791, and she published her poem to Wilber- 
 force on the rejection of his great bill for abolishing 
 slavery : — 
 
 Friends of the friendless, hail, ye generous band ! 
 
 she cries, in warm enthusiasm for the devoted cause. 
 
 Horace Walpole nicknamed her Deborah, called her 
 the Virago Barbauld, and speaks of her with utter rude- 
 ness and intolerant spite. But whether or not Horace 
 Walpole approved, it is certain that Mrs. Barbauld possessed 
 to a full and generous degree a quality which is now less, 
 common than it was in her day. 
 
32 MJ^S. BARBAULD. 
 
 Not very many years ago I was struck on one occasion 
 when a noble old lady, now gone to her rest, exclaimed in 
 my hearing that people of this generation had all sorts of 
 merits and charitable intentions, but that there was one 
 thing she missed which had certainly existed in her youth, 
 and which no longer seemed to be of the same account : 
 that public spirit which used to animate the young as well 
 as the old. 
 
 It is possible that philanthropy, and the love of the 
 beautiful, and the gratuitous diffusion of wall-papers may 
 be the modern rendering of the good old-fashioned senti- 
 ment. Mrs. Barbauld lived in very stirring days, when 
 private people shared in the excitements and catastrophes 
 of public affairs. To her the fortunes of England, its 
 loyalty, its success, were a part of her daily bread. By 
 her early associations she belonged to a party representing 
 opposition, and for that very reason she was the more 
 keenly struck by the differences of the conduct of affairs 
 and the opinions of those she trusted. Her friend Dr. 
 Priestley had emigrated to America for his convictions' 
 sake ; Howard was giving his noble life for his work ; 
 Wakefield had gone to prison. Now the very questions 
 are forgotten for which they struggled and suffered, or the 
 answers have come while the questions are forgotten, 
 in this their future which is our present, and to which 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 33 
 
 some unborn historian may point back with a moral 
 finger. 
 
 Dr. Aikin, whose estimate of his sister was very different 
 from Horace Walpole's, occasionally reproached her for not 
 writing more constantly. He wrote a copy of verses on 
 this theme : — 
 
 Thus speaks the Muse, and bends her brows severe : 
 
 Did I, Lsetitia, lend my choicest lays, 
 
 And crown thy youthful head with freshest bays. 
 
 That all the expectance of thy full-grown year, 
 
 Should lie inert and fruitless % revere 
 
 Those sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise, 
 
 Whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raise 
 
 Far from the vapours of this earthly sphere. 
 
 Seize, seize the lyre, resume the lofty strain. 
 
 She seems to have willingly left the lyre for Dr. Aikin's 
 use. A few hymns, some graceful odes, and stanzas, and 
 jeux cfesprit, a certain number of well-written and original 
 essays, and several political pamphlets, represent the best 
 of her work. Her more ambitious poems are those by 
 which she is the least remembered. It was at Hampstead 
 that Mrs. Barbauld wrote her contributions to her brother's 
 volume of ' Evenings at Home,' among which the trans- 
 migrations of Indur may be quoted as a model of style 
 and delightful matter. One of the best of her jeux d^esprit 
 is the ' Grroans of the Tankard,' which was written in early 
 
 D 
 
34 MRS. BARBAULD, 
 
 days, with much spirit and real humour. It begins with 
 a classic incantation, and then goes on : — 
 
 'Twas at the solemn silent noontide hour 
 When hunger rages with despotic power, 
 When the lean student quits his Hebrew roots 
 For the gross nourishment of English fruits, 
 And throws unfinished airy systems by 
 For solid pudding and substantial pie. 
 
 The tankard now, 
 
 Replenished to the brink, 
 With the cool beverage blue-eyed maidens drink, 
 
 but, accustomed to very different libations, is endowed with 
 voice and utters its bitter reproaches : — 
 
 Unblest the day, and luckless was the hour 
 Which doomed me to a Presbyterian's power, 
 Fated to serve a Puritanic race. 
 Whose slender meal is shorter than their grace. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Thumbkin, of fairy celebrity, used to mark his way by 
 flinging crumbs of bread and scattering stones as he went 
 along ; and in like manner authors trace the course of their 
 life's peregrinations by the pamphlets and articles they cast 
 down as they go. Sometimes they throw stones, sometimes 
 they throw bread. In '92 and '93 Mrs. Barbauld must 
 
MRS. BARBAULD, 35 
 
 have been occupied with party polemics and with the poli- 
 tical miseries of the time. A pamphlet on Grilbert Wake- 
 field's views, and another on ' Sins of the Government and 
 Sins of the People,' show in what direction her thoughts 
 were bent. Then came a period of comparative calm again 
 and of literary work and interest. She seems to have 
 turned to Akenside and Collins, and each had an essay to 
 himself. These were followed by certain selections from 
 the Sjpectator^ Tatler, &c., preceded by one of those 
 admirable essays for which she is really remarkable. She 
 also published a memoir of Kichardson prefixed to his 
 correspondence. Sir James Mackintosh, writing at a later 
 and sadder time of her life, says of her observations on the 
 moral of Clarissa that they are as fine a piece of mitigated 
 and rational stoicism as our language can boast of. 
 
 In 1 802 another congregation seems to have made signs 
 from Stoke Newington, and Mrs. Barbauld persuaded her 
 husband to leave his flock at Hampstead and to buy a house 
 near her brother's at Stoke Newington. This was her last 
 migration, and here she remained until her death in 1825. 
 One of her letters to Mrs. Kenrick gives a description of 
 what might have been a happy home : — ' We have a pretty 
 little back parlour that looks into our little spot of a garden,' 
 she says, ' and catches every gleam of sunshine. We have 
 
 pulled down the ivy, except what covers the coach-house 
 
 D 2 
 
36 MRS, BARBAULD. 
 
 We have planted a vine and a passion-flower, with abun- 
 dance of jessamine against the window, and we have scat- 
 tered roses and honeysuckle all over the garden. You may 
 smile at me for parading so over my house and domains.' 
 In May she writes a pleasant letter, in good spirits, com- 
 paring her correspondence with her friend to the flower of 
 an aloe, which sleeps for a hundred years, and on a sudden 
 pushes out when least expected. * But take notice, the life 
 is in the aloe all the while, and sorry should I be if the life 
 were not in our friendship all the while, though it so rarely 
 diffuses itself over a sheet of paper.' 
 
 She seems to have been no less sociable and friendly at 
 Stoke Newington than at Hampstead. People used to come 
 up to see her from London. Her letters, qyuiet and intimate 
 as they are, give glimpses of most of the literary people of 
 the day, not in memoirs then, but alive and drinking tea 
 at one another's houses, or walking all the way to Stoke 
 Newington to pay their respects to the old lady. 
 
 Charles Lamb used to talk of his two hold authoresses, 
 Mrs. Barbauld being one and Mrs. Inchbald being the other. 
 Crabb Eobinson and Eogers were two faithful links with the 
 outer world. 'Crabb Eobinson corresponds with Madame 
 de Stael, is quite intimate,' she writes, 'tas received I 
 don't know how many letters,' she adds, not without some 
 slight amusement. Miss Lucy Aikin tells a pretty story 
 
MRS. BARBAULD, yj 
 
 of Scott meeting Mrs. Barbauld at dinner, and telling her 
 that it was to her that he owed his poetic gift. Some 
 translations of Biirger by Mr. Taylor, of Norwich, which 
 she had read out at Edinburgh, had struck him so much 
 that they had determined him to try his own powers in 
 that line. 
 
 She often had inmates under her roof. One of them 
 was a beautiful and charming young girl, the daughter of 
 Mrs. Fletcher, of Edinburgh, whose early death is recorded 
 in her mother's life. Besides company at home, Mrs. Bar- 
 bauld went to visit her friends from time to time — the 
 Estlins at Bristol, the Edgeworths, whose acquaintance Mr, 
 and Mrs. Barbauld made about this time, and who seem to 
 have been invaluaible friends, bringing as they did a bright 
 new element of interest and cheerful friendship into her 
 sad and dimning life. A man must have extraordinarily 
 good spirits to embark upon four matrimonial ventures as 
 Mr. Edgeworth did ; and as for Miss Edge worth, appre- 
 ciative, effusive, and warm-hearted, she seems to have 
 more than returned Mrs. Barbauld's sympathy. 
 
 Miss Lucy Aikin, Dr. Aikin's daughter, was now also 
 making her own mark in the literary world, and had 
 inherited the bright intelligence and interest for which 
 her family was so remarkable. Much of Miss Aikin's 
 work is more sustained than her aunt's desultory pro- 
 
38 MRS. BARBAULD 
 
 ductions, but it lacks that touch of nature which has 
 preserved Mrs. Barbauld's memory where more important 
 people are forgotten. 
 
 Our authoress seems to have had a natural affection 
 for sister authoresses. Hannah More and Mrs. Montague 
 were both her friends, so were Madame d'Arblay and Mrs. 
 Chapone in a different degree ; she must have known Mrs. 
 Opie ; she loved Joanna Baillie. The latter is described 
 by her as the young lady at Hampstead who came to Mr. 
 Barbauld's meeting with as demure a face as if she had 
 never written a line. And Miss Aikin, in her memoirs, 
 describes in Johnsonian language how the two Miss Baillies 
 came to call one morning upon Mrs. Barbauld : — ' My 
 aunt immediately introduced the topic of the anonymous 
 tragedies, and gave utterance to her admiration with the 
 generous delight in the manifestation of kindred genius 
 which distinguished her.' But it seems that Miss Baillie 
 sat, nothing moved, and did not betray herself. Mrs. 
 Barbauld herself gives a pretty description of the sisters 
 in their home, in that old house on Windmill Hill, which 
 stands untouched, with its green windows looking out upon 
 so much of sky and heath and sun, with the wainscoted 
 parlours where Walter Scott used to come, and the low 
 wooden staircase leading to the old rooms above. It is in 
 one of her letters to Mrs. Kenrick that Mrs. Barbauld gives 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 39 
 
 a pleasant glimpse of the poetess Walter Scott admired. 
 ' I have not been abroad since I was at Norwich, except a 
 day or two at Hampstead with the Miss Baillies. One 
 should be, as I was, beneath their roof to know all their 
 merit. Their house is one of the best ordered I know. 
 They have all manner of attentions for their friends, and 
 not only Miss B., but Joanna, is as clever in furnishing a 
 room or in arranging a party as in writing plays, of which, 
 by the way, she has a volume ready for the press, but she 
 will not give it to the public till next winter. The subject 
 is to be the passion of fear. I do not know what sort of 
 a hero that passion can afford ! ' Fear was, indeed, a passion 
 alien to her nature, and she did not know the meaning of 
 the word. 
 
 Mrs. Barbauld's description of Hannah More and her 
 sisters living on their special hill-top was written after 
 Mr. Barbauld's death, and thirty years after Miss More's 
 verses which are quoted by Mrs. Ellis in her excellent 
 memoir of Mrs. Barbauld : — 
 
 Nor, Barbauld, shall my glowing heart refuse 
 A tribute to thy virtues or thy muse ; 
 This humble merit shall at least be mine, 
 The poet's chaplet for thy brows to twine ; 
 My verse thy talents to the world shall teach, 
 And praise the graces it despairs to reach. 
 
40 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 Then, after philosophically questioning the power of genius 
 to confer true happiness, she concludes : — 
 
 Can all the boasted powers of wit and song 
 Of life one pang remove, one hour prolong % 
 Fallacious hope which daily truths deride — 
 For you, alas ! have wept and Ganick died. 
 
 Meanwhile, whatever genius might not be able to 
 achieve, the five Miss Mores had been living on peacefully 
 together in the very comfortable cottage which had been 
 raised and thatched by the poetess's earnings. 
 
 * Barley Wood is equally the seat of taste and hospi-. 
 tality,' says Mrs. Barbauld to a friend. 
 
 ' Nothing could be more friendly than their reception,' 
 she writes to her brother, ' and nothing more charming 
 than their situation. An extensive view over the Mendip 
 Hills is in front of their house, with a pretty view of 
 Wrington. Their home — cottage, because it is thatched 
 — stands on the declivity of a rising ground, which they 
 have planted and made quite a little paradise. The five 
 sisters, all good old maids, have lived together these fifty 
 years. Hannah More is a good deal broken, but possesses 
 fully her powers of conversation, and her vivacity. We 
 exchanged riddles like the wise men of old ; I was given 
 to understand she was writing something.' 
 
 There is another allusion to Mrs. Hannah More in a 
 
MRS, BARBAULD, 41 
 
 sensible letter from Mrs. Barbauld, written to Miss 
 Edgeworth about this time, declining to join in an alarm- 
 ing enterprise suggested by the vivacious Mr. Edgeworth, 
 ^ a FeTTiiniad, a literary paper to be entirely contributed 
 to by ladies, and where all articles are to be accepted.' 
 ' There is no bond of union,' Mrs. Barbauld says, ' among 
 literary women any more than among literary men ; 
 different sentiments and connections separate them much 
 more than the joint interest of their sex would unite 
 them. Mrs. Hannah More would not write along with 
 you or me, and we should possibly hesitate at joining 
 Miss Hays or — if she were living — Mrs. Grodwin.' Then 
 she suggests the names of Miss Baillie, Mrs. Opie, her 
 own niece Miss Lucy Aikin, and Mr. S. Rogers, who would 
 not, she thinks, be averse to joining the scheme. 
 
 VII. 
 
 How strangely unnatural it seems when Fate's heavy 
 hand falls upon quiet and common-place lives, changing 
 the tranquil routine of every day into the solemnities and 
 excitements of terror and tragedy! It was after their 
 removal to Stoke Newington that the saddest of all blows 
 fell upon this true-hearted woman. Her husband's hypo- 
 chondria deepened and changed, and the attacks became 
 
42 MRS. BARBAULD, 
 
 so serious that her brother and his family urged her 
 anxiously to leave him to other care than her own. It 
 was no longer safe for poor Mr. Barbauld to remain alone 
 with his wife, and her life, says Mrs. Le Breton, was more 
 than once in peril. But, at first, she would not hear of 
 leaving him ; although on more than one occasion she had 
 to fly for protection to her brother close by. 
 
 There is something very touching in the patient 
 fidelity with which Mrs. Barbauld tried to soothe the later 
 sad disastrous years of her husband's life. She must have 
 been a woman of singular nerve and courage to endure as 
 she did the excitement and cruel aberrations of her once 
 gentle and devoted companion. She only gave in after 
 long resistance. 
 
 ' An alienation from me has taken possession of his 
 mind,' she says, in a letter to Mrs. Kenrick ; ' my presence 
 seems to irritate him, and I must resign myself to a sepa- 
 ration 'from him who has been for thirty years the partner 
 of my heart, my faithful friend, my inseparable com- 
 panion.' With her habitual reticence, she dwells na 
 more on that painful topic, but goes on to make plans for 
 them both, asks her old friend to come and cheer her in 
 her loneliness ; and the faithful Betsy, now a widow with 
 grown-up step-children, ill herself, troubled by deafness 
 and other infirmities, responds with a warm heart, and 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 43 
 
 promises to come, bringing the comfort with her of old 
 companionship and familiar sympathy. There is some- 
 thing very affecting in the loyalty of the two aged women 
 stretching out their hands to each other across a whole 
 lifetime. After her visit Mrs. Barbanld writes again : — 
 
 'He is now at Norwich, and I hear very favourable 
 accounts of his health and spirits ; he seems to enjoy him- 
 self very much amongst his old friends there, and converses 
 among them with his usual animation. There are no 
 symptoms of violence or of depression ; so far is favour- 
 able; but this cruel alienation from me, in which my 
 brother is included, still remains deep-rooted, and whether 
 he will ever change in this point Heaven only knows. 
 The medical men fear he will not : if so, my dear friend, 
 what remains for me but to resign myself to the will of 
 Heaven, and to think with pleasure that every day brings 
 me nearer a period which naturally cannot be very far off, 
 and at which this as well as every temporal affliction must 
 terminate ? 
 
 ' " Anything but this ! " is the cry of weak mortals 
 when afflicted; and sometimes I own I am inclined to 
 make it mine ; but I will check myself.' 
 
 But while she was hoping still, a fresh outbreak of. the 
 malady occurred. He, poor soul, weary of his existence, 
 put an end to his sufferings : he was found lifeless in the 
 
44 MI^S. BARBAULD. 
 
 New Kiver. Lucy Aikin quotes a Dirge found among her 
 aunt's papers after her death : — 
 
 Pure Spirit, where art thou now ? 
 
 O whisper to my soul, 
 let some soothening thought of thee 
 
 This bitter grief control. 
 
 'Tis not for thee the tears I shed, 
 
 Thy sufferings now are o'er. 
 The sea is calm, the tempest past, 
 
 On that eternal shore. 
 
 No more the storms that wrecked thy peace 
 
 Shall tear that gentle breast. 
 Nor summer's rage, nor winter's cold 
 
 That poor, poor frame molest. 
 
 Farewell ! With honour, peace, and love. 
 
 Be that dear memory blest. 
 Thou hast no tears for me to shed, 
 
 When I too am at rest. 
 
 But her time of rest was not yet come, and she lived for 
 seventeen years after her husband. She was very brave, 
 she did not turn from the sympathy of her friends, she 
 endured her loneliness with courage, she worked to dis- 
 tract her mind. Here is a touching letter addressed to 
 Mrs, Taylor, of Norwich, in which she says :-j— ' A thousand 
 thanks for your kind letter, still more for the very short 
 visit that preceded it. Though short — too short — ■ 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 45 
 
 it has left indelible impressions on my mind. My 
 heart has truly had communion with yours ; your 
 sympathy has been balm to it ; and I feel that there is 
 now no one on earth to whom I could pour out that heart 
 more readily. ... I am now sitting alone again, and feel 
 like a person who has been sitting by a cheerful fire, not 
 sensible at the time of the temperature of the air ; but 
 the fire removed, he finds the season is still winter. Day 
 after day passes, and I do not know what to do with my 
 time ; my mind has no energy nor power of application.' 
 
 How much she felt her loneliness appears again and 
 again from one passage and another. Then she struggled 
 against discouragement ; she took to her pen again. To 
 Mrs. Kenrick she writes: — 'I intend to pay my letter 
 debts ; not much troubling my head whether I have any- 
 thing to say or not; yet to you my heart has always 
 something to say : it always recognises you as among the 
 dearest of its friends ; and while it feels that new im- 
 pressions are made with difficulty and early effaced, retains, 
 and ever will retain, I trust beyond this world, those of our 
 early and long-tried affection.' 
 
 She set to work again, trying to forget her heavy 
 trials. It was during the first years of her widowhood 
 that she published her edition of the British novelists in 
 some fifty volumes. There is an opening chapter to this 
 
46 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 edition upon novels and novel-writing, which is an ad- 
 mirable and most interesting essay upon fiction, beginning 
 from the very earliest times. 
 
 In 1811 she wrote her poem on the King's illness, and 
 also the longer poem which provoked such indignant com- 
 ments at the time. It describes Britain's rise and luxury, 
 warns her of the dangers of her unbounded ambition and 
 unjustifiable wars : — 
 
 Arts, arms, and wealth destroy the fruits they bring ; 
 Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring. 
 
 Her ingenuous youth from Ontario's shore who visits the 
 ruins of London is one of the many claimants to the 
 honour of having suggested Lord Macaulay's celebrated 
 New Zealander : — 
 
 Pensive and thoughtful shall the wanderers greet 
 Each splendid square and still untrodden street, 
 Or of some crumbling turret, mined by time. 
 The broken stairs with perilous step shall climb, 
 Thence stretch their view the wide horizon round. 
 By scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound, 
 And, choked no more with fleets, fair Thames survey 
 Through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way. 
 
 It is impossible not to admire the poem, though it is 
 stilted and not to the present taste. The description 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 47 
 
 of Britain as it now is and as it once was is very 
 ingenious : — 
 
 Where once Bondiica whirled the scythed car, 
 And the fierce matrons raised the shriek of war, 
 Light forms beneath transparent muslin float, 
 And tutor'd voices swell the artful note ; 
 Light-leaved acacias, and the shady plane. 
 And spreading cedars grace the woodland reign. 
 
 The poem is forgotten now, though it was scouted 
 at the time and violently attacked, Southey himself falling 
 upon the poor old lady, and devouring her, spectacles and 
 all. She felt these attacks very much, and could not be 
 consoled, though Miss Edgeworth wrote a warm-hearted 
 letter of indignant sympathy. But Mrs. Barbauld had 
 something in her too genuine to be crushed, even by sar- 
 castic criticism. She published no more, but it was after 
 her poem of ' 1811 ' that she wrote the beautiful ode by 
 which she is best known and best remembered, — the ode 
 that Wordsworth used to repeat and say he envied, that 
 Tennyson has called ' sweet verses,' of which the lines ring 
 their tender hopeful chime like sweet church bells on a 
 summer evening. 
 
 Madame d'Arblay, in her old age, told Crabb Eobinson 
 that every night she said the verses over to herself as she 
 went to her rest. To the writer they are almost sacred. 
 
48 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 The hand that patiently pointed out to her, one by one, 
 the syllables of Mrs. Barbauld's hymns for children, that 
 tended our childhood, as it had tended our father's, 
 marked these verses one night, when it blessed us for the 
 last time. 
 
 Life, we've been long together, 
 
 Through pleasant and through cloudy weather ; 
 
 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear ; 
 
 Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh or tear, 
 
 Then steal away, give little warning. 
 
 Choose thine own time. 
 
 Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime, 
 
 Bid me * Good morning.' 
 
 Mrs. Barbauld was over seventy when she wrote this 
 ode. A poem, called ' Octogenary Reflections,' is also very 
 touching : — 
 
 Say ye, who through this round of eighty years 
 Have proved its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears ; 
 Say what is life, ye veterans who have trod, 
 Step following steps, its flowery thorny road % 
 Enough of good to kindle strong desire ; 
 Enough of iU to damp the rising fire ; 
 Enough of love and fancy, joy and hope, 
 To far desire and give the passions scope ; 
 Enough of disappointment, sorrow, pain, 
 To seal the wise man's sentence — * All is vain.' 
 
 There is another fragment of hers in which she likens 
 herself to a schoolboy left of all the train, who hears no 
 
MRS. BARBAULD. 49 
 
 sound of wheels to bear him to his father's bosom home. 
 ' Thus I look to the hour when I shall follow those that 
 are at rest before me.' And then at last the time came 
 for which she longed. Her brother died, her faithful Mrs. 
 Kenrick died, and Mrs. Taylor, whom she loved most of 
 all. She had consented to give up her solitary home to 
 spend the remaining years of her life in the home of her 
 adopted son Charles, now married, and a father ; but it was 
 while she was on a little visit to her sister-in-law, Mrs. 
 Aikin, that the summons came, very swiftly and peace- 
 fully, as she sat in her chair one day. Her nephew tran 
 scribed these, the last lines she ever wrote : — 
 
 * Who are you ? ' 
 
 ' Do you not know me % have you not expected me % ' 
 
 * Whither do you carry me % ' 
 
 * Come with me and you shall know/ 
 
 * The way is dark.' 
 
 * It is well trodden.' 
 
 * Yes, in the forward track.' 
 
 * Come along.' 
 
 * Oh ! shall I there see my beloved ones % Will they wel- 
 come me, and will they know me % Oh, tell me, tell me ; thou 
 canst tell me.' 
 
 * Yes, but thou must come first.' 
 
 ' Stop a little ; keep thy hand off till thou hast told me.' 
 
 * 1 never wait.' 
 
 * Oh ! shall I see the warm sun again in my cold grave % ' 
 
 * Nothing is there that can feel the sun.' 
 
50 MRS. BARBAULD. 
 
 * Oh, where then?' 
 
 * Come, I say.' 
 
 One may acknowledge the great progress which people 
 have made since Mrs. Barbauld's day in the practice of 
 writing prose and poetry, in the art of expressing upon 
 paper the thoughts which are in most people's minds. It 
 is (to use a friend's simile) like playing upon the piano — 
 everybody now learns to play upon the piano, and it is 
 certain that the modest performances of the ladies of Mrs. 
 Barbauld's time would scarcely meet with the attention 
 now, which they then received. But all the same, the 
 stock of true feeling, of real poetry, is not increased by 
 the increased volubility of our pens ; and so when some- 
 thing comes to us that is real, that is complete in pathos 
 or in wisdom, we still acknowledge the gift, and are 
 grateful for it. 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 1767-1849. 
 
 * Exceeding wise, fairspoken, and persuading.' — He7i. Vlll. 
 
 Eakly Days. 
 I. 
 
 Few authoresses in these days can have enjoyed the 
 ovations and attentions which seem to have been con- 
 sidered the due of many of the ladies distinguished at the 
 end of the last century and the beginning of this one. 
 To read the accounts of the receptions and compliments 
 which fell to their lot may well fill later and lesser lumin- 
 aries with envy. Crowds opened to admit them, banquets 
 spread themselves out before them, lights were lighted up 
 and flowers were scattered at their feet. Dukes, editors, 
 prime ministers, waited their convenience on their stair- 
 cases ; whole theatres rose up en masse to greet the gifted 
 creatures of this and that immortal tragedy. The author- 
 esses themselves, to do them justice, seem to have been 
 very little dazzled by all this excitement. Hannah More 
 contentedly retires with her maiden sisters to the Parnassus 
 on the Mendip Hills, where they sew and chat and make 
 
 E 2 
 
52 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 tea, and teach the village children. Dear Joanna Baillie, 
 modest and beloved, lives on to peaceful age in her pretty 
 old house at Hampstead, looking through tree-tops and 
 sunshine and clouds towards distant London. ' Out there 
 where all the storms are,' I heard the children saying 
 yesterday as they watched the overhanging gloom of smoke 
 which veils the city of metropolitan thunders and light- 
 ning. Maria Edgeworth's apparitions as a literary lioness 
 in the rush of London and of Paris society were but inter- 
 ludes in her existence, and her real life was one of con- 
 stant exertion and industry spent far away in an Irish 
 home among her own kindred and occupations and interests. 
 We may realise what these were when we read that Mr. 
 Edgeworth had no less than four wives, who all left 
 children, and that Maria was the eldest daughter of the 
 whole family. Besides this, we must also remember that 
 the father whom she idolised was himself a man of extra- 
 ordinary powers, brilliant in conversation (so I have been 
 told), full of animation, of interest, of plans for his country, 
 his family, for education and literature, for mechanics and 
 scientific discoveries ; that he was a gentleman widely con- 
 nected, hospitably inclined, with a large estate and many 
 tenants to overlook, with correspondence and^acquaintances 
 all over the world ; and besides all this, with various 
 schemes in his brain, to be eventually realised by others of 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 53 
 
 which velocipedes, tramwajs, and telegraphs were but a 
 few of the items. 
 
 One could imagine that under these circumstances the 
 hurry and excitement of London life must have sometimes 
 seemed tranquillity itself compared with the many and 
 absorbing interests of such a family. What these interests 
 were may be gathered from the pages of a very interest- 
 ing memoir from which the writer of this essay has been 
 allowed to quote. It is a book privately printed and 
 written for the use of her children by the widow of 
 Kichard Lovell Edgeworth, and is a record, among other 
 things, of a faithful and most touching friendship between 
 Maria and her father's wife — ' a friendship lasting for over 
 fifty years, and unbroken by a single cloud of difference 
 or mistrust.' Mrs. Edgeworth, who was Miss Beaufort 
 before her marriage, and about the same age as Miss 
 Edgeworth, unconsciously reveals her own most charming 
 and unselfish nature as she tells her stepdaughter's story. 
 
 When the writer looks back upon her own childhood, 
 it seems to her that she lived in company with a delight- 
 ful host of little playmates, bright, busy, clever children, 
 whose cheerful presence remains more vividly in her mind 
 than that of many of the real little boys and girls who 
 used to appear and disappear disconnectedly as children 
 do in childhood, when friendship and companionship 
 
54 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 depend almost entirely upon the convenience of grown-up 
 people. Now and again came little cousins or friends to 
 share our games, but day by day, constant and unchanging, 
 ever to be relied upon, smiled our most lovable and 
 friendly companions — simple Susan, lame Jervas, Talbot, 
 the dear Little Merchants, Jem the widow's son with his 
 arms round old Lightfoot's neck, the generous Ben, with 
 his whipcord and his useful proverb of ^ waste not, want 
 not ' — all of these were there in the window corner wait- 
 ing our pleasure. After Parents' Assistant, to which 
 familiar words we attached no meaning whatever, came 
 Popular Tales in big brown volumes off a shelf in the 
 lumber-room of an apartment in an old house in Paris, 
 and as we opened the books, lo ! creation widened to our 
 view. England, Ireland, America, Turkey, the mines of 
 Grolconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travellers, 
 governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life, were 
 all laid under contribution, and brought interest and 
 adventure to our humdrum nursery corner. All Mr. 
 Edgeworth's varied teaching and experience, all his 
 daughter's genius of observation, came to interest and 
 delight our play-time, and that of a thousand other little 
 children in different parts of the world. * People justly 
 praise Miss Edgeworth's admirable stories and novels, but 
 from prejudice and early association these beloved childish 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 55 
 
 histories seem unequalled still, and it is chiefly as a writer 
 for children that we venture to consider her here. Some 
 of the stories are indeed little idylls in their way. Walter 
 Scott, who best knew how to write for the young so as to 
 charm grandfathers as well as Hugh Littlejohn, Esq., and 
 all the grandchildren, is said to have wiped his kind eyes 
 as he put down ' Simple Susan.' A child's book, says a 
 reviewer of those days defining in the ' Quarterly Review,' 
 should be 'not merely less dry, less difficult, than a book 
 for grown-up people ; but more rich in interest, more true 
 to nature, more exquisite in art, more abundant in every 
 quality that replies to childhood's keener and fresher per- 
 ception.' Children like facts, they like short vivid 
 sentences that tell the story : as they listen intently, so 
 they read; every word has its value for them. It has 
 been a real surprise to the writer to find, on re-reading 
 some of these descriptions of scenery and adventure 
 which she had not looked at since her childhood, that the 
 details which she had imagined spread over much space 
 are contained in a few sentences at the beginning of a 
 page. These sentences, however, show the true art of the 
 writer. 
 
 It would be difficult to imagine anything better suited 
 to the mind of a very young person than these pleasant 
 stories, so complete in themselves, so interesting, so varied. 
 
56 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 The description of Jervas's escape from the mine where 
 the miners had plotted his destruction, almost rises to 
 poetry in its simple diction. Lame Jervas has warned his 
 master of the miners' plot, and showed him the vein of 
 ore which they have concealed. The miners have sworn 
 vengeance against him, and his life is in danger. His 
 master helps him to get away, and comes into the room 
 l)efore daybreak, bidding him rise and put on the clothes 
 which he has brought. ' I followed him out of the house 
 before anybody else was awake, and he took me across the 
 fields towards the high road. At this place we waited till 
 we heard the tinkling of the bells of a team of horses. 
 ^' Here comes the waggon," said he, " in which you are to 
 go. So fare you well, Jervas. I shall hear how you go 
 on; and I only hope you will serve your next master, 
 whoever he may be, as faithfully as you have served me." 
 *' I shall never find so good a master," was all I could say 
 for the soul of me ; I was quite overcome by his goodness 
 and sorrow at parting with him, as I then thought, for 
 ever.' The description of the journey is very pretty. 
 ' The morning clouds began to clear away ; I could see 
 my master at some distance, and I kept looking after him 
 as the waggon went on slowly, and he walked fast away 
 over the fields.' Then the sun begins to rise. The 
 waggoner goes on whistling, but lame Jervas, to whom 
 
MISS EDGEWORTIL 57 
 
 the rising sun was a spectacle wholly surprising, starts up, 
 exclaiming in wonder and admiration. The waggoner 
 bursts into a loud laugh. ' Lud a marcy,' says he, 'to 
 hear un' and look at un' a body would think the oaf had 
 never seen the sun rise afore ; ' upon which Jervas 
 remembers that he is still in Cornwall, and must not 
 betray himself, and prudently hides behind some parcels, 
 only just in time, for they meet a party of miners, and he 
 hears his enemies' voice hailing the waggoner. All the 
 rest of the day he sits within, and amuses himself by 
 listening to the bells of the team, which jingle continually. 
 ^On our second day's journey, however, I ventured out of 
 my hiding-place. I walked with the waggoner up and 
 down the hills, enjoying the fresh air, the singing of the 
 birds, and the delightful smell of the honeysuckles and 
 the dog-roses in the hedges. All the wild flowers and 
 even the weeds on the banks by the wayside were to me 
 matters of wonder and admiration. At almost every step 
 I paused to observe something that was new to me, and I 
 could not help feeling surprised at the insensibility of my 
 fellow-traveller, who plodded along, and seldom inter- 
 rupted his whistling except to cry ' Gree, Blackbird, aw 
 woa,' or ' How now, Smiler ? ' Then Jervas is lost in 
 admiration before a plant ' whose stem was about two feet 
 high, and which had a round shining purple beautiful 
 
58 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 flower,' and the waggoner with a look of scorn exclaims^ 
 ' Help thee, lad, dost not thou know 'tis a common thistle ? ' 
 After this he looks upon Jervas as very nearly an idiot* 
 ' In truth I believe I was a droll figure, for my hat was- 
 stuck full of weeds and of all sorts of wild flowers, and 
 both my coat and waistcoat pockets were stuffed out with 
 pebbles and funguses.' Then comes Plymouth Harbour : 
 Jervas ventures to ask some questions about the vessels, to 
 which the waggoner answers ' They be nothing in life but 
 the boats and ships, man ; ' so he turned away and went 
 on chewing a straw, and seemed not a whit more moved 
 to admiration than he had been at the sight of the thistle.. 
 * I conceived a high admiration of a man who had seen so 
 much that he could admire nothing,' says Jervas, with a. 
 touch of real humour. 
 
 Another most charming little idyll is that of Simple 
 Susan, who was a real maiden living in the neighbourhood 
 of Edgeworthstown. The story seems to have been mislaid 
 for a time in the stirring events of the first Irish rebellion,, 
 and overlooked, like some little daisy by a battlefield. 
 Few among us will not have shared Mr. Edge worth's parti- 
 ality for the charming little tale. The children fling their 
 garlands and tie up their violets. Susan bakes her cottage 
 loaves and gathers marigolds for broth, and tends her 
 mother to the distant tune of Philip's pipe coming across- 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 59 
 
 the fields. As we read the story again it seems as if we 
 could almost scent the fragrance of the primroses and the 
 double violets, and hear the music sounding above the 
 children's voices, and the bleatings of the lamb, so simply 
 and delightfully is the whole story constructed. Among 
 all Miss Edgeworth's characters few are more familiar to the 
 world than that of Susan's pretty pet lamb. 
 
 II. 
 
 No sketch of Maria Edgeworth's life, however slight, 
 would be complete without a few words about certain per- 
 sons coming a generation before her (and belonging still to 
 the age of periwigs), who were her father's associates and 
 her own earliest friends. Notwithstanding all that has 
 been said of Mr. Edgeworth's bewildering versatility of 
 nature, he seems to have been singularly faithful in his 
 friendships. He might take up new ties, but he clung 
 pertinaciously to those which had once existed. His 
 daughter inherited that same steadiness of affection. In his 
 life of Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, Mr. Charles Darwin, 
 writing of these very people, has said, ' There is, perhaps, 
 no safer test of a man's real character than that of his long- 
 continued friendship with good and able men.' He then 
 goes on to quote an instance of a long-continued affection 
 
6o MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 and intimacy only broken by death between a certain set 
 of distinguished friends, giving the names of Keir, Day, 
 Small, Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, and Darwin, and adding 
 to them the names of Edgeworth himself and of the Gral- 
 tons. 
 
 Mr. Edgeworth first came to Lichfield to make Dr. 
 Darwin's acquaintance. His second visit was to his friend 
 Mr. Day, the author of ' Sandford and Merton,' who had 
 taken a house in the valley of Stow, and who invited him 
 one Christmas on a visit. ' About the year 1 765,' says Miss 
 Seward, 'came to Lichfield, from the neighbourhood of 
 Beading, the young and gay philosopher, Mr. Edgeworth ; 
 a man of fortune, and recently married to a Miss Elers, of 
 Oxfordshire. The fame of Dr. Darwin's various talents 
 allured Mr. E. to the city they graced.' And the lady goes 
 on to describe Mr. Edgeworth himself: — 'Scarcely two- 
 and-twenty, with an exterior yet more juvenile, having 
 mathematic science, mechanic ingenuity, and a competent 
 portion of classical learning, with the possession of the 
 modern languages. . . . He danced, he fenced, he winged 
 his arrows with more than philosophic skill,' continues the 
 lady, herself a person of no little celebrity in her time and 
 place. Mr. Edgeworth, in his Memoirs, pays a respectful 
 tribute to Miss Seward's charms, to her agreeable conver- 
 sation, her beauty, her flowing tresses, her sprightliness and 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 6i 
 
 address. Sucli moderate expressions fail, however, to do 
 justice to this lady's powers, to her enthusiasm, her poetry, 
 her partisanship. The portrait prefixed to her letters is 
 that of a dignified person with an oval face and dark eyes, 
 the thick brown tresses are twined with pearls, her graceful 
 figure is robed in the softest furs and draperies of the 
 period. In her very first letter she thus poetically describes 
 her surroundings : — * The autumnal glory of this day puts 
 to shame the summer's suUenness. I sit writing upon this 
 dear gTeen terrace, feeding at intervals my little golden- 
 breasted songsters. The embosomed vale of Stow glows 
 sunny through the Claude-Lorraine tint which is spread 
 over the scene like the blue mist over a plum.' 
 
 In this Claude-Lorraine-plum-tinted valley stood the 
 house which Mr. Day had taken, and where Mr. Edgeworth 
 had come on an eventful visit. Miss Seward herself lived 
 with her parents in the Bishop's palace at Lichfield. There 
 was also a younger sister, ' Miss Sally,' who died as a girl, 
 and another very beautiful young lady their friend, by name 
 Honora Sneyd, placed under Mrs. Seward's care. She was 
 the heroine of Major Andre's unhappy romance. He too 
 lived at Lichfield with his mother, and his hopeless love 
 gives a tragic reality to this by-gone holiday of youth and 
 merry-making. As one reads the old letters and memoirs 
 the echoes of laughter reach us. One can almost see the 
 
62 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 young folks all coming together out of the Cathedral Close, 
 where so much of their time was passed; the beautiful 
 Honora, surrounded by friends and adorers, chaperoned by 
 the graceful Muse her senior, also much admired, and much 
 made of. Thomas Day is perhaps striding after them in 
 silence with keen critical glances ; his long black locks flow 
 unpowdered down his back. In contrast to him comes his 
 brilliant and dressy companion, Mr. Edgeworth, who talks 
 so agreeably. I can imagine little Sabrina, Day's adopted 
 foundling, of whom so many stories have been told, fol- 
 lowing shyly at her guardian's side in her simple dress 
 and childish beauty, and Andre's young handsome face 
 turned towards Miss Sneyd. So they pass on happy and 
 contented in each other's company, Honora in the midst, 
 beautiful, stately, reserved : she too was one of those not 
 destined to be old. 
 
 Miss Seward seems to have loved this friend with a 
 very sincere and admiring affection, and to have bitterly 
 mourned her early death. Her letters abound in 
 apostrophes to the lost Honora. But perhaps the poor 
 Muse expected almost too much from friendship, too 
 much from life. She expected, as we all do at times, that 
 her friends should be not themselves but her, that they 
 should lead not their lives but her own. So much at 
 least one may gather from the various phases of her style 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 63 
 
 and correspondence, and her complaints of Honora's 
 estrangement and subsequent coldness. Perhaps, also. 
 Miss Seward's many vagaries and sentiments may have 
 frozen Honora's sympathies. Miss Seward was all 
 asterisks and notes of exclamation. Honora seems to 
 have forced feeling down to its most scrupulous expres- 
 sion. She never lived to be softened by experience, to 
 suit herself to others by degrees : with great love she also 
 inspired awe and a sort of surprise. One can imagine her 
 pointing the moral of the purple jar, as it was told long 
 afterwards by her stepdaughter, then a little girl playing 
 at her own mother's knee in her nursery by the river. 
 
 People in the days of shilling postage were better 
 correspondents than they are now when we have to be 
 content with pennyworths of news and of affectionate in- 
 tercourse. Their descriptions and many details bring all 
 the chief characters vividly before us, and carry us into the 
 hearts and the pocket-books of the little society at Lich- 
 field as it then was. The town must have been an agree- 
 able sojourn in those days for people of some pretension 
 and small performance. The inhabitants of Tdchfield 
 seem actually to have read each other's verses, and having 
 done so to have taken the trouble to sit down and write 
 out their raptures. They were a pleasant lively company 
 living round about the old cathedral towers, meeting in the 
 
64 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 Close or the adjaceot gardens or the hospitable Palace 
 itself. Here the company would sip tea, talk mild litera- 
 ture of their own and good criticism at second hand, 
 quoting Dr. Johnson to one another with the familiarity 
 of townsfolk. From Erasmus Darwin, too, they must 
 have gained something of vigour and originality. 
 
 With all her absurdities Miss Seward had some real 
 critical power and appreciation ; and some of her lines 
 are very pretty.^ An ' Ode to the Sun ' is only what 
 might have been expected from this Lichfield Corinne. 
 Her best known productions are an ' Elegy on Captain 
 Cook,' a ' Monody on Major Andre,' whom she had known 
 from her early youth ; and there is a poem, ' Louisa,' of 
 which she herself speaks very highly. But even more 
 than her poetry did she pique herself upon her epistolary 
 correspondence. It must have been well worth while 
 writing letters when they were not only prized by the 
 writer and the recipients, but commented on by their 
 friends in after years. ' Court Dewes, Esq.,' writes, after 
 
 * In a notice of Miss Seward in the Animal Register, just after her 
 death in 1809, the writer, who seems to have known her, says : — * Conscious 
 of ability, she freely displayed herself in a manner equally remote from 
 
 annoyance and affectation Her errors arose from a glowing 
 
 imagination joined to an excessive sensibility, cherished instead of 
 repressed by early habits. It is understood that she has left the whole 
 of her works to Mr. Scott, the northern poet, with a view to their publi- 
 cation with her life and posthumous pieces.' 
 
MISS EDGEVVORTH. 65 
 
 five years, for copies of Miss Seward's epistles to Miss 
 Eogers and Miss Weston, of which the latter begins : — 
 ' Soothing and welcome to me, dear Sophia, is the regret 
 you express for our separation ! Pleasant were the weeks 
 we have recently passed together in this ancient and em- 
 bowered mansion ! I had strongly felt the silence and 
 vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. 
 How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the 
 friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in 
 which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of un- 
 availing melancholy!' Then follows a sprightly attack 
 before which Johnson may have quailed indeed. ' Is the 
 Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his 
 brother authors, and thirsts for its destruction, to be 
 allowed to gallop unmolested over the fields of criticism ? 
 A few pebbles from the well-springs of truth and elo- 
 quence are all that is wanted to bring the might of his 
 envy low.' This celebrated letter, which may stand as 
 a specimen of the whole six volumes, concludes with the 
 following apostrophe : — 'Virtuous friendship, how pure, how 
 sacred are thy delights ! Sophia, thy mind is capable of 
 tasting them in all their poignance : against how many of 
 life's incidents may that capacity be considered as a 
 counterpoise ! ' 
 
 There were constant rubs, which are not to be 
 
 F 
 
66 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 wondered at, between Miss Seward and Dr. Darwin, who, 
 though a poet, was also a singularly witty, downright man, 
 outspoken and humorous. The lady admires his genius, 
 bitterly resents his sarcasms ; of his celebrated work, the 
 ' Botanic Grarden,' she says, 'It is a string of poetic 
 brilliants, and they are of the first water, but the eye will 
 be apt to want the intersticial black velvet to give effect 
 to their lustre.' In later days, notwithstanding her 
 ' elegant language,' as Mr. Charles Darwin calls it, she said 
 several spiteful things of her old friend, but they seem 
 more prompted by private pique than malice. 
 
 If Miss Seward was the Minerva and Dr. Darwin the 
 Jupiter of the Lichfield society, its philosopher was 
 Thomas Day, of whom Miss Seward's description is so 
 good that I cannot help one more quotation : — 
 
 'Powder and fine clothes were at that time the appen- 
 dages of gentlemen ; Mr. Day wore not either. He was 
 tall and stooped in the shoulders, full made but not cor- 
 pulent, and in his meditative and melancholy air a degree 
 of awkwardness and dignity were blended.' She then 
 compares him with his guest, Mr. Edgeworth. ' Less 
 graceful, less amusing, less brilliant than Mr. E., but more 
 highly imaginative, more classical, and a deeper^reasoner ; 
 strict integrity, energetic friendship, open-handed gene- 
 rosity, and diffusive charity, greatly overbalanced on the 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH, 67 
 
 side of virtue, the tincture of misanthropic gloom and proud 
 contempt of common life society.' Wright, of Derby, painted 
 a full-length picture of Mr. Day in 1770. 'Mr. Day 
 looks upward enthusiastically, meditating on the contents 
 of a book held in his dropped right hand ... a flash of 
 lightning plays in his hair and illuminates the contents 
 of the volume.' ' Dr. Darwin,' adds Miss Seward, ' sat to 
 Mr. Wright about the same period — that was a simply 
 contemplative portrait of the most perfect resemblance.' 
 
 III. 
 
 Maria must have been three years old this eventful 
 Christmas time when her father, leaving his wife in Berk- 
 shire, came to stay with Mr. Day at Lichfield, and first 
 made the acquaintance of Miss Seward and her poetic 
 circle. Mr. Day, who had once already been disappointed 
 in love, and whose romantic scheme of adopting his found- 
 lings and of educating one of them to be his wife, has 
 often been described, had brought one of the maidens to 
 the house he had taken at Lichfield. This was Sabrina, as 
 he had called her. Lucretia, having been found trouble- 
 some, had been sent ofi" with a dowry to be apprenticed to 
 a milliner. Sabrina was a charming little girl of thirteen ; 
 everybody liked her, especially the friendly ladies at the 
 
 F 2 
 
68 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 Palace, who received her with constant kindness, as they 
 did Mr. Day himself and his visitor. What Miss Seward 
 thought of Sabrina's education I do not know. The poor 
 child was to be taught to despise luxury, to ignore fear, to 
 be superior to pain. She appears, however, to have been 
 very fond of her benefactor, but to have constantly pro- 
 voked him by starting and screaming whenever he fired 
 uncharged pistols at her skirts, or dropped hot melted 
 sealing-wax on her bare arms. She is described as lovely 
 and artless, not fond of books, incapable of understanding 
 scientific problems, or of keeping the imaginary and ter- 
 rible secrets with which her guardian used to try her nerves. 
 I do not know when it first occurred to him that Honora 
 Sneyd was all that his dreams could have imagined. One 
 day he left Sabrina under many restrictions, and returning 
 unexpectedly found her wearing some garment or hand- 
 kerchief of which he did not approve, and discarded her on 
 the spot and for ever. Poor Sabrina was evidently not meant 
 to mate and soar with philosophical eagles. After this 
 episode, she too was despatched, to board with an old lady, 
 in peace for a time, let us hope, and in tranquil mediocrity. 
 Mr. Edge worth approved of this arrangement ; he had 
 never considered that Sabrina was suited to his friend. 
 But being taken in due time to call at the Palace, he was 
 charmed with Miss Seward, and still more by all he 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 69 
 
 saw of Honora ; comparing her, alas ! in his mind ' with all 
 other women, and secretly acknowledging her superiority.' 
 At first, he says, Miss Seward's brilliance overshadowed 
 Honora, but very soon her merits grew upon the bystanders, 
 Mr. Edgeworth carefully concealed his feelings except 
 from his host, who was beginning himself to contemplate a 
 marriage with Miss Sneyd. Mr. Day presently proposed 
 formally in writing for the hand of the lovely Honora, and 
 Mr. Edgeworth was to take the packet and to bring back 
 the answer ; and being married himself, and out of the run- 
 ning, he appears to have been unselfishly anxious for his 
 friend's success. In the packet Mr. Day had written down 
 the conditions to which he should expect his wife to sub- 
 scribe. She would have to begin at once by giving up all 
 luxuries, amenities, and intercourse with the world, and 
 promise to continue to seclude herself entirely in his com- 
 pany. Miss Sneyd does not seem to have kept Mr. Edgeworth 
 waiting long while she wrote her answer decidedly saying 
 that she could not admit the unqualified control of a husband 
 over all her actions, nor the necessity for ' seclusion from 
 society to preserve female virtue.' Finding that Honora 
 absolutely refused to change her way of life, Mr. Day went 
 into a fever, for which Dr. Darwin bled him. Nor did he 
 recover until another Miss Sneyd, Elizabeth by name, made 
 her appearance in the Close. 
 
^o MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 Mr. Edgeworth, who was of a lively and active disposi- 
 tion, had introduced archery among the gentlemen of the 
 neighbourhood, and he describes a fine summer evening's 
 entertainment passed in agreeable sports, followed by 
 dancing «,nd music, in the course of which Honora's sister. 
 Miss Elizabeth, appeared for the first time on the Lichfield 
 scene, and immediately joined in the country dance. 
 There is a vivid description of the two sisters in Mr. 
 Edgeworth's memoirs, of the beautiful and distinguished 
 Honora, loving science, serious, eager, reserved ; of the 
 more lovely but less graceful Elizabeth, with less of energy,, 
 more of humour and of social gifts than her sister. Eliza- 
 beth Sneyd was, says Edgeworth, struck by Day's eloquence,, 
 by his unbounded generosity, by his scorn of wealth. His 
 educating a young girl for his wife seemed to her romantic 
 and extraordinary ; and she seems to have thought it pos- 
 sible to yield to the evident admiration she had aroused in 
 him. But, whether in fun or in seriousness, she represented 
 to him that he could not with justice decry accomplish- 
 ments and graces that he had not acquired. She wished 
 him to go abroad for a time to study to perfect himself in 
 all that was wanting ; on her own part she promised not to 
 go to Bath, London, or any public place of amusement 
 until his return, and to read certain books which he 
 recommended. 
 
MISS EDGEVVORTH. 71 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. Edgeworth had made no secret of his 
 own feeling for Honora to Mr. Day, 'who with all the 
 eloquence of virtue and of friendship ' urged him to fly, to 
 accompany him abroad, and to shun dangers he could not 
 hope to overcome. Edgeworth consented to this proposal, 
 and the two friends started for Paris, visiting Kousseau on 
 their way. They spent the winter at Lyons, as it was a 
 place where excellent masters of all sorts were to be found ; 
 and here Mr. Day, with excess of zeal — 
 
 put himself (says his friend) to every species of tortui-e, ordinary 
 and extraordinary, to compel his Antigallican limbs, in spite of 
 their natural rigidity, to dance and fence^ and manage the great 
 horse. To perform his promise to Miss E. Sneyd honourably, 
 he gave up seven or eight hours of the day to these exercises, 
 for which he had not the slightest taste, and for which, except 
 horsemanship, he manifested the most sovereign contempt. It 
 was astonishing to behold the energy with which he persevered 
 in these pursuits. I have seen him stand between two boards 
 which reached from the ground higher than his knees : these 
 boards were adjusted with screws so as barely to permit him to 
 bend his knees, and to rise up and sink down. By these means 
 Mr. Huise proposed to force Mr. Day's knees outwards ] but 
 screwing was in vain. He succeeded in torturing his patient ; 
 but original formation and inveterate habit resisted all his 
 endeavours at personal improvement. I could not help pitying 
 my philosophic friend, pent up in durance vile for hours 
 together, with his feet in the stocks, a book in his hand, and 
 contempt in his heart. 
 
 Mr. Edgeworth meanwhile lodged himself ' in excellent 
 
72 M/SS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 and agreeable apartments,' and occupied himself with engi- 
 neering. He is certainly curiously outspoken in his 
 memoirs ; and explains that the first Mrs. Edgeworth, 
 Maria's mother, with many merits, was of a complaining 
 disposition, and did not make him so happy at home as 
 a woman of a more lively temper might have succeeded in 
 doing. He was tempted, he said, to look for happiness 
 elsewhere than in his home. Perhaps domestic affairs 
 may have been complicated by a warm-hearted but trouble- 
 some little son, who at Day's suggestion had been brought 
 up upon the Kousseau system, and was in consequence 
 quite unmanageable, and ' a worry to everybody. Poor 
 Mrs. Edgeworth's complainings were not to last very long. 
 She joined her husband at Lyons, and after a time, having 
 a dread of lying-in abroad, returned home to die in her 
 confinement, leaving four little children. Maria could 
 remember being taken into her mother's room to see her 
 for the last time. 
 
 Mr. Edgeworth hurried back to England, and was met 
 by his friend Thomas Day, who had preceded him, and 
 whose own suit does not seem to have prospered meanwhile. 
 But though notwithstanding all his efforts Thomas Day 
 had not been fortunate in securing Elizabeth iSneyd's affec- 
 tions, he could still feel for his friend. His first words were 
 to tell Edgeworth that Honora was still free, more beautiful 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 73 
 
 than ever ; while Virtue and Honour commanded it, he 
 had done all he could to divide them ; now he wished to be 
 the first to promote their meeting. The meeting resulted 
 in an engagement, and Mr. Edgeworth and Miss Sneyd 
 were married within four months by the benevolent old 
 canon in the Lady Chapel of Lichfield Cathedral. 
 
 Mrs. Seward wept; Miss Seward, 'notwithstanding 
 some imaginary dissatisfaction about a bridesmaid,' was 
 really glad of the marriage, we are told ; and the young 
 couple immediately went over to Ireland. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Though her life was so short, Honora Edgeworth seems 
 to have made the deepest impression on all those she 
 came across. Over little Maria she had the greatest 
 influence. There is a pretty description of the child 
 standing lost in wondering admiration of her stepmother's 
 beauty, as she watched her soon after her marriage dressing 
 at her toilet-table. Little Maria's feeling for her step- 
 mother was very deep and real, and the influence of those 
 few years lasted for a lifetime. Her own exquisite careful- 
 ness she always ascribed to it, and to this example may 
 also be attributed her habits of order and self-government, 
 her life of reason and deliberate judgment. 
 
74 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 The seven years of Honora's married life seem to have 
 been very peaceful and happy. She shared her husband's- 
 pursuits, and wished for nothing outside her own home. 
 She began with him to write those little books which were 
 afterwards published. It is just a century ago since she 
 and Mr. Edgeworth planned the early histories of Harry 
 and Lucy and Frank ; while Mr. Day began his ' Sandford 
 and Merton,' which at first was intended to appear at the 
 same time, though eventually the third part was not 
 published till 1789. 
 
 As a girl of seventeen Honora Sneyd had once been 
 threatened with consumption. After seven years of 
 married life the cruel malady again declared itself ; and 
 though Dr. Darwin did all that human resource could do, 
 and though every tender care surrounded her, the poor 
 young lady rapidly sank. There is a sad, prim, most 
 affecting letter, addressed to little Maria by the dying 
 woman shortly before the end ; and then comes that one 
 written by the father, which is to tell her that all is over. 
 
 If Mr. Edgeworth was certainly unfortunate in losing 
 again and again the happiness of his home, he was more 
 fortunate than most people in being able to rally from his 
 grief. He does not appear to have been unfaithful in feel- 
 ing. Years after, Edgeworth, writing to console Mrs. Day 
 upon her husband's death, speaks in the most touching way 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH 75 
 
 of all lie had suffered when Honora died, and of the struggle 
 he had made to regain his hold of life. This letter is in 
 curious contrast to tliat one written at the time, as he sits 
 by poor Honora's deathbed ; it reads strangely cold and 
 irrelevant in these days when people are not ashamed of 
 feeling or of describing what they feel. ' Continue, my 
 dear daughter' — he writes to Maria, who was then thirteen 
 years old — ' the desire which you feel of becoming amiable, 
 prudent, and of use. The ornamental parts of a character, 
 with such an understanding as yours, necessarily ensue ; 
 but true judgment and sagacity in the choice of friends, 
 and the regulation of your behaviour, can be only had 
 from reflection, and from being thoroughly convinced of 
 what experience in general teaches too late, that to be 
 happy we must be good.' 
 
 ' Such a letter, written at such a time,' says the kind 
 biographer, 'made the impression it was intended to 
 convey ; and the wish to act up to the high opinion he r 
 father had formed of her character became an exciting 
 and controlling power over the whole of Maria's future 
 life.' On her deathbed, Honora urged her husband to 
 marry again, and assured him that the woman to suit 
 him was her sister Elizabeth. Her influence was so great 
 upon them both that, although Elizabeth was attached to 
 some one else, and Mr. Edgeworth believed her to be 
 
76 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 little suited to himself, they were presently engaged and 
 married, not without many difficulties. The result proved 
 how rightly Honora had judged. 
 
 It was to her father hat Maria owed the suggestion of 
 her first start in literature. Immediately after Honora's 
 death he tells her to write a tale about the length of a 
 'Spectator,' on the subject of generosity. 'It must be 
 taken from history or romance, must be sent the day 
 se'nnight after you receive this ; and I beg you will take 
 some pains about it.' A young gentleman from Oxford 
 was also set to work to try his powers on the same subject, 
 and Mr. William Sneyd, at Lichfield, was to be judge 
 between the two performances. He gave his verdict for 
 Maria : ' An excellent story and very well written : but 
 Where's the generosity?' This, we are told, became a 
 sort of proverb in the Edgeworth family. 
 
 The little girl meanwhile had been sent to school to a 
 certain Mrs. Lataffiere, where she was taught to use her 
 fingers, to write a lovely delicate hand-, to work white satin 
 waistcoats for her papa. She was then removed to a fashion- 
 able establishment in Upper Wimpole Street, where, says 
 her stepmother, 'she underwent all the usual tortures of 
 backboards, iron collars, and dumb-bells, with the unusual 
 one of being hung by the neck to draw out the muscles and 
 increase the growth, — a signal failure in her case.' (Miss 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 77 
 
 Edgeworth was always a very tiny person.) There is a 
 description given of Maria at this school of hers of the 
 little maiden absorbed in her book with all the other 
 children at play, while she sits in her favourite place in 
 front of a carved oak cabinet, quite unconscious of the 
 presence of the romping girls all about her. 
 
 Hers was a very interesting character as it appears in 
 the Memoirs — sincere, intelligent, self-contained, and yet 
 dependent; methodical, observant. Sometimes as one 
 reads of her in early life one is reminded of some of the 
 personal characteristics of the writer who perhaps of all 
 writers least resembles Miss Edgeworth in her art— of 
 Charlotte Bronte, whose books are essentially of the 
 modem and passionate school, but whose strangely mixed 
 character seemed rather to belong to the orderly and 
 neatly ruled existence of Queen Charlotte's reign. People's 
 lives as they really are don't perhaps vary very much, but 
 people's lives as they seem to be assuredly change with 
 the fashions. Miss Edgeworth and Miss Bronte were 
 both Irishwomen, who have often, with all their outcome, 
 the timidity which arises from quick and sensitive feeling. 
 But the likeness does not go very deep. Maria, whose 
 diffidence and timidity were personal, but who had a firm 
 and unalterable belief in family traditions, may have been 
 saved from some danger of prejudice and limitation by a 
 
78 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 most fortunate though trying illness which affected her 
 eyesight, and which caused her to be removed from her 
 school with its monstrous elegancies to the care of Mr. 
 Day, that kindest and sternest of friends. 
 
 This philosopher in love had been bitterly mortified 
 when the lively Elizabeth Sneyd, instead of welcoming 
 his return, could not conceal her laughter at his uncouth 
 elegancies, and confessed that, on the whole, she had 
 liked him better as he was before. He forswore Lich- 
 field and marriage, and went abroad to forget. He 
 turned his thoughts to politics ; he wrote pamphlets on 
 public subjects and letters upon slavery. His poem of 
 the ' Dying Negro ' had been very much admired. Miss 
 Hannah More speaks of it in her Memoirs. The subject 
 of slavery was much before people's minds, and Day's 
 influence had not a little to do with the rising indigna- 
 tion. 
 
 Among Day's readers and admirers was one person 
 who was destined to have a most important influence 
 npon his life. By a strange chance his extraordinary 
 ideal was destined to be realised ; and a young lady, good, 
 accomplished, rich, devoted, who had read his books, and 
 sympathised with his generous dreams, was^ready not only 
 to consent to his strange conditions, but to give him her 
 whole heart and find her best happiness in his society and 
 
M/SS EDGEWORTH. 79 
 
 in carrying out his experiments and fancies. She was Miss 
 Esther Milnes, of Yorkshire, an heiress ; and though at 
 first Day hesitated and could not believe in the reality of 
 her feeling, her constancy and singleness of mind were not 
 to be resisted, and they were married at Bath in 1778. 
 We hear of Mr. and Mrs. Day spending the first winter 
 of their married life at Hampstead, and of Mrs. Day, 
 thickly shodden, walking with him in a snowstorm on the 
 common, and ascribing her renewed vigour to her husband's 
 Spartan advice. 
 
 Day and his wife eventually established themselves at 
 Anningsley, near Chobham. He had insisted upon settling 
 her fortune upon herself, but Mrs. Day assisted him in 
 every way, and sympathised in his many schemes and 
 benevolent ventures. When he neglected to make a 
 window to the dressing-room he built for her, we hear of her 
 uncomplainingly lighting her candles ; to please him she 
 worked as a servant in the house, and all their large means 
 were bestowed in philanthropic and charitable schemes. 
 Mr. Edgeworth quotes his friend's reproof to Mrs. Day, 
 who was fond of music : ' Shall we beguile the time with 
 the strains of a lute while our fellow- creatures are 
 starving ? ' 'I am out of pocket every year about 300^. 
 by the farm I keep,' Day writes his to his friend Edgeworth. 
 * The soil I have taken in hand, I am convinced, is one of 
 
8o MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 the most completely barren in England.' He then goes 
 on to explain his reasons for what he is about. ' It enables 
 me to employ the poor, and the result of all my specula- 
 tions about humanity is that the only way of benefiting 
 mankind is to give them employment and make them earn 
 their money.' There is a pretty description of the worthy 
 couple in their home dispensing help and benefits all 
 round about, draining, planting, teaching, doctoring — 
 nothing came amiss to them. Their chief friend and 
 neighbour was Samuel Cobbett, who understood their 
 plans, and sympathised in their efforts, which, naturally 
 enough, were viewed with doubt and mistrust by most of 
 the people round about. It was at Anningsley that Mr.. 
 Day finished ' Sandford and Merton,' begun many years 
 before. His death was very sudden, and was brought about 
 by one of his own benevolent theories. He used to main- 
 tain that kindness alone could tame animals ; and he was 
 killed "by a fall from a favourite colt which he was breaking 
 in. Mrs. Day never recovered the shock. She lived two 
 years hidden in her home, absolutely inconsolable, and 
 then died and was laid by her husband's side in the church- 
 yard at Wargrave by the river. 
 
 It was to the care of these worthy people that little 
 Maria was sent when she was ill, and she was doctored by 
 them both physically and morally. ' Bishop Berkeley's 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 8r 
 
 tar-water was still considered a specific for all complaints,' 
 says Mrs. Edgeworth. ' Mr. Day thought it would be of 
 use to Maria's inflamed eyes, and he used to bring a large 
 tumbler full of it to her every morning. She dreaded hi& 
 " Now, Miss Maria, drink this." But there was, in spite of 
 his stern voice, something of pity and sympathy in his 
 countenance. His excellent library was open to her, and 
 he directed her studies. His severe reasoning and uncom- 
 promising truth of mind awakened all her powers, and the 
 questions he put to her and the working out of thtf 
 answers, the necessity of perfect accuracy in all her words, 
 suited the natural truth of her mind ; and though such 
 strictness was not agreeable, she even then perceived its 
 advantage, and in after life was grateful for it.' 
 
 V. 
 
 We have seen how Miss Elizabeth Sneyd, who could 
 not make up her mind to marry Mr. Day notwithstanding 
 all he had gone through for her sake, had eventually con- 
 sented to become Mr. Edgeworth's third wife. With this 
 stepmother for many years to come Maria lived in an 
 afifectionate intimacy, only to be exceeded by that most 
 faithful companionship which existed for fifty years be- 
 tween her and the lady from whose memoirs I quote. 
 
82 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 It was about 1 782 that Maria went home to live at 
 Edgeworthtown with her father and his wife, with the 
 many young brothers and sisters. The family was a large 
 one, and already consisted of her own sisters, of Honora 
 the daughter of Mrs. Honora, and Lovell her son. To 
 these succeeded many others of the third generation ; and 
 two sisters of Mrs. Edge worth's, who also made their home 
 at Edgeworthtown. 
 
 Maria had once before been there, very young, but she was 
 now old enough to be struck with the difference then so striking 
 between Ireland and England. The tones and looks, the 
 melancholy and the gaiety of the people, were so new and ex- 
 traordinary to her that the delineations she long afterwards made 
 of Irish character probably owe their life and truth to the im- 
 pression made on her mind at this time as a stranger. Though 
 it was June when they landed, there was snow on the roses 
 she ran out to gather, and she felt altogether in a new and 
 unfamiliar country. 
 
 She herself describes the feelings of the master of a family 
 returning to an Irish home : — 
 
 Wherever he turned his eyes, in or out of his home, damp 
 dilapidation, waste appeared. Painting, glazing, roofing, fencing, 
 finishing — all were wanting. The backyard and even the front 
 lawn round the windows of the house were filled with loungers, 
 followers, and petitioners ; tenants, undertenants, drivers, sub- 
 agent and agent were to have audience; and they all had 
 grievances and secret informations, accusations, reciprocations, 
 and quarrels each under each interminable. 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 85 
 
 Her account of her father's dealings with them is 
 admirable : — 
 
 I was with him constantly, and I was amused and interested 
 in seeing how he made his way through their complaints, 
 petitions, and grievances with decision and despatch, he all the 
 time in good humour with the people and they delighted with 
 him, though he often rated them roundly when they stood before 
 him perverse in litigation, helpless in procrastination, detected 
 in cunning or convicted of falsehood. They saw into his 
 character almost as soon as he understood theirs. 
 
 Mr. Edgeworth had in a very remarkable degree that 
 power of ruling and administering which is one of the 
 rarest of gifts. He seems to have shown great firmness and 
 good sense in his conduct in the troubled times in which 
 be lived. He saw to his own affairs, administered justice, 
 put down middlemen as far as possible, reorganised the 
 letting out of the estate. Unlike many of his neighbours, 
 he was careful not to sacrifice the future to present ease of 
 mind and of pocket. He put down rack-rents and bribes 
 of every sort, and did his best to establish things upon a 
 firm and lasting basis. 
 
 But if it was not possible even for Mr. Edgeworth to make 
 such things all they should have been outside the house, 
 the sketch given of the family life at home is very pleasant. 
 The father lives in perfect confidence with his children, 
 admitting them to his confidence, interesting them in his 
 
 a 2 
 
84 ■ MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 experiments, spending his days with them, consulting them. 
 There are no reservations; he does his business in the 
 great sitting-room, surrounded by his family. I have 
 heard it described as a large ground-floor room, with 
 windows to the garden and with two columns supporting 
 the further end, by one of which Maria's writing-desk 
 used to be placed — a desk which her father had devised 
 for her, which used to be drawn out to the fireside when 
 she worked. Does not Mr. Edgeworth also mention in 
 one of his letters a picture of Thomas Day hanging over 
 a sofa against the wall ? Books in plenty there were, we 
 may be sure, and perhaps models of ingenious machines 
 and different appliances for scientific work. Sir Henry 
 Holland and Mr. Ticknor give a curious description of 
 Mr. Edgeworth's many ingenious inventions. There were 
 strange locks to the rooms and telegraphic despatches to 
 the kitchen ; clocks at the one side of the house were 
 wound "up by simply opening certain doors at the other 
 end. It has been remarked that all Miss Edgeworth's 
 heroes had a smattering of science. Several of her brothers 
 inherited her father's turn for it. We hear of them raising 
 steeples and establishing telegraphs in partnership with 
 him. Maria shared of the family labours and used to 
 help her father in the business connected with the estate, 
 to assist him, also, to keep the accounts. She had a special 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH, 85 
 
 turn for accounts, and she was pleased with her exquisitely 
 neat columns and by the accuracy with which her figures 
 fell into their proper places. Long after her father's death 
 this knowledge and experience enabled her to manage the 
 estate for her eldest stepbrother, Mr. Lovell Edgeworth. 
 She was able, at a time of great national difficulty and 
 anxious crisis, to meet a storm in which many a larger 
 fortune was wrecked. 
 
 But in 1782 she was a young girl only beginning life. 
 Storms were not yet, and she was putting out her wings 
 in the sunshine. Her father set her to translate ' Adele et 
 Theodore,' by Madame de Grenlis (she had a great facility 
 for languages, and her French was really remarkable). 
 Holcroft's version of the book, however, appeared, and the 
 Edgeworth translation was never completed. Mr. Day 
 wrote a letter to congratulate Mr. Edgeworth on the 
 occasion. It seemed horrible to Mr. Day that a woman 
 should appear in print. 
 
 It is possible that the Edgeworth family was no ex- 
 ception to the rule by which large and clever and animated 
 families are apt to live in a certain atmosphere of their 
 own. But, notwithstanding this strong family bias, few 
 people can have seen more of the world, felt its temper 
 more justly, or appreciated more fully the interesting 
 varieties of people to be found in it than Maria Edge- 
 
86 MISS EDGEWORTH, 
 
 worth. Witlnn easy reach of Edgeworthtown were dif- 
 ferent agreeable and cultivated houses. There was Paken- 
 ham Hall with Lord Longford for its master ; one of its 
 daughters was the future Duchess of Wellington, ' who wa& 
 always Kitty Pakenham for her old friends.' There at 
 Castle Forbes also lived, I take it, more than one of the 
 well-bred and delightful persons, out of ' Patronage,' and 
 the * Absentee,' who may, in real life, have borne the 
 names of Lady Moira and Lady Grranard. Besides, there 
 were cousins and relations without number — Foxes, 
 Ruxtons, marriages and intermarriages ; and when the 
 time came for occasional absences and expeditions from 
 home, the circles seem to have spread incalculably in every 
 direction. The Edgeworths appear to have been a genuinely 
 sociable clan, interested in others and certainly interesting 
 to them. 
 
 VL 
 
 The first letter given in the Memoirs from Maria to 
 her favourite aunt Euxton is a very sad one, which tells 
 of the early death of her sister Honora, a beautiful girl of 
 fifteen, the only daughter of Mrs. Honora Edgeworth, who 
 died of consumption, as her mother had died.^ This letter, 
 written in the dry phraseology of the time, is nevertheless 
 full of feeling, above all for her father who was, as Maria 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH, 87 
 
 says elsewhere, ever since she could think or feel, the first 
 object and motive of her mind. 
 
 Mrs. Edgeworth describes her sister-in-law as follows : — 
 
 Mrs. Kuxton resembled her brother in the wit and vivacity 
 of her mind and strong affections; her grace and charm of 
 manner were such that a gentleman once said of her ; ' If I 
 were to see Mrs. Kuxton in rags as a beggar woman sitting on 
 the doorstep, I should say " Madam " to her.' ' To write to her 
 Aunt Ruxton was, as long as she lived, Maria's greatest pleasure 
 while away from her,' says Mrs. Edgeworth, * and to be with her 
 was a happiness she enjoyed with never flagging and supreme 
 delight. Blackcastle was within a few hours' drive of Edge- 
 worthtown, and to go to Blackcastle was the holiday of her life.* 
 
 Mrs. Edgeworth tells a story of Maria once staying at 
 Blackcastle and tearing out the title page of ' Belinda,' so 
 that her aunt, Mrs. Ruxton, read the book without any 
 suspicion of the author. She was so delighted with it that 
 she insisted on Maria listening to page after page, exclaim- 
 ing ' Is not that admirably written ? ' ' Admirably read, 
 I think,' said Maria ; until her aunt, quite provoked by her 
 faint acquiescence, says, ' I am sorry to see my little Maria 
 unable to bear the praises of a rival author ; ' at which 
 poor Maria burst into tears, and Mrs. Kuxton could never 
 bear the book mentioned afterwards. 
 
 It was with Mrs. Euxton that a little boy, born just 
 after the death of the author of ' Sandford and Merton,' 
 
S8 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 was left on the occasion of the departure of the Edgeworth ' 
 family for Clifton, in 1792, where Mr. Edgeworth spent a 
 couple of years for the health of one of his sons. In July 
 the poor little brother dies in Ireland. * There does 
 not, now that little Thomas is gone, exist even a person 
 of the same name as Mr. Day,' says Mr. Edgeworth, 
 who concludes his letter philosophically, as the father of 
 twenty children may be allowed to do, by expressing a 
 hope that to his nurses, Mrs. Euxton and her daughter, 
 ^ the remembrance of their own goodness will soon 
 obliterate the painful impression of his miserable end.' 
 During their stay at Clifton Kichard Edgeworth, the 
 eldest son, who had been brought up upon Eousseau's 
 system, and who seems to have found the Old World too 
 restricted a sphere for his energies, after going to sea and 
 disappearing for some years, suddenly paid them a visit 
 from South Carolina, where he had settled and married. 
 The young man was gladly welcomed by them all. He 
 had been long separated from home, and he eventually 
 died very young in America ; but his sister always clung 
 to him with fond affection, and when he left them to 
 return home she seems to have felt his departure very 
 much. ' Last Saturday my poor brother Richard took 
 leave of us to return to America. He has gone up to 
 London with my father and mother, and is to sail from 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 89 
 
 thence. We could not part from him without great pain 
 and regret, for he made us all extremely fond of him.' 
 
 Notwithstanding these melancholy events, Maria Edge- 
 worth seems to have led a happy busy life all this time 
 among her friends, lier relations, her many interests, her 
 many fancies and facts, making much of the children, of 
 whom she writes pleasant descriptions to her aunt. 
 ^ Charlotte is very engaging and promises to be handsome. 
 Sneyd is, and promises everything. Henry will, I think, 
 through life always do more than he promises. Little 
 Honora is a sprightly blue-eyed child at nurse with a 
 woman who is the picture of health and simplicity. 
 Lovell is perfectly well. Doctor Darwin has paid him 
 very handsome compliments on his lines on the Barbarini 
 Vase in the first part of the '* Botanic Grarden." ' 
 
 Mr. Edgeworth, however, found the time long at 
 Olifton, though, as usual, he at once improved his 
 opportunities, paid visits to his friends in London and 
 elsewhere, and renewed many former intimacies and corre- 
 spondences. 
 
 Maria also paid a visit to London, but the time had 
 not come for hei: to enjoy society, and the extreme shyness 
 of which Mrs. Edgeworth speaks made it pain to her to 
 be in society in those early days. ' Since I have been 
 away from home,' she writes, ' I have missed the society of 
 
90 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 my father, mother, and sisters more than I can express, and 
 more than beforehand I could have thought possible. I 
 long to see them all again. Even when I am most amused 
 I feel a void, and nojv I understand what an aching void 
 is perfectly.' Very soon we hear of her at home again^ 
 ' scratching away at the Freeman family.' Mr. Edgeworth 
 is reading aloud Gay's ' Trivia ' among other things, which 
 she recommends to her aunt. ' I had much rather make 
 a bargain with any one I loved to read the same books with 
 them at the same hour than to look at the moon like 
 Rousseau's famous lovers.' There is another book, a new 
 book for the children, mentioned about this time, ' Evenings 
 at Home,' which they all admire imniensely. 
 
 Miss Edgeworth was now about twenty-six, at an age 
 when a woman's powers have fully ripened ; a change comes 
 over her style ; there is a fulness of description in her letters 
 and a security of expression which show maturity. Her 
 habit of writing was now established, and she describes 
 the constant interest her father took and his share in all 
 she did. Some of the slighter stories she first wrote upon 
 a slate and read out to her brothers and sisters ; others she 
 sketched for her father's approval, and arranged and altered 
 as he suggested. The letters for literary ladies were with 
 the publishers by this time, and these were followed by 
 various stories and early lessons, portions of ' Parents ' 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 91 
 
 Assistant,' and of popular tales, all of which were sent out 
 in packets and lent from one member of the family to 
 another before finally reaching Mr. Johnson, the publisher's, 
 hands. Maria Edgeworth in some of her letters from 
 Clifton alludes with some indignation to the story of 
 Mrs. Hannah More's ungrateful 'protegee Lactilla, the 
 literary milkwoman, whose poems Hannah More was at 
 such pains to bring before the world, and for whom, with 
 her kind preface and warm commendations and subscrip- 
 tion list, she was able to obtain the large sum of 500^. 
 The ungrateful Lactilla, who had been starving when 
 Mrs. More found her out, seems to have lost her head in 
 this sudden prosperity, and to have accused her bene- 
 factress of wishing to steal a portion of the money. Maria 
 Edgeworth must have been also interested in some family 
 marriages which took place about this time. Her own 
 sister Anna became engaged to Dr. Beddoes, of Clifton, 
 whose name appears as prescribing for the authors of various 
 memoirs of that day. He is ' a man of ability, of a great 
 name in the scientific world,' says Mr. Edgeworth, who 
 favoured the Doctor's ' declared passion,' as a proposal was 
 then called, and the marriage accordingly took place on 
 their return to Ireland. Emmeline, another sister, was 
 soon after married to Mr. King, a surgeon, also living at 
 Bristol, and Maria was now left the only remaining 
 
92 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 daughter of the first marriage, to be good aunt, sister, 
 friend to all the younger members of the party. She was 
 all this, but she herself expressly states that her father would 
 never allow her to be turned into a nursery drudge ; her 
 share of the family was limited to one special little boy. 
 Meanwhile her pen-and-ink children are growing up, and 
 starting out in the world on their own merits. 
 
 ' I beg, dear Sophy,' she writes to her cousin, ' that 
 you will not call my little stories by the sublime name of 
 my works ; I shall else be ashamed when the little mouse 
 comes forth. The stories are printed and bound the same 
 size as ' Evenings at Home,' but I am afraid you will 
 dislike the title. My father had sent the ' Parents' 
 Friend,' but Mr. Johnson has degraded it into ' Parents' 
 Assistant.' 
 
 In 1797, says Miss Beaufort, who was to be so soon 
 more intimately connected with the Edgeworth family, 
 Johnson wished to publish more volumes of the ' Parents' 
 Assistant' on fine paper, with prints, and. Mrs. Kuxton 
 asked me to make some designs for them. These 
 designs seem to have given great satisfaction to the 
 Edgeworth party, and especially to a little boy called 
 William, Mrs. Edgeworth's youngest boy, wjio grew up to 
 be a fine young man, but who died young of the cruel 
 family complaint. Mrs. Edgeworth's health was also 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 93 
 
 failing all this time — ' Though she makes epigrams she is 
 far from well,' says Maria ; but they, none of them seem 
 seriously alarmed. Mr. Edgeworth, in the intervals of 
 politics, is absorbed in a telegraph, which, with the help 
 of his sons, he is trying to establish. It is one which will 
 act by night as well as by day. 
 
 It was a time of change and stir for Ireland, disaffec- 
 tion growing and put down for a time by the soldiers ; 
 armed bands going about ' defending ' the country and 
 breaking its windows. In 1794 threats of a French in- 
 vasion had alarmed everybody, and now again in 1796 
 came rumours of every description, and Mr. Edgeworth, 
 was very much disappointed that his proposal for estab- 
 lishing a telegraph across the water to England was re- 
 jected by Grovernment. He also writes to Dr. Darwin 
 that he had offered himself as a candidate for the county, 
 and been obliged to relinquish at the last moment ; but 
 these minor disappointments were lost in the trouble 
 which fell upon the household in the following year — the 
 death of the mother of the family, who sank rapidly and 
 died of consumption in 1797. 
 
94 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 VII. 
 
 When Mr. Edgeworth himself died (not, as we may 
 l3e sure, without many active post-mortem wishes and 
 directions) he left his entertaining Memoirs half finished, 
 and he desired his daughter Maria in the most emphatic 
 way to complete them, and to publish them without 
 changing or altering anything that he had written. 
 People reading them were surprised by the contents ; many 
 blamed Miss Edgeworth for making them public, not 
 knowing how solemn and binding these dying commands 
 of her father's had been, says Mrs. Leadbeater, writing at 
 the time to Mrs. Trench. Many severe and wounding 
 reviews appeared, and this may have influenced Miss 
 Edgeworth in her own objection to having her Memoirs 
 published by her family. 
 
 Mr." Edgeworth's life was most extraordinary, com- 
 prising in fact three or four lives in the place of that one 
 usually allowed to most people, some of us having to be 
 moderately content with ahalf or three-quarters of existence. 
 But his versatility of mind was no less remarkable than 
 his tenacity of purpose and strength of affection, though 
 some measure of sentiment must have certainly been 
 wanting, and his fourth marriage must have taken most 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 95 
 
 people by surprise. The writer once expressed her sur- 
 prise at the extraordinary influence that Mr. Edgeworth 
 seenis to have had over women and over the many 
 members of his family who continued to reside in his 
 home after all the various changes which had taken place 
 
 there. Lady S to whom she spoke is one who has 
 
 seen more of life than most of us, who has for years 
 past carried help to the far-away and mysterious East, but 
 whose natural place is at home in the more prosperous and 
 unattainable West End. This lady said, ' You do not in 
 the least understand what my Uncle Edgeworth was. I 
 never knew anything like him. Brilliant, full of energy 
 and charm, he was something quite extraordinary and 
 irresistible. If you had known him you would not have 
 wondered at anything.' 
 
 * I had in the spring of that year (1797) paid my first visit 
 to Edgeworthtown with my mother and sister/ writes Miss 
 Beaufort, afterwards Mrs. Edgeworth, the author of the Memoirs. 
 ' My father had long before been there, and had frequently met 
 Mr. Edgev/orth at Mrs. Buxton's. In 1795 my father was 
 presented to the living of Collon, in the county of Louth, 
 where he resided from that time. His vicarage was within five 
 minutes' walk of the residence of Mr. Foster, then Speaker of 
 the Irish House of Commons, the dear friend of Mr. Edgeworth, 
 who came to Collon in the spring of 1798 several times, and at 
 last ofiered me his hand, which I accepted.' 
 
 Maria, who was at first very much opposed to the match. 
 
96 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 would not have been herself the most devoted and faithful 
 of daughters if she had not eventually agreed to her 
 father's wishes, and, as daughters do, come by degrees to 
 feel with him and to see with his eyes. The influence of 
 a father over a daughter where real sympathy exists is one 
 of the very deepest and strongest that can be imagined. 
 Miss Beaufort herself seems also to have had some special 
 attraction for Maria. She was about her own age. She 
 must have been a person of singularly sweet character and 
 gentle liberality of mind. ' You will come into a new 
 family, but you will not come as a stranger, dear Miss 
 Beaufort,' writes generous Maria. ' You will not lead a 
 new life, but only continue to lead the life you have been 
 used to in your own happy cultivated family.' And her 
 stepmother in a few feeling words describes all that Maria 
 was to her from the very first when she came as a bride to 
 the home where the sisters and the children of the lately 
 lost wife were all assembled to meet her. 
 
 It gives an unpleasant thrill to read of the newly- 
 married lady coming along to her home in a postchaise, and 
 seeing something odd on the side of the road. ' Look to 
 the other side ; don't look at it,' says Mr. Edgeworth ; and 
 when they had passed he tells his bride that it was the 
 body of a man hung by the rebels between the shafts of a 
 car. 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 97 
 
 The family at Edgeworthtown consisted of two ladies, 
 sisters of the late Mrs. Edgeworth, who made it their 
 home, and of Maria, the last of the first family. Lovell, 
 now the eldest son, was away ; but there were also four 
 daughters and three sons at home. 
 
 All agreed in making me feel at once at home and part of 
 the family ; all received me with the most unaffected cordiality ; 
 but from Maria it was something more. She more than ful- 
 filled the promise of her letter ; she made me at once her most 
 intimate friend, and in every trifle of the day treated me with 
 the most generous confidence. 
 
 Those times were even more serious than they are 
 now ; we hear of Mr. Bond, the High Sheriff, paying ' a 
 pale visit ' to Edgeworthtown. ' I am going on in the old 
 way, writing stories,' says Maria Edgeworth, writing in 
 1798. ' I cannot be a captain of dragoons, and sitting 
 with my hands before me would not make any one of us 
 one degree safer. . . . Simple Susan went to Foxhall a few 
 days ago for Lady Anne to carry her to England.' . . . ' My 
 father has made our little rooms so nice for us,' she con- 
 tinues ; ' they are all fresh painted and papered. Oh ! 
 rebels, oh ! French spare them. We have never injured 
 you,' and all we wish is to see everybody as happy as our- 
 selves.' 
 
 On August 29 we find from Miss Edge worth's letter to 
 
98 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 her cousin that the French have got to Castlebar. ' The 
 Lord-Lieutenant is now at Athlone, and it is supposed it 
 will be their next object of attack. My father's corps of 
 yeomanry are extremely attached to him and seem fully in 
 earnest ; but, alas ! by some strange negligence, their arms 
 have not yet arrived from Dublin. . . . We, who are so 
 near the scene of action, cannot by any means discover 
 what number of the French actually landed ; some say 800, 
 some 1,800, some 18,000.' 
 
 The family had a narrow escape that day, for two 
 officers, who were in charge of some ammunition, offered to 
 take them under their protection as far as Longford. Mr. 
 Edgeworth most fortunately detained them. 'Half an 
 hour afterwards, as we were quietly sitting in the portico, 
 we heard, as we thought close to us, the report of a pistol 
 or a clap of thunder which shook the house. The officer 
 soon after returned almost speechless ; he could hardly ex- 
 plain what had happened. The ammunition cart, contain- 
 ing nearly three barrels of gunpowder, took fire, and burnt 
 half-way on the road to Longford. The man who drove 
 the cart was blown to atoms. Nothing of him could be 
 found. Two of the horses were killed ; others were blown 
 to pieces, and their limbs scattered to a distance. The 
 head and body of a man were found a hundred and twenty 
 yards from the spot. ... If we had gone with this 
 
iMISS EDGEWORTH. 99 
 
 ammunition cart, we must have been killed. An hour or 
 two afterwards we were obliged to fly from Edgeworth- 
 town. The pikemen, 300 in number, were within a mile 
 of the town ; my mother and Charlotte and I rode ; passed 
 the trunk of the dead man, bloody limbs of horses, and two 
 dead horses, by the help of men who pulled on our steeds 
 — all safely lodged now in Mrs. Fallon's inn.' ' Before we 
 had reached the place where the cart had been blown up,' 
 says Mrs. Edgeworth, ' Mr. Edgeworth suddenly recollected 
 that he had left on the table in his study a list of the 
 yeomanry corps which he feared might endanger the poor 
 fellows and their families if it fell into the hands of the 
 , rebels. He galloped back for it. It was at the hazard of 
 his life ; but the rebels had not yet appeared. He burned 
 the paper, and rejoined us safely.' The Men^oirs give a 
 , most interesting and spirited account of the next few days. 
 The rebels spared Mr. Edgeworth's house, although they 
 broke into it. After a time the family were told that all 
 was safe for their return, and the account of their coming 
 home, as it is given in the second volume of Mr. Edge- 
 worth's life by his daughter, is a model of style and 
 admirable description. 
 
 In 1799 Mr. Edgeworth came into Parliament for the 
 borough of St. Johnstown. He was a Unionist by con- 
 viction, but he did not think the times were yet ripe for 
 
 ?i2 
 
loo MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 the Union, and he therefore voted against it. In some of 
 his letters to Dr. Darwin written at this time, he says that 
 he was offered 3,000 guineas for his seat for the few 
 remaining weeks of the session, which, needless to say, he 
 refused, not thinking it weU, as he says, ' to quarrel with 
 w/yself.^ He also adds that Maria continues writing for 
 children under the persuasion that she cannot be more 
 serviceably employed ; and he sends (with his usual per- 
 spicuity) affectionate messages to the Doctor's ' good 
 amiable lady and his giant hrood,^ But this long friendly 
 correspondence was coraing to an end. The Doctor's 
 letters, so quietly humorous and to the point, Mr. Edge- 
 worth's answers with all their characteristic and lively 
 variety, were nearly at an end. 
 
 It was in 1800 that Maria had achieved her great 
 success, and published ' Castle Eackrent,' a book — not for 
 children this time — which made everybody talk who read, 
 and those read who had only talked before. This work 
 was published anonymously, and so great was its reputation 
 that some one was at the pains to copy out the whole of 
 the story with erasures and different signs of authenticity, 
 and assume the authorship. 
 
 One very distinctive mark of Maria Edgeworth's mind 
 is the honest candour and genuine critical faculty which is 
 hers. Her appreciation of her own work and that of 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. loi 
 
 others is unaffected and really discriminating, whether it 
 is 'Corinne' or a simple sti)r}r^T5^bi(?h;' she i,s^ reading, or 
 Scott's new novel the 'Firate,/ or ^cmfe' of l^ei^^^Vn' manu- 
 scripts which she estimates justly and reasonably. ' I have 
 read " Corinne" with my father, and I like it better than he 
 does. In one word, I am dazzled by the genius, provoked 
 by the absurdities, and in admiration of the taste and 
 critical judgment of Italian literature displayed through- 
 out the whole work : but I will not dilate upon it in a 
 letter. I could talk for three hours to you and my aunt.' 
 
 Elsewhere she speaks with the warmest admiration of 
 a ' Simple Story.' Jane Austen's books were not yet pub- 
 lished ; but another writer, for whom Mr. Edgeworth and 
 his daughter had a very great regard and admiration, was 
 Mrs. Barbauld, who in all the heavy trials and sorrows of 
 her later life found no little help and comfort in the 
 friendship and constancy of Maria Edgeworth. 'Mr. and 
 Mrs. Barbauld, upon Mr. Edgeworth's invitation, paid him 
 a visit at Clifton, where he was again staying in 1799, and 
 where the last Mrs. Edgeworth's eldest child was born. 
 There is a little anecdote of domestic life at this time in 
 the Memoirs which gives one a glimpse, not of an authoress, 
 but of a very sympathising and impressionable person. 
 ^ Maria took her little sister to bring down to her father, 
 but when she had descended a few steps a panic seized her, 
 
102 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 and she was afraid to go either backwards or forwards. 
 She sat dow^Q on the'^aixs-'afra^d she should drop the child, 
 afraid tl^at :it^'h,ea4 -would qpmeVoff, and afraid that her 
 father would find her sitting there and laugh at her, till 
 seeing the footman passing she called "Samuel" in a 
 terrified voice, and made him walk before her backwards 
 down the stairs till she safely reached the sitting-room.' 
 For all these younger children Maria seems to have had a 
 most tender and motherly regard, as indeed for all her 
 young brothers and sisters of the different families. Many 
 of them were the heroines of her various stories, and few 
 heroines are more charming than some of Miss Edgeworth's. 
 Rosamund is said by some to have been Maria herself, 
 impulsive, warm-hearted, timid, and yet full of spirit 
 and animation. 
 
 In his last letter to Mr. Edgeworth Dr. Darwin writes 
 kindly of the authoress, and sends her a message. The 
 letter is- dated April 17, 1802. ' I am glad to find you 
 still amuse yourself with mechanism in spite of the troubles 
 pf Ireland ; ' and the Doctor goes on to ask his friend to 
 come and pay a visit to the Priory, and describes the 
 pleasant house with the garden, the ponds full of fish, the 
 deep umbrageous valley, with the talkative sti;/sam running 
 down it, and Derby tower in the distance. The letter, so 
 kind, so playful in its tone, was never finished. Dr. Darwin 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 103 
 
 was writing as he was seized with what seemed a fainting 
 fit, and he died within an hour. Miss Edgeworth writes 
 of the shock her father felt when the sad news reached 
 him ; a shock, she says, which must in some degree be 
 experienced by every person who reads this letter of Dr. 
 Darwin's. 
 
 No wonder this generous outspoken man was esteemed 
 in his own time. To us, in ours, it has been given still 
 more to know the noble son of ' that giant brood,' whose 
 name will be loved and held in honour as long as people 
 live to honour nobleness, simplicity, and genius; those 
 things which give life to life itself. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 ' Calais after a rough passage ; Brussels, flat country, 
 tiled houses, trees and ditches, the window shutters 
 turned out to the street; fishwives' legs, Dunkirk, and 
 the people looking like wooden toys set in motion ; 
 Bruges and its mingled spires, shipping, and windmills.' 
 These notes of travel read as if Miss Edgeworth had been 
 writing down only yesterday a pleasant list of the things 
 which are to be seen two hours off, to-day no less plainly 
 than a century ago. She jots it all down from her corner 
 in the postchaise, where she is propped up with a father. 
 
I04 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 brother, stepmother, and sister for travelling companions, 
 and a new book to beguile the way. She is charmed with 
 her new book. It is the story of 'Mademoiselle de 
 Clermont,' by Madame de Grenlis, and only just out. The 
 Edgeworths (with many other English people) rejoiced in 
 the long-looked-for millennium, which had been signed 
 only the previous autumn, and they now came abroad to 
 bask in the sunshine of the Continent, which had been so 
 long denied to our mist-bound islanders. We hear of the 
 enthusiastic and somewhat premature joy with which this 
 peace was received by all ranks of people. Not only did 
 the English rush over to France ; foreigners crossed to 
 England, and one of them, an old friend of Mr. Edge- 
 worth's, had already reached Edgeworthtown, and inspired 
 its enterprising master with a desire to see those places and 
 things once more which he heard described. Mr. Edge- 
 worth was anxious also to show his young wife the 
 treasures .in the Louvre, and to help her to develop her 
 taste for art. He had had many troubles of late, lost 
 friends and children by death and by marriage. One can 
 imagine that the change must have been welcome to them 
 all. Besides Maria and Lovell, his eldest son, he took with 
 him a lovely young daughter, Charlotte Edgeworth, the 
 daughter of Elizabeth Sneyd. They travelled by Belgium, 
 stopping on their way at Bruges, at Grhent, and visiting 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 105 
 
 pictures and churches along the road, as travellers still 
 like to do. Mrs. Edgeworth was, as we have said, the 
 artistic member of the party. We do not know what 
 modern rhapsodists would say to Miss Edgeworth's very 
 subdued criticisms and descriptions of feeling on this 
 occasion. ' It is extremely agreeable to me,' she writes, 
 ■^ to see paintings with those who have excellent taste and 
 no affectation.' And this remark might perhaps be 
 thought even more to the point now than in the pre- 
 sesthetic age in which it was innocently made. The 
 travellers are finally landed in Paris in a magnificent 
 hotel in a fine square, * formerly Place Louis-Quinze, 
 afterwards Place de la Ee volution, now Place de la 
 Ooncorde.' And Place de la Concorde it remains, wars 
 and revolutions notwithstanding, whether lighted by the 
 flames of the desperate Commune or by the peaceful 
 sunsets which stream their evening glory across the blood- 
 stained stones. 
 
 The Edgeworths did not come as strangers to Paris ; 
 they brought letters and introductions with them, and 
 bygone associations and friendships which had only now 
 to be resumed. The well-known Abbe Morellet, their old 
 acquaintance, ' answered for them,' says Miss Edgeworth, 
 and besides all this Mr Edgeworth's name was well known 
 in scientific circles. Breguet, Montgolfier, and others 
 
io6 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 all made him welcome. Lord Henry Petty, as Maria's 
 friend Lord Lansdowne was then called, was in Paris, and 
 Rogers the poet, and Kosciusko, cured of his wounds. For 
 the first time they now made the acquaintance of M.- 
 Dumont, a lifelong friend and correspondent. There were 
 many others — the Delesserts, of the French Protestant 
 faction, Madame Suard, to whom the romantic Thomas 
 Day had paid court some thirty years before, and Madame 
 Campan, and Madame Recamier, and Madame de Remusat, 
 and Madame de Houdetot, now seventy-two years of age,, 
 but Rousseau's Julie still, and Camille Jordan, and the 
 Chevalier Edelcrantz, from the Court of the King of 
 Sweden. 
 
 The names alone of the Edgeworths' entertainers repre- 
 sent a delightful and interesting section of the history 
 of the time. One can imagine that besides all these 
 pleasant and talkative persons the Faubourg Saint-Grermain 
 itself Ihrew open its great swinging doors to the relations 
 of the Abbe Edgeworth who risked his life to stand by 
 his master upon the scaffold and to speak those noble 
 warm-hearted words, the last that Louis ever heard. One 
 can picture the family party as it must have appeared 
 with its pleasant British looks — the agreeable 'ruddy-faced' 
 father, the gentle Mrs. Edgeworth, who is somewhere 
 described by her stepdaughter as so orderly, so clean, so 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. io7 
 
 freshly dressed, the child of j&fteen, only too beautiful 
 and delicately lovely, and last of all Maria herself, the 
 nice little unassuming, Jeannie-Deans-looking body Lord 
 Byron described, small, homely, perhaps, but with her 
 gift of French, of charming intercourse, her fresh laurels 
 of authorship (for ' Belinda ' was lately published), her 
 bright animation, her cultivated mind and power of inter- 
 esting all those in her company, to say nothing of her own 
 kindling interest in every one and every thing round about 
 her. 
 
 Her keen delights and vivid descriptions of all these 
 new things, faces, voices, ideas, are all to be read in some 
 long and most charming letters to Ireland, which also 
 contain the account of a most eventful crisis which this 
 Paris journey brought about. The letter is dated March 
 1803, and it concludes as follows : — 
 
 Here, my dear aunt, I was interrupted in a manner that will 
 sui'prise you as much as it surprised me — by the coming of M. 
 Edelcrantz, a Swedish gentleman whom we have mentioned to 
 you, of superior understanding and mild manners. He came to 
 offer me his hand and heart ! My heart, you may suppose, 
 cannot return his attachment, for I have seen but very little of 
 him, and have not had time to have formed any judgment except 
 that I think nothing could tempt me to leave my own dear 
 friends and my own country to live in Sweden. 
 
 Maria Edgeworth was now about thirty years of age, at 
 
io8 MISS EDGEWORTH, 
 
 a time of life when people are apt to realise perhaps almost 
 more deeply than in early youth the influence of feeling, its 
 importance, and strange power over events. Hitherto 
 there are no records in her memoirs of any sentimental 
 episodes, but it does not follow that a young lady has not 
 had her own phase of experience because she does not 
 write it out at length to her various aunts and corre- 
 spondents. Miss Edge worth was not a sentimental person. 
 She was warmly devoted to her own family, and she seems 
 to have had a strong idea of her own want of beauty; 
 perhaps her admiration for her lovely young sisters may 
 have caused this feeling to be exaggerated by her. But 
 no romantic, lovely heroine could have inspired a deeper 
 or more touching admiration than this one which M. 
 Edelcrantz felt for his English friend ; the mild and 
 superior Swede seems to have been thoroughly in earnest. 
 So indeed was Miss Edgeworth, but she was not carried 
 away by the natural impulse of the moment. She realised 
 the many difiiculties and dangers of the unknown; she 
 looked to the future ; she turned to her own home, and 
 with an affection all the more felt because of the trial to 
 which it was now exposed. The many lessons of self- 
 control and self-restraint which she had learnt returned 
 with instinctive force. Sometimes it happens that people 
 miss what is perhaps the best for the sake of the next 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 109 
 
 best, and we see convenience and old habit and expediency, 
 and a hundred small and insignificant circumstances, 
 gathering like some avalanche to divide hearts that might 
 give and receive very much from each. But sentiment is 
 not the only thing in life. Other duties, ties, and realities 
 there are ; and it is difficult to judge for others in such 
 matters. Sincerity of heart and truth to themselves are 
 pretty sure in the end to lead people in the right direction 
 for their own and for other people's happiness. Only, in 
 the experience of many women there is the danger that 
 fixed ideas, and other people's opinion, and the force of 
 custom may limit lives which might have been complete 
 in greater things, though perhaps less perfect in the lesser. 
 People in the abstract are sincere enough in wishing fulness 
 of experience and of happiness to those dearest and nearest 
 to them ; but we are only human beings, and when the time 
 comes and the horrible necessity for parting approaches, 
 our courage goes, our hearts fail, and we think we are 
 preaching reason and good sense while it is only a most 
 natural instinct which leads us to cling to that to which 
 we are used and to those we love. 
 
 Mr. Edge worth did not attempt to influence Maria. 
 Mrs. Edgeworth evidently had some misgivings, and cer- 
 tainly much sympathy for the Chevalier and for her friend 
 and stepdaughter. She says : — 
 
no MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 Maria was mistaken as to her own feelings. She refused M. 
 Edelcrantz, but she felt much more for him than esteem and 
 admiration ; she was extremely in love with him. Mr. Edge- 
 worth left her to decide for herself; but she saw too plainly 
 what it would be to us to lose her and what she would feel at 
 parting with us. She decided rightly for her own future 
 happiness and for that of her family, but she suffered much 
 at the time and long afterwards. While we were at Paris I 
 remember that in a shop, where Charlotte and I were making 
 purchases, Maria sat apart absorbed in thought, and so deep in 
 reverie that when her father came in and stood opposite to her 
 she did not see him till he spoke to her, when she started 
 and burst into tears. . . . I do not think she repented of her 
 refusal or regretted her decision. She was well aware that she 
 could not have made M. Edelcrantz happy, that she would not 
 have suited his position at the Court of Stockholm, and that her 
 want of beauty might have diminished his attachment. It was 
 perhaps better she should think so, for it calmed her mind ; 
 but from what I saw of M. Edelcrantz I think he was a man 
 <}apable of really valuing her. I believe he was much attached 
 to her, and deeply mortified at her refusal. He continued to 
 Teside in Sweden after the abdication of his master, and was 
 always distinguished for his high character and great abilities. 
 He never married. He was, except for his very fine eyes, 
 remarkably plain. 
 
 So ends the romance of the romancer. There are, 
 however, many happinesses in life, as there are many 
 troubles. 
 
 Mrs. Edgeworth tells us that after her stepdaughter's 
 return to Edgeworthtown she occupied herself with various 
 
MISS EDGE WORTH. in 
 
 literary works, correcting some of her former MSS. for 
 the press, and writing ' Madame de Fleury,' ' Emilie de 
 Coulanges,' and 'Leonora.' But the high-flown and 
 romantic style did suit her gift, and she wrote best when 
 her genuine interest and unaffected glances shone with 
 bright understanding sympathy upon her immediate sur- 
 roundings. When we are told that ' Leonora ' was written 
 in the style the Chevalier Edelcrantz preferred, and that 
 the idea of what he would think of it was present to 
 Maria in every page, we begin to realise that for us at all 
 events it was a most fortunate thing that she decided as 
 she did. It would have been a loss indeed to the world if 
 this kindling and delightful spirit of hers had been 
 choked by the polite thorns, fictions, and platitudes of an 
 artificial, courtly life and by the well-ordered narrowness 
 of a limited standard. She never heard what the 
 Chevalier thought of the book ; she never knew that he 
 ever read it even. It is a satisfaction to hear that he 
 married no one else, and while she sat writing and not 
 forgetting in the pleasant library at home, one can 
 imagine the romantic Chevalier in his distant Court 
 faithful to the sudden and romantic devotion by which he 
 is now remembered. Romantic and chivalrous friendship 
 seems to belong to his country and to his countrymen. 
 
112 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 IX. 
 
 There are one or two other episodes less sentimental 
 than this one recorded of this visit to Paris, not the least 
 interesting of these being the account given of a call 
 upon Madame de Gen lis. The younger author from her 
 own standpoint having resolutely turned away from the voice 
 of the charmer for the sake of that which she is convinced 
 to be duty and good sense, now somewhat sterriiy takes the 
 measure of her elder sister, who has failed in the struggle, 
 who is alone and friendless, and who has made her fate. 
 
 The story is too long to quote at full length. An 
 isolated page without its setting loses very much; the 
 previous description of the darkness and uncertainty 
 through which Maria and her father go wandering, and 
 asking their way in vain, adds immensely to the sense of 
 the gloom and isolation which are hiding the close of a 
 long and brilliant career. At last, after wandering for a 
 long time seeking for Madame de Grenlis, the travellers 
 compel a reluctant porter to show them the staircase in 
 the Arsenal, where she is living, and to point out the door 
 before he goes off with the light. 
 
 They wait in darkness. The account of what happens 
 when the door is opened is so interesting that I cannot 
 refrain from quoting it at length : — 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 113 
 
 After ringing the bell we presently heard doors open and 
 little footsteps approaching nigh. The door was opened by a 
 girl of about Honora's size, holding an ill set-up, wavering 
 candle in her hand, the light of which fell full upon her face 
 and figure. Her face was remarkably intelligent — dark spark- 
 ling eyes, dark hair curled in the most fashionable long cork- 
 screw ringlets over her eyes and cheeks. She parted the 
 ringlets to take a full view of us. The dress of her figure by 
 no means suited the head and elegance of her attitude. What 
 her nether weeds might be we could not distinctly see, but 
 they seemed a coarse short petticoat like what Molly Bristow's 
 children would wear. After surveying us and hearing our 
 name was Edgeworth she smiled graciously and bid us follow 
 her, saying, ' Maman est chez elle.' She led the way with the 
 grace of a young lady who has been taught to dance across two 
 ante-chambers, miserable-looking ; but, miserable or not, no 
 home in Paris can be without them. The girl, or young lady, 
 for we were still in doubt which to think her, led into a small 
 room in which the candles were so well screened by a green tin 
 screen that we could scarcely distinguish the tall form of a lady 
 in black who rose from her chair by the fireside \ as the door 
 opened a great puff of smoke came from the huge fireplace at 
 the same moment. She came forward, and we made our way 
 towards her as well as we could through a confusion of tables, 
 chairs, and work-baskets, china, writing-desks and inkstands, 
 and birdcages, and a harp. She did not speak, and as her back 
 was now turned to both fire and candle I could not see her face 
 or anything but the outline of her form and her attitude. Her 
 form was the remains of a fine form, her attitude that of a 
 woman used to a better drawing-room. 
 
 I being foremost, and she silent, was compelled to speak to 
 the figure in darkness. ' Madame de Genlis nous a fait I'honneur 
 de nous mander qu'elle voulait bien nous permettre de lui rendre 
 
 I 
 
114 yl//55 EDGEWORTH. 
 
 visite,' said I, or words to that effect, to which she replied by 
 taking my hand and saying something in which * charmee ' was 
 the most intelligible word. While she spoke she looked over 
 my shoulder at my father, whose bow, I presume, told her he 
 was a gentleman, for she spoke to him immediately as if she 
 wished to please and seated us in fauteuils near the fire. 
 
 I then had a full view of her face — figure wqyj thin and 
 melancholy dark eyes, long sallow cheeks, compressed thin lips, 
 two or three black ringlets on a high forehead, a cap that Mrs. 
 Orier might wear — altogether in appearance of fallen fortunes, 
 worn-out health, and excessive but guarded irritability. To 
 me there was nothing of that engaging, captivating manner 
 which I had been taught to expect. She seemed to me to be 
 alive only to literary quarrels and jealousies. The muscles of 
 her face as she spoke, or as my father spoke to her, quickly and 
 too easily expressed hatred and anger. . . . She is now, you 
 know, devote achamee. . . . Madame de Genlis seems to have 
 "been so much used to being attacked that she has defence and 
 apologies ready prepared. She spoke of Madame de Stael's 
 * Delphine ' with detestation. . . . Forgive me, my dear Aunt 
 Mary ; you begged me to see her with favourable eyes, and I 
 went, after seeing her * Rosiere de Salency,' with the most favour- 
 able disposition, but I could not like her. . . . And from time 
 to time I saw, or thought I saw, through the gloom of lier 
 countenance a gleam of coquetry. But my father judges of 
 her much more favourably than I do. She evidently took 
 pains to please him, and he says he is sure she is a person over 
 whose mind he could gain great ascendency. 
 
 The ' young and gay philosopher ' at fifty is not 
 unchanged since we knew him first. Maria adds a post- 
 script: - 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 1 15 
 
 I had almost forgotten to tell you that the little girl who 
 showed us in is a girl whom she is educating. * Elle m'appelle 
 maman, mais elle n'est pas ma fiUe.' The manner in which 
 this little girl spoke to Madame de Grenlis and looked at her 
 appeared to me more in her favour than anything else. I 
 went to look at what the child was writing ; she was translating 
 Darwin's Zoonomici. 
 
 Every description one reads by Miss Edgeworth of 
 actual things and people makes one wish that she had 
 written more of them. This one is the more interesting 
 from the contrast of the two women, both so remarkable 
 and coming to so different a result in their experience of 
 life. 
 
 This eventful visit to Paris is brought to an eventful 
 termination by several gendarmes, who appear early one 
 morning in Mr. Edgeworth's bedroom with orders that he 
 is to get up and to leare Paris immediately. Mr. Edge- 
 worth had been accused of being brother to the Abbe de 
 Fermont. When the mitigated circumstances of his being 
 only a first cousin were put forward by Lord Whitworth, 
 the English Ambassador, the Edge worths received per- 
 mission to return from the suburb to which they had 
 retired; but private news hurried their departure, and 
 they were only in time to escape the general blockade and 
 detention of English prisoners. After little more than a 
 year of peace, once more war was declared on May 20, 1803. 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 Lovell, the eldest son, who was absent at the time and 
 travelling from Switzerland, was not able to escape in time ; 
 nor for twelve years to come was the young man able to 
 return to his own home and family. 
 
 X. 
 
 ' Belinda,' ' Castle Kackrent,' the ' Parents' Assistant,' 
 the ' Essays on Practical Education,' had all made their 
 mark. The new series of popular tales was also welcomed. 
 There were other books on the way ; Miss Edgeworth had 
 several MSS. in hand in various stages, stories to correct 
 for the press. There was also a long novel, first begun by her 
 father and taken up and carried on by her. The ' Essays 
 on Practical Education,' which were first published in 1 798, 
 continued to be read. M. Pictet had translated the book 
 into French the year before ; a third edition was published 
 some t&n years later, in 1811, in the preface of which the 
 authors say, ' It is due to the public to state that twelve 
 years' additional experience in a numerous family, and 
 careful attention to the results of other modes of education, 
 have given the authors no reason to retract what they have 
 advanced in these volumes.' 
 
 In Mr. Edgeworth's Memoirs, however, his daughter 
 states that he modified his opinions in one or two par- 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 117 
 
 ticulars ; allowing more and more liberty to the children, 
 and at the same time conceding greater importance to the 
 habit of early though mechanical efforts of memory. The 
 essays seem in every way in advance of their time ; many 
 of the hints contained in them most certainly apply to 
 the little children of to-day no less than to their small 
 grandparents. A lady whose own name is high in 
 the annals of education was telling me that she had 
 been greatly struck by the resemblance between the 
 Edgeworfch system and that of Froebel's Kindergarten 
 method, which is now gaining more and more ground in 
 people's estimation, the object of both being not so 
 much to cram instruction into early youth as to 
 draw out each child's powers of observation and atten- 
 tion. 
 
 The first series of tales of fashionable life came out in 
 1 809, and contained among other stories ' Ennui,' one of 
 the most remarkable of Miss Edgeworth's works. The 
 second series included the ' Absentee,' that delightful 
 story of which the lesson should be impressed upon us even 
 more than in the year 1812. The 'Absentee ' was at first 
 only an episode in the longer novel of ^ Patronage ; ' but 
 the public was impatient, so were the publishers, and 
 fortunately for every one the ' Absentee ' was printed as a 
 separate tale. 
 
ii8 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 ^Patronage' had been begun by Mr. Edgeworth to 
 amuse his wife, who was recovering from illness ; it was 
 originally called the ' Fortunes of the Freeman Family/ 
 and it is a history with a moral. Morals were more in 
 fashion then than they are now, but this one is obvious 
 without any commentary upon it. It is tolerably cer- 
 tain that clever, industrious, well-conducted people will 
 succeed, where idle, scheming, and untrustworthy persons 
 will eventually fail to get on, even with powerful friends 
 to back them. But the novel has yet to be written that 
 will prove that, where merits are more equal, a little 
 patronage is not of a great deal of use, or that people's 
 positions in life are exactly proportioned to their merit* 
 Mrs. Barbauld's pretty essay on the 'In consistency of Human 
 Expectations' contains the best possible answer to the 
 problem of what people's deserts should be. Let us hope 
 that personal advancement is only one of the many things 
 people "try for in life, and that there are other prizes a& 
 well worth having. Miss Edgeworth herself somewhere 
 speaks with warm admiration of this very essay. Of the 
 novel itself she says (writing to Mrs. Barbauld), ' It is so 
 vast a subject that it flounders about in my hands and 
 quite overpowers me.' 
 
 It is in this same letter that Miss Edgeworth mentions 
 another circumstance which interested her at this time, and 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 119 
 
 which was one of those events occurring now and again 
 which do equal credit to all concerned. 
 
 I have written a preface and notes [she says] — for I too 
 would be an editor — fcr a little book which a very worthy 
 countrywoman of mine is going to publish : Mrs. Leadbeater, 
 granddaughter to Burke's first preceptor. She is poor. She 
 has behaved most handsomely about some letters of Burke's to 
 her grandfather and herself. It would have been advantageous 
 to her to publish them ; but, as Mrs. Burke ^ — Heaven knows 
 why — objected, she desisted. 
 
 Mrs. Leadbeater was an Irish Quaker lady whose 
 simple and spirited annals of Ballitore delighted Carlyle 
 in his later days, and whose ' Cottage Dialogues ' greatly 
 struck Mr. Edge worth at the time ; and the kind 
 Edgeworths, finding her quite unused to public trans- 
 actions, exerted themselves in every way to help her. Mr. 
 Edgeworth took the MSS. out of the hands of an Irish 
 publisher, and, says Maria, ' our excellent friend's worthy 
 successor in St. Paul's Churchyard has, on our recom- 
 mendation, agreed to publish it for her.' Mr. Edgeworth's 
 own letter to Mrs. Leadbeater gives the history of his 
 good-natufed offices and their satisfactory results. 
 
 * Mrs. Burke, hearing more of the circumstances, afterwards sent 
 permission; but Mrs. Leadbeater being a Quakeress, and having once 
 2)romised not to publish, could not take it upon herself to break her 
 covenant. 
 
,120 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 From R. L. Edgeworth, July 5, 1810. 
 Miss Edgeworth desires me as a man of business to write 
 to Mrs. Leadbeater relative to the publication of * Cottage 
 Dialogues.' Miss Edgeworth has written an advertisement, and 
 will, with Mrs. Leadbeater's permission, write notes for an 
 English edition. The scheme which I propose is of two parts 
 — to sell the English copyright to the house of Johnson in 
 London, where we dispose of our own works, and to publish a 
 very large and cheap edition for Ireland for schools. ... I can 
 probably introduce the book into many places. Our family 
 takes 300 copies. Lady Longford 50, Dr. Beaufort 20, &c. . . . 
 I think Johnson & Co. will give 50Z. for the English copyright. 
 
 After the transaction Mr. Edgeworth wrote to the 
 publishers as follows : — 
 
 May 31, 1811 : Edgeworthtown. 
 
 My sixty-eighth birthday. 
 
 My dear Gentlemen, — I have just heard your letter to 
 Mrs. Leadbeater read by one who dropped tears of pleasure 
 from a sense of your generous and handsome conduct. I take 
 great pleasure in speaking of you to the rest of the world as 
 you deserve, and I cannot refrain from expressing to yourselves 
 the genuine esteem that I feel for you. I know that this direct 
 praise is scarcely allowable, but my advanced age and my close 
 connection with you must be my excuse. — Yours sincerely, 
 
 R. L. E. 
 
 Tears seem equivalent to something more than the 
 estimated value of Mrs. Leadbeater's labours. The 
 charming and well-known Mrs. Trench who was also Mary 
 Leadbeater's friend, writes warmly praising the notes. 
 ' Miss Edgeworth's notes on your Dialogues have as much 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 121 
 
 spirit and originality as if she had never before explored 
 the mine which many thought she had exhausted.' 
 
 All these are pleasant specimens of the Edgeworth 
 correspondence, which, however (following the course of 
 most correspondence), does not seem to have been always 
 equally agreeable. There are some letters (among others 
 which I have been allowed to see) written by Maria about 
 this time to an unfortunate young man who seems to have 
 •annoyed her greatly by his excited importunities. 
 
 I thank you [she says] for your friendly zeal in defence of 
 my powers of pathos and subUmity \ but I think it carries you 
 much too far when it leads you to imagine that I refrain, from 
 principle or virtue, from displaying powers that I really do not 
 possess. I assure you that I am not in the least capable of 
 writing a dithyrambic ode, or any other kind of ode. 
 
 One is reminded by this suggestion of Jane Austen also 
 declining to write ' an historical novel illustrative of the 
 august House of Coburg.' 
 
 The young man himself seems to have had some wild 
 aspirations after authorship, but to have feared criticism. 
 
 The advantage of the art of printing [says his friendly 
 Minerva] is that the mistakes of individuals in reasoning and 
 writing will be corrected in time by the public, so that the 
 cause of truth cannot suffer ; and I presume you are too much 
 of a philosopher to mind the trifling mortification that the 
 detection of a mistake might occasion. You know that some 
 sensible person has observed that acknowledging a mistake is 
 
122 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 saying, only in other words, that we are wiser to-day than we 
 were yesterday. 
 
 He seems at last to have passed the bounds of reason- 
 able correspondence, and she writes as follows : — 
 
 Your last letter, dated in June, was many months before it 
 reached me. In answer to all your reproaches at my silence I 
 can only assure you that it was not caused by any change in 
 my opinions or good wishes ; but I do not carry on what is 
 called a regular correspondence with anybody except with one 
 or two of my very nearest relations ; and it is best to tell the 
 plain truth that my father particularly dislikes my writing 
 letters, so I write as few as I possibly can, 
 
 XI. 
 
 While Maria Edgeworth was at work in her Irish 
 home, successfully producing her admirable delineations, 
 another woman, born some eight years later, and living in 
 the quiet Hampshire village where the elm trees spread so 
 greenly, was also at work, also writing books that were 
 destined to influence many a generation, but which were 
 meanwhile waiting unknown, unnoticed. Do we not all 
 know the story of the brown paper parcel lying unopened 
 for years on the publisher's shelf and containing Henry 
 Tilney and all his capes, Catherine Morland and all her 
 romance, and the great John Thorpe himself, uttering those 
 valuable literary criticisms which Lord Macaulay, writing 
 to his little sisters at home, used to quote to them ? ' Oh,. 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 123 
 
 Lord ! ' says John Thorpe, 'I never read novels ; I have other 
 things to do.' 
 
 A friend reminds us of Miss Austen's own indignant 
 outburst. ' Only a novel ! only " Cecilia," or " Camilla," 
 or " Belinda ; " or, in short, only some work in which the 
 greatest powers of the mind are displayed, the most 
 thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest 
 delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit 
 and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen 
 language.' If the great historian, who loved novels himself, 
 had not assured us that we owe Miss Austen and Miss 
 Edge worth to the early influence of the author of 
 ' Evelina,' one might grudge ' Belinda ' to such company 
 as that of ' Cecilia ' and ' Camilla.' 
 
 * Pride and Prejudice ' and ' Northanger Abbey ' were 
 published about the same time as ' Patronage ' and ' Tales 
 of Fashionable Life.' Their two authors illustrate, curiously 
 enough, the difference between the national characteristics 
 of English and Irish — the breadth, the versatility, the 
 innate wit and gaiety of an Irish mind ; the comparative 
 narrowness of range of an English nature ; where, however, 
 we are more likely to get humour and its never-failing 
 charm. Long afterwards Jane Austen sent one of her 
 novels to Miss Edgeworth, who appreciated it indeed, as 
 such a mind as hers could not fail to do, but it was with no 
 
124 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 such enthusiasm as that which she felt for other more 
 ambitious works, with more of incident, power, know- 
 ledge of the world, in the place of that one subtle quality 
 of humour which for some persons outweighs almost every 
 other. Something, some indefinite sentiment, tells people 
 where they amalgamate and with whom they are in- 
 tellectually akin ; and by some such process of criticism the 
 writer feels that in this little memoir of Miss Edgeworth 
 she has but sketched the outer likeness of this remarkable 
 woman's life and genius ; and that she has scarcely done 
 justice to very much in Miss Edgeworth, which so many 
 of the foremost men of her day could appreciate — a power, 
 a versatility, an interest in subjects for their own sakes, 
 not for the sakes of those who are interested in them, 
 which was essentially hers. 
 
 It is always characteristic to watch a writer's progress 
 in the estimation of critics and reviewers. In 1809 Miss 
 Edgeworth is moderately and respectfully noticed. ' As a 
 writer of novels and tales she has a marked peculiarity, 
 that of venturing to dispense common sense to her readers 
 and to bring them within the precincts of real life. With- 
 out excluding love from her pages she knows how to assign 
 to it its true limits.' In 1812 the revieweE, more used to 
 hear the author's praises on all sides, now starts from a 
 higher key, and, as far as truth to nature and delineation 
 
AIISS EDGEWORTH. 125 
 
 of character are concerned, does not allow a rival except 
 ' Don Quixote ' and ' Gril Bias.' The following criticism 
 is just and more to the point : — 
 
 To this power of masterly and minute delineation of cha- 
 racter Miss Edgeworth adds another which has rarely been 
 combined with the former, that of interweaving the peculiarities 
 of her persons with the conduct of her piece, and making them, 
 without forgetting for a moment their personal consistency, 
 conduce to the general lesson. . . . Her virtue and vice, 
 though copied exactly from nature, lead with perfect ease to a 
 moral conclusion, and are finally punished or rewarded by 
 means which (rare as a retribution in this world is) appear for 
 the most part neither inconsistent nor unnatural. 
 
 Then follows a review of ' Vivian ' and of the ' Absentee/ 
 which is perhaps the most admirable of her works. We 
 may all remember how Macaulay once pronounced that 
 the scene in the 'Absentee' where Lord Colambre dis- 
 covers himself to his tenantry was the best thing of the 
 sort since the opening of the twenty-second book of the 
 ' Odyssey.' 
 
 An article by Lord Dudley, which is still to be quoted, 
 appeared in the ' Quarterly Eeview ' in 1814. What he 
 says of her works applies no less to Miss Edgeworth's own 
 life than to the principles which she inculcates. 
 
 The old rule was for heroes and heroines to fall suddenly 
 and irretrievably in love. If they fell in love with the right 
 person so much the better ; if not, it could not be helped, and 
 
126 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 the novel ended unhappily. And, above all, it was held quite 
 irregular for the most reasonable people to make any use what- 
 •ever of their reason on the most important occasion of their 
 lives. Miss Edgeworth has presumed to treat this mighty 
 power with far less reverence. She has analysed it and found 
 it does not consist of one simple element, but that several 
 •common ingredients enter into its composition — habit, esteem, 
 a belief of some corresponding sentiment and of suitableness in 
 the character and circumstances of the party. She has pro- 
 nounced that reason, timely and vigorously applied, is almost a 
 specific, and, following up this bold empirical line of practice, 
 she has actually produced cases of the entire cure of persons 
 who had laboured under its operation. Her favourite qualities 
 are prudence, firmness, temper, and that active, vigilant good 
 sense which, without checking the course of our kind affections, 
 exercises its influence at every moment and surveys deliberately 
 the motives and consequences of every action. Utility is her 
 •object, reason and experience her means. 
 
 XII. 
 
 This review of Lord Dudley's must have come out 
 after a visit from the Edgeworth family to London in 
 1813, which seems to have been a most brilliant and 
 amusing campaign. * I know the homage that was paid 
 you,' wrote Mrs. Barbauld, speaking of the event, ' and I 
 exulted in it for your sake and for my sex's sake.' Miss 
 Edgeworth was at the height of her popularity, in good 
 spirits and good health. Mr. Edgeworth was seventy, but 
 Jie looked years younger, and was still in undiminished 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 127 
 
 health and vigour. The party was welcomed, feted, 
 sought after everywhere. Except that they miss seeing 
 Madame d'Arblay and leave London before the arrival of 
 Madame de Stael, they seem to have come in for every- 
 thing that was brilliant, fashionable, and entertaining. 
 They breakfast with poets, they sup with marquises, they 
 call upon duchesses and scientific men. Maria's old friend 
 the Duchess of Wellington is not less her friend than she 
 was in County Longford. Every one likes them and comes 
 knocking at their lodging-house door, while Maria up- 
 stairs is writing a letter, standing at a chest of drawers. 
 < Miss Edgeworth is delightful,' says Tom Moore, ' not 
 from display, but from repose and unafifectedness, the 
 least pretending person.' Even Lord Bry on writes warmly 
 of the authoress whose company is so grateful, and who 
 goes her simple, pleasant way cheerful and bringing kind 
 cheer, and making friends with the children as well as 
 with the elders. Many of these children in their lives 
 fully justified her interest, children whom we in turn have 
 known and looked up to as distinguished greyheaded men. 
 Some one asked Miss Edgeworth how she came to 
 imderstand children as she did, what charm she used to 
 win them. ' I don't know,' she said kindly ; ' I lie down 
 and let them crawl over me.' She was greatly pleased on 
 one occasion when at a crowded party a little girl suddenly 
 
128 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 started forth, looked at her hard, and said, ' I like simple 
 Susan best,' and rushed away overwhelmed at her own 
 audacity. The same lady who was present on this occasion 
 asked her a question which we must all be grateful to have 
 solved for us — how it happened that the respective places 
 of Laura and Rosamond came to be transposed in 
 ' Patronage,' Laura having been the wiser elder sister in 
 the ' Purple Jar,' and appearing suddenly as the younger 
 in the novel. Miss Edgeworth laughed and said that 
 Laura had been so preternaturally wise and thoughtful as 
 a child, she could never have kept her up to the mark, and 
 so she thought it best to change the character altogether. 
 During one of her visits to London Miss Edgeworth 
 went to dine at the house of Mr. Marshall ; and his 
 daughter. Lady Monteagle, tells a little story which gives 
 an impression, and a kind one, of the celebrated guest. 
 Everything had been prepared in her honour, the lights 
 lighted, the viands were cooked. Dinner was announced, 
 and some important person was brought forward to hand 
 Miss Edgeworth down, when it was discovered that she 
 had vanished. For a moment the company and the dinner 
 were all at a standstill. She was a small person, but 
 diligent search was made. Miss Edgeworth had last been 
 seen with the children of the house, and she was eventually 
 found in the back kitchen, escorted by the said children, 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 129 
 
 who, having confided their private affairs to her sym- 
 pathetic ear, had finally invited her to come with them 
 and see some rabbits which they were rearing down below. 
 A lady who used to live at Clifton as a little girl, and to 
 be sometimes prescribed for by Dr. King, was once brought 
 up as a child to Miss Edgeworth, and she told me how very 
 much puzzled she felt when the bright old lady, taking her 
 by the hand, said, ' Well, my dear, how do you do, and how 
 is my excellent brother-in-law ? ' One can imagine what a 
 vague sort of being an ' excellent brother-in-law ' would 
 seem to a very young child. 
 
 We read in Miss Edgeworth's memoir of her father 
 that Mr. Edgeworth recovered from his serious illness in 
 1814 to enjoy a few more years of life among his friends, 
 his children, and his experiments. His good humour and 
 good spirits were undiminished, and he used to quote an 
 old friend's praise of Hhe privileges and convenience of 
 old age.' He was past seventy, but he seems to have 
 continued his own education to the end of life. ' Without 
 affecting to be young, he exerted himself to prevent any of 
 his faculties from sinking into the indolent state which 
 portends their decay,' and his daughter says that he went 
 on learning to the last, correcting his faults and practising 
 his memory by various devices, so that it even improved 
 with age. 
 
 K 
 
I30 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 In one of his last letters to Mrs. Beaufort, his wife's 
 mother, he speaks with no little paternal pleasure of his 
 home and his children : * Such excellent principles, such 
 just views of human life and manners, such cultivated 
 understandings, such charming tempers make a little 
 Paradise about me ; ' while with regard to his daughter's 
 works he adds concerning the book which was about to 
 appear, ' If Maria's tales fail with the public, you will hear 
 of my hanging myself.' 
 
 Mr. Edgeworth died in the summer of 1817, at home, 
 surrounded by his family, grateful, as he says, to Providence 
 for allowing his body to perish before his mind. 
 
 During the melancholy months which succeeded her father's 
 death Maria hardly wrote any letters ; her sight was in a most 
 alarming state. The tears, she said, felt in her eyes like the 
 cutting of a knife. She had overworked them all the previous 
 winter, sitting up at night and struggling with her grief as she 
 wrote * Ormond.' She was now unable to use them without 
 pain. . '. . Edgeworthtown now belonged to Lovell, the eldest 
 surviving brother, but he wished it to continue the home of the 
 family. Maria set to work to complete her father's memoirs 
 and to fulfil his last wish. 
 
 It was not without great hesitation and anxiety that 
 she determined to finish writing her father's Life. There is 
 a touching appeal in a letter to her aunt Kuxton. ' I felt 
 the happiness of my life was at stake. Even if all the rest 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 131 
 
 of the world had praised it and you had been dissatisfied, 
 how miserable should I have been ! ' And there is another 
 sentence written at Bowood, very sad and full of remem- 
 brance : ' I feel as if I had lived a hundred years and 
 was left alive after everybody else.' The book came out, 
 and many things were said about it, not all praise. The 
 ' Quarterly ' was so spiteful and intolerant that it seemed 
 almost personal in its violence. It certainly would have 
 been a great loss to the world had this curious and 
 interesting memoir never been published, but at the 
 time the absence of certain phrases and expressions of 
 opinions which Mr. Edgeworth had never specially professed 
 seemed greatly to offend the reviewers. 
 
 The worst of these attacks Miss Edgeworth never read, 
 and the task finished, the sad months over, the poor eyes 
 recovered, she crossed to England. 
 
 XIIT. 
 
 One is glad to hear of her away and at Bowood reviving 
 in good company, in all senses of the word. Her old friend 
 Lord Henry Petty, now Lord Lansdowne, was still her 
 friend and full of kindness. Outside the house spread a 
 green deer-park to rest her tired eyes, within were pleasant 
 and delightful companions to cheer her soul. Sir Samuel 
 
 K 2 
 
132 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 Komilly was there, of whom she speaks with affectionate 
 admiration, as she does of her kind host and hostess. ' I 
 much enjoy the sight of Lady Lansdowne's happiness with 
 her husband and her children. Beauty, fortune, cultivated 
 society all united — in short, everything that the most 
 reasonable or unreasonable could wish. She is so amiable 
 and desirous to make others happy.' 
 
 Miss Edgeworth's power of making other people see 
 things as she does is very remarkable in all these letters ; 
 with a little imagination one could almost feel as if one 
 might be able to travel back into the pleasant society in 
 which she lived. When she goes abroad soon after with 
 her two younger sisters (Fanny, the baby whose head so 
 nearly came off in her arms, and Harriet, who have both 
 grown up by this time to be pretty and elegant young 
 ladies), the sisters are made welcome everywhere. In 
 Paris, as in London, troops of acquaintance came forward 
 to receive ' Madame Maria et mesdemoiselles ses soeurs,' 
 as they used to be announced. Most of their old friends 
 were there still ; only the children had grown up and were 
 now new friends to be greeted. It is a confusion of names 
 in visionary succession, comprising English people no less 
 than French. Miss Edgeworth notes it all with a sure 
 hand and true pen ; it is as one of the sketch-books of a 
 great painter, where whole pictures are indicated in a few 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 133 
 
 just lines. Here is a peep at the Abbaye aux Bois in 
 1820:— 
 
 We went to Madame Recamier in her convent, I'Abbaye 
 aux Bois, up seventy-eight steps. All came in with asthma. 
 Elegant room; she as elegant as ever. Matthieu de Mont- 
 morenci, the ex-Queen of Sweden, Madame de Boigne, a charm- 
 ing woman, and Madame la Marechale de , a battered 
 
 beauty, smelling of garlic and screeching in vain to pass as a 
 wit. . . . Madame Becamier has no more taken the veil than 
 I have, and is as little likely to do it. She is quite beautiful ; 
 she dresses herself and her little room with elegant simplicity, 
 and lives in a convent only because it is cheap and respectable. 
 
 One sees it all, the convent, the company, the last 
 refrain of former triumphs, the faithful romantic Matthieu 
 de Montmorenci, and above all the poor Marechale, who 
 will screech for ever in her garlic. Let us turn the page, 
 we find another picture from these not long past days : — 
 
 Breakfast at Camille Jordan's; it was half- past twelve 
 before the company assembled, and we had an houi''s delightful 
 conversation with Camille Jordan and his wife in her spotless 
 white muslin and little cap, sitting at her husband's feet as he 
 lay on the sofa ; as clean, as nice, as fresh, as thoughtless of 
 herself as my mother. At this breakfast we saw three of the 
 most distinguished of that party who call themselves 'les 
 Doctrinaires ' and say they are more attached to measures than 
 to men. 
 
 Here is another portrait of a portrait and its painter : — 
 
 Princess Potemkin is a Russian, but she has all the grace, 
 
134 MISS EDGEWORTH, 
 
 softness, winning manner of the Polish ladies. Oval face, pale, 
 with the finest, softest, most expressive chestnut dark eyes. 
 She has a sort of politeness which pleases peculiarly, a mixture 
 of the ease of high rank and early habit with something that is 
 sentimental without affectation. Madame le Brun is painting 
 her picture. Madame le Brun is sixty-six, with great vivacity 
 as well as genius, and better worth seeing than her pictures, 
 for though they are speaking she speaks. 
 
 Another visit the sisters paid, which will interest the 
 readers of IVIadame de la Eochejaquelin's memoirs of the 
 war in the Vendee : — 
 
 In a small bedroom, well famished, with a fire just lighted, 
 we found Madame de la Rochejaquelin on the sofa ; her two 
 daughters at work, one spinning with a distaff^ the other 
 embroidering muslin. Madame is a fat woman with a broad, 
 round, fair fece and a most benevolent expression, her hair cut 
 short and perfectly grey as seen under her cap ; the rest of the 
 face much too young for such grey locks ; and though her face 
 and bundled form all squashed on to a sofa did not at first 
 promise much of gentility, you could not hear her speak or 
 hear her for three minutes without perceiving that she was 
 well-bom and well-bred. 
 
 Madame de la Kochejaquelin seems to have confided in 
 Miss Edgeworth. 
 
 * I am always sorry when any stranger sees me, puree qvA 
 je sais qtte je detruis tovie illusion. Je sais que je devrais 
 avoir Vair d^une heroine.* She is much better than a heroine ; 
 she is benevolence and truth itself. 
 
 We must not forget the scientific world where Madame 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 135 
 
 Maria was no less at home than in fashionable literary 
 cliques. The sisters saw something of Cuvier at Paris ; in 
 Switzerland they travelled with the Aragos. They were on 
 their way to the Marcets at Greneva when they stopped at 
 Coppet, where ]Miss Edgeworth was always specially happy 
 in the society of Madame Auguste de Stael and Madame 
 de Broglie. But Switzerland is not one of the places 
 where human beings only are in the ascendant; other 
 influences there are almost stronger than human ones. ' I 
 did not conceive it possible that I should feel so much 
 pleasure from the beauties of nature as I have done since I 
 came to this country. The first moment when I saw Mont 
 Blanc will remain an era in my life — a new idea, a new 
 feeling standing alone in the mind.' Miss Edgeworth pre- 
 sently comes down from her mountain heights and, full of 
 interest, throws herself into the talk of her friends at 
 Coppet and Greneva, from which she quotes as it occurs to 
 her. Here is Rocca's indignant speech to Lord Byron, who 
 was abusing the stupidity of the Geneve se. ' Eh ! milord, 
 pourquoi venir vous fourrer parmi ces honnetes gens ? * 
 There is Arago's curious anecdote of Napoleon, who sent 
 for him after the battle of Waterloo, offering him a large 
 sum of money to accompany him to America. The 
 Emperor had formed a project for founding a scientific 
 colony in the New World. Arago was so indignant with 
 
136 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 him for abandoning his troops that he would have nothing 
 to say to the plan. A far more touching story is Dr. 
 Marcet's account of Josephine. ' Poor Josephine ! Do you 
 remember Dr. Marcet's telling us that when he breakfasted 
 with her she said, pointing to her flowers, " These are my 
 subjects. I try to make them happy " ? ' 
 
 Among other expeditions they made a pilgrimage to the 
 home of the author of a work for which Miss Edgeworth 
 seems to have entertained a mysterious enthusiasm. The 
 novel was called ' Caroline de Lichfield,' and was so much 
 admired at the time that Miss Seward mentions a gentle- 
 man who wrote from abroad to propose for the hand of the 
 authoress, and who, more fortunate than the poor Chevalier 
 Edelcrantz, was not refused by the lady. Perhaps some 
 similarity of experience may have led Maria Edgeworth to 
 wish for her acquaintance. Happily the time was past for 
 Miss Edgeworth to look back ; her life was now shaped and 
 moulded_in its own groove ; the consideration, the variety, 
 the difficulties of unmarried life were hers, its agreeable 
 change, its monotony of feeling and of unselfish happiness, 
 compared with the necessary regularity, the more personal 
 felicity, the less liberal interests of the married. Her life 
 seems to have been full to overflowing of practical occupa- 
 tion and consideration for others. What changing scenes 
 and colours, what a number of voices, what a crowd of out- 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 137 
 
 stretched hands, what interesting processions of people pass 
 across her path ! There is something of her father's 
 optimism and simplicity of nature in her unceasing bright- 
 ness and activity, in her resolutions to improve as time goes 
 on. Her young brothers and sisters grow to be men and 
 women ; with her sisters' marriages new interests touch her 
 warm heart. Between her and the brothers of the younger 
 generation who did not turn to her as a sort of mother 
 there may have been too great a difference of age for that 
 companionship to continue which often exists between a 
 child and a grown-up person. So at least one is led to 
 believe was the case as regards one of them, mentioned in a 
 memoir which has recently appeared. But to her sisters 
 she could be friend, protector, chaperon, sympathising 
 companion, and elder sister to the end of her days. We 
 hear of them all at Bowood again on their way back to 
 Ireland, and then we find them all at home settling down 
 to the old life, 'Maria reading Sevigne,' of whom she 
 never tires. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 One of the prettiest and most sympathetic incidents 
 in Maria Edgeworth's life was a subsequent expedition to 
 Abbotsford and the pleasure she gave to its master. They 
 
138 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 first met in Edinburgh, and her short account conjures up 
 the whole scene before us : — 
 
 Ten o'clock struck as I read this note. We were tired, we 
 were not fit to be seen, but I thought it right to accept Walter 
 Scott's cordial invitation, sent for a hackney coach, and just as 
 we were, without dressing, we went. As the coach stopped we 
 saw the hall lighted, and the moment the door opened heard the 
 joyous sounds of loud singing. Three servants' • The Miss 
 Edgeworths ! ' sounded from hall to landing-place, and as I 
 paused for a moment in the anteroom I heard the first sound of 
 Walter Scott's voice — * The Miss Edgeworths come ! ' The 
 room was lighted by only one globe lamp ; a circle were singing 
 loud and beating time : all stopped in an instant. 
 
 Is not this picture complete ? Scott himself she 
 describes as ' full of genius without the slightest effort at 
 expression, delightfully natural, more lame but not so 
 unwieldy as she expected.' Lady Scott she goes on to 
 sketch in some half-dozen words — ' French, large dark 
 eyes, civil and good-natured.' 
 
 When we wakened the next morning the whole scene of the 
 preceding night seemed like a dream [she continues] ; however 
 at twelve came the real Lady Scott, and we called for Scott at 
 the Parliament House, who came out of the Courts with joyous 
 face, as if he had nothing on earth to do or to think of but to 
 show us Edinburgh. 
 
 In her quick, discriminating way she looks round and 
 notes them all one by one. 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 139 
 
 Mr. Lockhart is reserved and silent, but he appears to have 
 much sensibility under this reserve. Mrs. Lockhart is very 
 pleasing — a slight, elegant figure and graceful simplicity of 
 manner, perfectly natural. There is something most winning 
 in her affectionate manner to her father. He dotes upon her, 
 
 A serious illness intervened for poor Maria before she 
 and her devoted young nurses could reach Abbotsford 
 itself. There she began to recover, and Lady Scott 
 watched over her and prescribed for her with the most 
 tender care and kindness. ' Lady Scott felt the attention 
 and respect Maria showed to her, perceiving that she 
 valued her and treated her as a friend,' says Mrs. Edge- 
 worth ; ' not, as too many of Sir Walter's guests did, with 
 neglect.' This is Miss Edgeworth's description of the 
 Abbotsford family life : — 
 
 It is quite delightful to see Scott and 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. 
 
 The return visit, when Scotland visited Ireland, was 
 no less successful. Mrs. Edgeworth writes : — 
 
 Maria and my daughter Harriet accompanied Sir Walter 
 and Miss Scott, Mr. Lockhart, and Captain and Mrs. Scott 
 to Killamey. They travelled in an open caleche of Sir 
 Walter's. . . . 
 
MMSS EDGEWOBTU. 
 
 Ife^al 
 
142 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 the twinkling of an eye — such an eye as his — he would 
 see all our manifold grievances up and down the country. 
 One word, one hon mot of his, would do more for us, I 
 
 guess, than 's four hundred pages and all the like 
 
 with which we have been bored.' 
 
 The two knew how to make good company for one 
 another ; the quiet-Jeanie-Deans body could listen as well 
 as give out. We are told that it was not so much that 
 she said brilliant things, but that a general perfume of 
 wit ran through her conversation, and she most certainly 
 had the gift of appreciating the good things of others. 
 Whether in that ^ scene of simplicity, truth, and nature ' 
 a London rout, or in some quiet Hampstead parlour talk- 
 ing to an old friend, or in her own home among books and 
 relations and interests of every sort, Miss Edgeworth 
 seems to have been constantly the same, with presence of 
 mind and presence of heart too, ready to respond to every- 
 thing. - I think her warmth of heart shines even brighter 
 than her wit at times. ' I could not bear the idea that 
 you suspected me of being so weak, so vain, so senseless,' 
 she once wrote to Mrs. Barbauld, 'as to have my head 
 turned by a little fashionable flattery.' If her head was 
 not turned it must have been because her spirit was stout 
 enough to withstand the world's almost irresistible 
 influence. 
 
Af/SS EDGEWORTH. 143 
 
 Not only the great men but the women too are among 
 her friends. She writes prettily of Mrs. Somerville, with 
 her smiling eyes and pink colour, her soft voice, strong, 
 well-bred Scotch accent, timid, not disqualifying timid, 
 but naturally modest. 'While her head is among the 
 stars her feet are firm upon the earth.' She is * delighted ' 
 with a criticism of Madame de Stael's upon herself, in a 
 letter to M. Dumont. ' Vraiment elle etait digne de I'en- 
 thousiasme, mais elle se perd dans votre triste utilite.' It 
 is difi&cult to understand why this should have given Miss 
 Edgeworth so much pleasure ; and here finally is a little 
 vision conjured up for us of her meeting with Mrs. Fry 
 among her prisoners : — 
 
 Little doors, and thick doors, and doors of all sorts were 
 unbolted and unlocked, and on we went through dreary but 
 clean passages till we came to a room where rows of empty 
 benches fronted us, a table on which lay a large Bible. Several 
 ladies and gentlemen entered, took their seats on benches at 
 either side of the table in silence. Enter Mrs. Fry in a drab- 
 coloured silk cloak and a plain, borderless Quaker cap, a most 
 benevolent countenance, calm, benign. *I must make an 
 inquiry. Is Maria Edgeworth here ? ' And when I went 
 forward she bade me come and sit beside her. Her first smile 
 as she looked upon me I can never forget. The prisoners came 
 in in an orderly manner and ranged themselves upon the 
 benches. 
 
144 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 XV. 
 
 * In this my sixtieth year, to commence in a few days,' 
 says Miss Edgeworth, writing to her cousin Margaret 
 Euxton, ' I am resolved to make great progress.' ' Rosa- 
 mond at sixty,' says Miss Ruxton, touched and amused. 
 Her resolutions were not idle. 
 
 ' The universal difficulties of the money market in the 
 year 1826 were felt by us,' says Mrs. Edgeworth in her 
 memoir, 'and Maria, who since her father's death had 
 given up rent-receiving, now resumed it ; undertook the 
 management of her brother Lovell's affairs, which she con- 
 ducted with consummate skill and perseverance, and 
 weathered the storm that swamped so many in this finan- 
 cial crisis.' We also hear of an opportune windfall in the 
 shape of some valuable diamonds, which an old lady, a 
 distant relation, left in her will to Miss Edgeworth, who 
 sold them and built a market-house for Edgeworthtown 
 with the proceeds. 
 
 April 8, 1827. — I am quite well and in high good humour 
 and good spirits, in consequence of having received the whole of 
 Lovell's half-year's rents in full, with pleasure to the tenants and 
 without the least fatigue or anxiety to myself. 
 
 It was about this time her novel of ' Helen ' was written, 
 the last of her books, the only one that her father had not 
 
MISS EDGEWORTH. 145 
 
 revised. There is a vivid account given by one of her 
 brothers of the family assembled in the library to hear the 
 manuscript read out, of their anxiety and their pleasure as 
 they realised how good it was, how spirited, how well 
 equal to her standard. Tickner, in his account of Miss 
 Edgeworth, says that the talk of Lady Davenant in 
 ' Helen ' is very like Miss Edgeworth's own manner. His 
 visit to Edgeworthtown was not long after the publication 
 of the book. His description, if only for her mention of 
 her father, is worth quoting : — 
 
 As we drove to the door Miss Edgeworth came out to meet 
 us, a small, short, spare body of about sixty-seven, with extremely 
 frank and kind manners, but who always looks straight into 
 your face with a pair of mild deep grey eyes whenever she speaks 
 to you. With characteristic directness she did not take us into 
 the library until she had told us that we should find there Mrs. 
 Alison, of Edinburgh, and her aunt, Miss Sneyd, a person very 
 old and infirm, and that the only other persons constituting the 
 family were Mrs. Edgeworth, Miss Honora Edgeworth, and Dr. 
 Ah' son, a physician. . . . Miss Edgeworth's conversation was 
 always ready, as full of vivacity and variety as 1 can imagine. . . . 
 She was disposed to defend everybody, even Lady Morgan, as 
 far as she could. And in her intercoui'se with her family she 
 was quite delightful, referring constantly to Mrs. Edgeworth, 
 who seems to be the authority in all matters of fact, and most 
 kindly repeating jokes to her infirm aunt. Miss Sneyd, who 
 cannot hear them, and who seems to have for her the most un- 
 bounded afiection and admiration. . . . About herself as an 
 author she seems to have no reserve or secrets. She spoke with 
 
 L 
 
146 MISS EDGEWORTH. 
 
 great kindness and pleasure of a letter I brought to her from 
 Mr. Peabody, explaining some passage in his review of * Helen ' 
 which had troubled her from its allusion to her father. ' But/ 
 she added, ' no one can know what I owe to my father. He 
 advised and directed me in everjrthing. I never could have 
 done anything without him. There are things I cannot be mis- 
 taken about, though other people can. I know them.' As she 
 said this the tears stood in her eyes, and her whole person was 
 moved. ... It was, therefore, something of a trial to talk so 
 brilliantly and variously as she did from nine in the morning 
 to past eleven at night. 
 
 She was unfeignedly glad to see good company. Here 
 is her account of another visitor : — 
 
 Se'pt, 26. — The day before yesterday we were amusing our- 
 selves by telling who among literary and scientific people we 
 should wish to come here next. Francis said Coleridge ; I said 
 Herschell. Yesterday morning, as I was returning from my 
 morning walk at half-past eight, I saw a bonnetless maid in the 
 walk, with a letter in her hand, in search of me. When I 
 opened the letter I found it was from Mr. Herschell, and that 
 he was waiting for an answer at Mr. Briggs's inn. I have 
 seldom b'feen so agreeably surprised, and now that he is gone and 
 that he has spent twenty-four hours here, if the fairy were to 
 ask me the question again I should still more eagerly say, * Mr. 
 Herschell, ma'am, if you please.' 
 
 She still came over to England from time to time, 
 visiting at her sisters' houses. Honora was now Lady 
 Beaufort ; another sister, Fanny, the object of her closest 
 and most tender affection, was Mrs. Lestock Wilson. Age 
 
MISS EDGE WORTH. 147 
 
 Tjrought no change in her mode of life. Time passes with 
 tranquil steps, for her not hasting unduly. ' I am perfect,' 
 she writes at the age of seventy-three to her stepmother 
 of seventy-two, ' so no more about it, and thank you from 
 my heart and every component part of my precious self 
 for all the care, and successful care, you have taken of me, 
 your old petted nurseling.' 
 
 Alas ! it is sad to realise that quite late in life fresh 
 sorrows fell upon this warm-hearted woman. Troubles 
 gather ; young sisters fade away in their beauty and 
 happiness. But in sad times and good times the old 
 home is still unchanged, and remains for those that are 
 left to turn to for shelter, for help, and consolation. To 
 the very last Miss Edgeworth kept up her reading, her 
 correspondence, her energy. All along we have heard of 
 her active habits — out in the early morning in her 
 garden, coming in to the nine o'clock breakfast with her 
 hands full of roses, sitting by and talking and reading her 
 letters while the others ate. Her last letter to her old 
 friend Sir Henry Holland was after reading the first 
 volume of Lord Macaulay's History. Sir Henry took the 
 letter to Lord Macaulay, who was so much struck by its 
 discrimination that he asked leave to keep it. 
 
 She was now eighty-two years of age, and we find her 
 laughing kindly at the anxiety of her sister and brother- 
 
 ♦ .2 
 
148 MRS. EDGEWORTH. 
 
 in-law, who had heard of her climbing a ladder to wind up 
 an old clock at Edgeworthtown. ' I am heartily obliged 
 and delighted by your being such a goose and Eichard 
 such a gander,' she says ' as to be frightened out of your 
 wits by my climbing a ladder to take off the top of the 
 clock.' She had not felt that there was anything to fear 
 as once again she set the time that was so nearly at an 
 end for her. Her share of life's hours had been well spent 
 and well enjoyed ; with a peaceful and steady hand and 
 tranquil heart she might mark the dial for others whose 
 hours were still to come. 
 
 Mrs. Edgeworth's own words tell all that remains to be 
 told. 
 
 It was on the morning of May 22, 1849, that she was 
 taken suddenly ill with pain in the region of the heart, and 
 after a few hours breathed her last in my arms. She had 
 always wished to die quickly, at home, and that I should be 
 with her. All her wishes were fulfilled. She was gone, and 
 nothing like her again can we see in this world. 
 
MRS OPIE. 
 
 1769-1863. 
 
 ' Your gentleness shaU force more than your force move us to gentle- 
 ness.' — As You Like It. 
 
 I. 
 
 It is not very long since some articles appeared in the 
 ' ComMU Magazine ' which were begun under the influence 
 of certain ancient bookshelves with so pleasant a flavour 
 of the old world that it seemed at the time as if yesterday 
 not to-day was the all-important hour, and one gladly sub- 
 mitted to the subtle charm of the past — its silent veils, its 
 quiet incantations of dust and healing cobweb. The*phase 
 is but a passing one with most of us, and we must soon 
 feel that to dwell at length upon each one of the pretty 
 old fancies and folios of the writers and explorers who were 
 bom towards the end of the last century would be an im- 
 possible affectation ; and yet a postscript seems wanting to 
 the sketches which have already appeared of Mrs. Barbauld 
 and Miss Edgeworth, and the names of their contempor- 
 aries should not be quite passed over. 
 
I50 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 In a hundred charming types and prints and portraits 
 we recognise the well-known names as they used to appear 
 in the garb of life. Grand ladies in broad loops and 
 feathers, or graceful and charming as nymphs in muslin 
 folds, with hanging clouds of hair ; or again, in modest 
 coiffes such as dear Jane Austen loved and wore even in her 
 youth. Hannah More only took to coiffes and wimples in 
 later life ; in early days she was fond of splendour, and,, 
 as we read, had herself painted in emerald earrings. How 
 many others besides her are there to admire ! Who does 
 not know the prim, sweet, amply frilled portraits of Mrs. 
 Trimmer and Joanna Baillie ? Only yesterday a friend 
 showed me a sprightly, dark-eyed miniature of Felicia 
 Hemans. Perhaps most beautiful among all her sister 
 muses smiles the lovely head of Amelia Opie, as she was 
 represented by her husband with luxuriant chestnut hair 
 piled lip Eomney fashion in careless loops, with the radiant 
 yet dreaming eyes which are an inheritance for some 
 members of her family. 
 
 The authoresses of that day had the pre-eminence in 
 looks, in gracious dress and bearing ; but they were rather 
 literary women than anything else, and had but little in com- 
 mon with the noble and brilliant writers who were to follow 
 them in our own more natural and outspoken times ; whose 
 wise, sweet, passionate voices are already passing away into 
 
MRS. OP IE. 151 
 
 the distance ; of whom so few remain to us.^ The secret 
 of being real is no very profound one, and yet how rare it 
 is, how long it was before the readers and writers of this 
 century found it out ! It is like the secret of singing in 
 perfect tune, or of playing the vioKn as Joachim can play 
 upon it. In literature, as in music, there is at times a 
 certain indescribable tone of absolute reality which carries 
 the reader away and for the moment absorbs him into the 
 mind of the writer. Some metempsychosis takes place. 
 It is no longer a man or a woman turning the pages of a 
 book, it is a human being suddenly absorbed by the book 
 itself, living the very life which it records, breathing the 
 spirit and soul of the writer. Such books are events, not 
 books to us, new conditions of existence, new selves sud- 
 denly revealed through the experience of other more vivid 
 personalities than our own. The actual experience of other 
 lives is not for us, but this link of simple reality of feeling 
 is one all independent of events ; it is like the miracle of 
 the loaves and fishes repeated and multiplied — one man 
 comes with his fishes and lo ! the multitude is filled. 
 
 But this simple discovery, that of reality, that of 
 speaking from the heart, was one of the last to be made 
 
 * And yet as I write I remember one indeed who is among us, whose 
 portrait a Keynolds or an Opie might have been glad to paint for the 
 generations who will love her works. 
 
152 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 by women. In France Madame de Sevigne and Madame de 
 La Fayette were not afraid to be themselves, but in England 
 the majority of authoresses kept their readers carefully at 
 pen's length, and seemed for the most part to be so con- 
 scious of their surprising achievements in the way of litera- 
 ture as never to forget for a single instant that they were 
 in print. With the exception of Jane Austen and Maria 
 Edgeworth, the women writers of the early part of this 
 century were, as I have just said, rather Hterary women 
 than actual creators of literature. It is still a mystery how 
 they attained to their great successes. Frances Burney 
 charms great Burke and mighty Johnson and wise Macaulay 
 in later times. Mrs. Opie draws compliments from Mack- 
 intosh, and compliments from the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, 
 and Sydney Smith, and above all tears from Walter Scott. 
 
 Perhaps many of the flattering things addressed to Mrs. 
 Opie may have said not less for her own charm and sweet- 
 ness of nature than for the merit of her unassuming pro- 
 ductions ; she must have been a bright, merry, and fascin- 
 ating person, and compliments were certainly more in her 
 line than the tributes of tears which she records. 
 
 The authoresses of heroines are often more interesting 
 than the heroines themselves, and Amelia Opie was 
 certainly no exception to this somewhat general state- 
 ment. A pleasant, sprightly authoress, beaming bright 
 
MRS. OP IE. 153 
 
 glances on her friends, confident, intelligent, full of inte- 
 rest in life, carried along in turn by one and by another 
 influence, she comes before us a young and charming 
 figure, with all the spires of Norwich for a background, 
 and the sound of its bells, and the stir of its assizes, as she 
 issues from her peaceful home in her father's tranquil old 
 house, where the good physician lives widowed, tending his 
 poor and his sick, and devotedly spoiling his only child. 
 
 II. 
 
 Amelia Opie was born in 1769 in the old city of 
 Norwich, within reach of the invigorating breezes of the 
 great North Sea. Her youth must have been somewhat 
 solitary ; she was the only child of a kind and cultivated 
 physician, Doctor James Alderson, whose younger brother, 
 a barrister, also living in Norwich, became the father of 
 Baron Alderson. Her mother died in her early youth. 
 From her father, however, little Amelia seems to have 
 liad the love and indulgence of over half a century, a 
 tender and admiring love which she returned with all her 
 heart's devotion. She was the pride and darling of his 
 home, and throughout her long life her father's approba- 
 tion was the one chief motive of her existence. Spoiling 
 is a vexed question, but as a rule people get so much 
 stem justice from all the rest of the world that it seems 
 
154 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 well that their parents should love and comfort them in 
 youth for the many disgraces and difficulties yet to come. 
 Her mother is described as a delicate, high-minded 
 woman, 'somewhat of a disciplinarian/ says Mrs. Opie's^ 
 excellent biographer, Miss Brightwell, but she died too 
 soon to carry her theories into practice. Miss Brightwell 
 suggests that ' Mrs. Opie might have been more demure 
 and decorous had her mother lived, but perhaps less 
 charming.' There are some verses addressed to her 
 mother in Mrs. Opie's papers in which it must be con- 
 fessed that the remembrance of her admonition plays a 
 most important part — 
 
 Hark ! clearer still thy voice I hear. 
 
 Again reproof in accents mild, 
 Seems whispering in my conscious ear, 
 
 and so on. 
 
 Some of Mrs. Alderson's attempts at discipline seemed 
 unusual and experimental ; the little girl was timid,, 
 afraid of black people, of black beetles, and of hmnan 
 skeletons. She was given the skeleton to play with, and 
 the beetles to hold in her hand. One feels more sym- 
 pathy with the way in which she was gently reconciled to 
 the poor negro with the frightening black face — by being 
 told the story of his wrongs. But with the poor mother's 
 
MRS. OP IE. 155 
 
 untimely death all this maternal supervision came to an 
 end. ' Amelia, your mother is gone ; may you never have 
 reason to blush when you remember her ! ' her father said 
 as he clasped his Uttle orphan to his heart ; and all her 
 life long Amelia remembered those words. 
 
 There is a pretty reminiscence of her childhood from a 
 beginning of the memoir which was never written : — 
 ' One of my earliest recollections is of gazing on the 
 bright blue sky as I lay in my little bed before my hour 
 of rising came, listening with delighted attention to the 
 ringing of a peal of bells. I had heard that heaven was 
 beyond those blue skies, and I had been taught that there 
 was the home of the good, and I fancied that those sweet 
 bells were ringing in heaven.' The bells were ringing for 
 the Norwich Assizes, which played an important part in 
 our little heroine's life, and which must have been asso- 
 ciated with many of her early memories. 
 
 The little girl seems to have been allowed more liberty 
 than is usually given to children. ' As soon as I was old 
 enough to enjoy a procession,' she says, ' I was taken to 
 see the Judges come in. Youthful pages in pretty dresses 
 ran by the side of the High Sheriff's carriage, in which the 
 Judges sat, while the coaches drove slowly and with a 
 solemnity becoming the high and awful office of those 
 whom they contained With reverence ever did I 
 
156 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 behold the Judges' wigs, the scarlet robes they wore, and 
 even the white wand of the Sheriff.' 
 
 There is a description which in after years might have 
 made a pretty picture for her husband's pencil of the little 
 maiden wandering into the court one day, and called by a 
 kind old Judge to sit beside him upon the bench. She goes 
 on to recount how next day she was there again ; and when 
 some attendant of the court wanted her to leave the place, 
 saying not unnaturally, 'Go, Miss, this is no place for 
 you ; be advised,' the Judge again interfered, and ordered 
 the enterprising little girl to be brought to her old place 
 upon the cushion by his side. The story gives one a 
 curious impression of a child's life and education. She 
 seems to have come and gone alone, capable, intelligent, 
 unabashed, interested in all the events and humours of 
 the place. 
 
 Children have among other things a very vivid sense of 
 citizenship and public spirit, somewhat put out in later 
 life by the rush of personal feeling, but in childhood the 
 personal events are so few and so irresponsible that public 
 affairs become an actual part of life and of experience. 
 While their elders are still discussing the news and weigh- 
 ing its importance, it is already a part of-the children's 
 life. Little Amelia Alderson must have been a happy 
 child, free, affectionate, independent ; grateful, as a child 
 
MRS. OP IE. 157 
 
 should be, towards those who befriended her. One of her 
 teachers was a French dancing-master called Christian, for 
 whom she had a warm regard. She relates that long after- 
 wards she came with her husband and a friend to visit the 
 Dutch church at Norwich. ' The two gentlemen were 
 engaged in looking round and making their observations, 
 and I, finding myself somewhat cold, began to hop and 
 dance upon the spot where I stood, when my eyes chanced 
 to fall upon the pavement below, and I started at beholding 
 the well-known name of Christian graved upon the slab ; I 
 stopped in dismay, shocked to find that I had actually 
 been dancing upon the grave of my old master — he wha 
 first taught me to dance.' 
 
 III. 
 
 After her mother's death, Amelia Alderson, who was 
 barely fifteen at the time, began to take her place in 
 society. She kept her father's house, received his friends, 
 made his home bright with her presence. The lawyers 
 came round in due season : Sir James Mackintosh came, 
 the town was full of life, of talk, of music, and poetry, and 
 prejudice. 
 
 Harriet Martineau, in her memoir of Mrs. Opie, gives 
 a delightful and humorous account of the Norwich of that 
 day — rivalling Lichfield and its literary coterie, only with 
 
158 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 less sentimentality and some additional peculiarities of its 
 own. One can almost see the Tory gentlemen, as Miss 
 Martineau describes them, setting a watch upon the Cathe- 
 dral, lest the Dissenters should bum it as a beacon for 
 Boney ; whereas good Bishop Bathurst, with more faith in 
 human nature, goes on resolutely touching his hat to the 
 leading Nonconformists. ' Tlie French taught in schools,' 
 says Miss Martineau, ' was found to be unintelligible when 
 the peace at length arrived, taught as it was by an aged 
 powdered Monsieur and an elderly flowered Madame, who 
 liad taught their pupils' Norfolk pronunciation. But it was 
 l)eginning to be known,' she continues, ' that there was such 
 a language as Grerman, and in due time there was a young 
 man who had actually been in Grermany, and was trans- 
 lating " Nathan the Wise." When William Taylor became 
 eminent as almost the only Grerman scholar in England, 
 old Norwich was very proud and grew, to say the truth, 
 excessively conceited. She was (and she might be) proud 
 of her Sayers, she boasted of her intellectual supper-parties, 
 and finally called herself the " Athens of England." ' 
 
 In this wholesome, cheerful Athens, blown by the 
 invigorating Northern breezes, little Amelia bloomed and 
 developed into a lovely and happy girl. She was fortunate, 
 indeed, in her friends. One near at hand must have been 
 an invaluable adviser for a motherless, impressionable girl. 
 
MRS. OP IE. 159 
 
 Mrs. John Taylor was so loved that she is still remem- 
 bered. Mrs. Barhauld prized and valued her affection 
 beyond all others. ^ I know the value of your letters,' 
 «ays Sir James Mackintosh, writing from Bombay ; ' they 
 rouse my mind on subjects which interest us in common — 
 children, literature, and life. I ought to be made per- 
 manently better by contemplating a mind like yours.' And 
 he still has Mrs. Taylor in his mind when he concludes with 
 a little disquisition on the contrast between the barren 
 sensibility, the indolent folly of some, the useful kindness 
 of others, ' the industrious benevolence which requires a 
 vigorous understanding and a decisive character.' 
 
 Some of Mrs. Opie's family have shown me a photo- 
 graph of her in her Quaker dress, in old age, dim, and 
 -changed, and sunken, from which it is very difficult to 
 realise all the brightness, and life, and animation which 
 must have belonged to the earlier part of her life. The 
 delightful portrait of her engraved in the ' Mirror ' shows 
 the animated beaming countenance, the soft expressive eyes, 
 the abundant auburn waves of hair, of which we read. The 
 picture is more like some charming allegorical being than 
 a real live young lady — some Belinda of the ' Rape of the 
 Lock ' (and one would as soon have expected Belinda to 
 turn Quakeress). Music, poetry, dancing, elves, graces and 
 flirtations, cupids, seem to attend her steps. She delights 
 
i6o MRS. OPIE. 
 
 in admiration, friendship, companionship, and gaiety, and 
 yet with it all we realise a warm-hearted sincerity, and 
 appreciation of good and high-minded things, a truth of 
 feeling passing out of the realms of fancy altogether into 
 one of the best realities of life. She had a thousand links 
 with life : she was musical, artistic ; she was literary ; she 
 had a certain amount of social influence ; she had a voice, 
 a harp, a charming person, mind and manner. Admiring 
 monarch s in later days applauded her performance ; devoted 
 subjects were her friends and correspondents, and her sphere 
 in due time extended beyond the approving Norwich- 
 Athenian coterie of old friends who had known her from 
 her childhood, to London itself, where she seems to have 
 been made welcome by many, and to have captivated more 
 than her share of victims. 
 
 In some letters of hers written to Mrs. Taylor and 
 quoted by her biographer we get glimpses of some of 
 these early experiences. The bright and happy excitable 
 girl comes up from Norwich to London to be made more 
 happy still, and more satisfied with the delight of life 
 as it unfolds. Besides her fancy for lawyers, literary 
 people had a great attraction for Amelia, and Grodwin 
 seems to have played an important part^ in her earlier 
 experience. A saying of Mrs. Inchbald's is quoted by her 
 on her return home as to the report of the world being* 
 
MRS. OPIE. i6i 
 
 that Mr. Holcroft was in love with Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs» 
 Inchbald with Mr. Grodwin, Mr. Grodwin with Miss 
 Alderson, and Miss Alderson with Mr. Holcroft ! 
 
 The following account of Somers Town, and a 
 philosopher's costume in those days, is written to her 
 father in 1794:— 
 
 After a most delightful ride through some of the richest 
 country I ever beheld, we arrived about one o'clock at the 
 philosopher's house ; we found him with his hair hien poudre, 
 and in a pair of new sharp-toed red morocco slippers, not to 
 mention his green coat and crimson under- waistcoat. 
 
 From Godwin's by the city they come to Marlborough 
 Street, and find Mrs. Siddons nursing her little baby, and 
 as handsome and charming as ever. They see Charles 
 Kemble there, and they wind up their day by calling on 
 Mrs. Inchbald in her pleasant lodgings, with two hundred 
 pounds just come in from Sheridan for a farce of sixty 
 pages. Godwin's attentions seem to have amused and 
 pleased the fair, merry Amelia, who is not a little proud 
 of her arch influence over various rugged and apparently 
 inaccessible persons. Mrs. Inchbald seems to have been 
 as jealous of Miss Alderson at the time as she afterwards 
 was of Mary Wollstonecraft. ' Will you give me nothing 
 to keep for your sake?' says Godwin, parting from Amelia. 
 ' Not even your slipper ? I had it once in my possession.' 
 
 M 
 
i62 MRS. OPIE. 
 
 * This was true,' adds Miss Amelia ; ' my shoe had come 
 off and he picked it up and put it in his pocket.' Else- 
 where she tells her friend Mrs. Taylor that Mr. Holcroft 
 would like to come forward, but that he had no chance. 
 
 That some one person had a chance, and a very good 
 one, is plain enough from the context of a letter, but 
 there is nothing in Mrs. Opie's life to show why fate was 
 contrary in this, while yielding so bountiful a share of all 
 other good things to the happy country girl. 
 
 Among other people, she seems to have charmed 
 various French refugees, one of whom was the Due 
 d'Aiguillon, come over to England with some seven 
 thousand others, waiting here' for happier times, and 
 hiding their sori'ows among our friendly mists. Grodwin 
 was married when Miss Alderson revisited her London 
 friends and admirers in 1797 — an eventful visit, when she 
 met Opie for the first time. 
 
 The account of their first meeting is amusingly given 
 in Miss Brightwell's memoirs. It was at an evening 
 party. Some of those present were eagerly expecting 
 the arrival of Miss Alderson, but the evening was wearing 
 away and still she did not appear; ' at length the door was 
 flung open, and she entered bright and smiling, dressed 
 in a robe of blue, her neck and arms bare, and on her 
 head a small bonnet placed in somewhat coquettish style 
 
MRS, OPIE. 163 
 
 sideways and surmounted by a plume of three white 
 feathers. Her beautiful hair hung in waving tresses over 
 her shoulders ; her face was kindling with pleasure at the 
 sight of her old friends, and her whole appearance was 
 animated and glowing. At the time she came in Mr. 
 Opie was sitting on a sofa beside Mr. F., who had been 
 saying from time to time, ' Amelia is coming ; Amelia will 
 surely come. Why is she not here ? ' and whose eyes were 
 turned in her direction. He was interrupted by her com- 
 panion eagerly exclaiming, ' Who is that — who is that ? ' 
 and hastily rising Opie pressed forward to be introduced 
 to the fair object whose sudden appearance had so 
 impressed him.' With all her love of excitement, of 
 change, of variety, one cannot but feel, as I have said, 
 that there was also in Amelia Alderson's cheerful life a 
 vein of deep and very serious feeling, and the bracing 
 influence of the upright and high-minded people among 
 whom she had been brought up did not count for nothing 
 in her nature. She could show her genuine respect for 
 what was generous and good and true, even though she 
 did not always find strength to carry out the dream of an 
 excitable and warm-hearted nature. 
 
1 64 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 IV. 
 
 There is something very interesting in the impression 
 one receives of the ' Inspired Peasant,' as Alan Cunningham 
 calls John Opie — the man who did not paint to live so 
 much as live to paint. He was a simple, high-minded 
 Cornishman, whose natural directness and honesty were 
 unspoiled by favour, unembittered by failure. Opie's gift, 
 like some deep-rooted seed living buried in arid soil, ever 
 aspired upwards towards the light. His ideal was high; 
 his performance fell far short of his life-long dream, and 
 he knew it. But his heart never turned from its life's 
 aim, and he loved beauty and Art with that true and unfail- 
 ing devotion which makes a man great, even though his 
 achievements do not show all he should have been. 
 
 The old village carpenter, his father, who meant him 
 to succeed to the business, was often angry, and loudly 
 railed at the boy when good white-washed walls and clean 
 boards were spoiled by scrawls of lamp-black and charcoal. 
 John worked in the shop and obeyed his father, but when his 
 day's task was over he turned again to his darling pursuits. 
 At twelve years old he had mastered Euclid,, and could also 
 rival ' Mark Oaks,' the village phenomenon, in painting a 
 butterfly ; by the time John was sixteen he could earn as 
 
MRS. OPIE. 165 
 
 much as 7s. ^d, for a portrait. It was in this year that 
 there came to Truro an accomplished and various man 
 Dr. Wolcott — sometimes a parson, sometimes a doctor of 
 medicine, sometimes as Peter Pindar, a critic and literary 
 man. This gentleman was interested by young Opie and 
 his performances, and he asked him on one occasion how 
 he liked painting. ' Better than bread-and-butter,' says 
 the boy. Wolcott finally brought his 'proUge to London, 
 where the Doctor's influence and Opie's own undoubted 
 merit brought him success ; and to Opie's own amazement 
 he suddenly found himself the fashion. His street was , 
 crowded with carriages; long processions of ladies and 
 gentlemen came to sit to him ; he was able to furnish a 
 house ' in Orange Court, by Leicester Fields ; ' he was 
 beginning to put by money when, as suddenly as he had 
 been taken up, he was forgotten again. The carriages 
 drove off in some other direction, and Opie found himself 
 abandoned by the odd, fanciful world of fashions, which 
 would not be fashions if they did not change day by day. 
 It might have proved a heart-breaking phase of life for a 
 man whose aim had been less single. But Opie was of too 
 generous a nature to value popularity beyond achievement. 
 He seems to have borne this freak of fortune with great 
 equanimity, and when he was sometimes overwhelmed, it 
 was not by the praise or dispraise of others, but by his own 
 
t66 MBS. OPIE. 
 
 consciousness of failure, of inadequate performance. 
 Troubles even more serious than loss of patronage and em- 
 ployment befell him later. He had married, unhappily for 
 himself, a beautiful, unworthy woman, whose picture he 
 has painted many times. She was a faithless as well as a 
 weak and erring wife, and finally abandoned him. When 
 Opie was free to marry again he was thirty-six, a serious, 
 downright man of undoubted power and influence, of 
 sincerity and tenderness of feeling, of rugged and unusual 
 manners. He had not many friends, nor did he wish for 
 many, but those who knew him valued him at his worth. 
 His second wife showed what was in her by her apprecia- 
 tion of his noble qualities, though one can hardly realise 
 a greater contrast than that of these two, so unlike in 
 character, in training, and disposition. They were married 
 in London, at Marylebone Church, in that dismal year of 
 '98, which is still remembered. Opie loved his wife deeply 
 and passionately; he did not charm her, though she 
 charmed him, but for his qualities she had true respect 
 and admiration. 
 
 V. 
 
 Opie must be forgiven if he was one-idead, if he erred 
 from too much zeal. All his wife's bright gaiety of nature, 
 her love for her fellow-creatures, her interest in the world. 
 
MRS. OPIE. 167 
 
 her many-sidedness, this uncompromising husband would 
 gladly have kept for himself. For him his wife and his 
 home were the whole world ; his Art was his whole life. 
 
 The young couple settled down in London after their 
 marriage, where, notwithstanding fogs and smoke and dull 
 monotony of brick and smut, so many beautiful things are 
 created ; where Turner's rainbow lights were first reflected, 
 where Tennyson's ' Princess ' sprang from the fog. It was 
 a modest and quiet installation, but among the pretty things 
 which Amelia brought to brighten her new home we read 
 of blue feathers and gold gauze bonnets, tiaras, and spencers, 
 scarlet ribbons, buflp net, and cambric flounces, all of which 
 give one a pleasant impression of her intention to amuse 
 herself, and to enjoy the society of her fellows, and to bring 
 her own pleasant contributions to their enjoyment. 
 
 Opie sat working at his easel, painting portraits to 
 earn money for his wife's use and comfort, and encouraging 
 her to write, for he had faith in work. He himself would 
 never intermit his work for a single day. He would have 
 gladly kept her always in his sight. ' If I would stay at 
 home for ever, I believe my husband would be merry from 
 morning to night — a lover more than a husband,' Amelia 
 writes to Mrs. Taylor. He seemed to have some feeling 
 that time for him was not to be long — that life was passing 
 quickly by, almost too quickly to give him time to realise 
 
i68 MRS. OP IE, 
 
 his new home happiness, to give him strength to grasp 
 his work. He was no rapid painter, instinctively feeling 
 his light and colour and action, and seizing the moment's 
 suggestion, but anxious, laborious, and involved in that 
 sad struggle in which some people pass their lives, for 
 €ver disappointed. Opie's portraits seem to have been 
 superior to his compositions, which were well painted, 
 * but unimaginative and commonplace,' says a painter of 
 our own time, whose own work quickens with that 
 mysterious soul which some pictures (as indeed some 
 human beings) seem to be entirely without. 
 
 ' During the nine years that I was his wife,' says Mrs. 
 Opie, ' I never saw him satisfied with any one of his pro- 
 ductions. Often, very often, he has entered my sitting- 
 room, and, throwing himself down in an agony of despon- 
 dence upon the sofa, exclaimed, "I shall never be a 
 painter ! " ' 
 
 He .was a wise and feeling critic, however great his 
 shortcomings as a painter may have been. His lectures 
 are admirable; full of real thought and good judgment. 
 Sir James Mackintosh places them beyond Eeynolds's in 
 some ways. 
 
 ' If there were no difficulties every one would be a 
 painter,' says Opie, and he goes on to point out what a 
 painter's object should be — ' the discovery or conception 
 
MRS. OPIE. 169 
 
 of perfect ideas of things ; nature in its purest and most 
 essential form rising from the species to the genus, the 
 highest and ultimate exertion of human genius.' For 
 him it was no grievance that a painter's life should be one 
 long and serious effort. ' If you are wanting to your- 
 selves, rule may be multiplied upon rule and precept upon 
 precept in vain.' Some of his remarks might be thought 
 still to apply in many cases, no less than they did a 
 hundred years ago, when he complained of those green- 
 sick lovers of chalk, brick-dust, charcoal and old tapestry, 
 who are so ready to decry the merits of colouring and to 
 set it down as a kind of superfluity. It is curious to 
 contrast Opie's style in literature with that of his wife, 
 who belongs to the entirely past generation which she 
 reflected, whereas he wrote from his own original impres- 
 sions, saying those things which struck him as forcibly 
 then as they strike us now. ' Father and Daughter ' was 
 Mrs. Opie's first acknowledged book. It was published in 
 1801, and the author writes modestly of all her apprehen- 
 sions. ' Mr. Opie has no patience with me ; he consoles 
 me by averring that fear makes me overrate others and 
 underrate myself.' The book was reviewed in the ' Edin- 
 burgh.' We hear of one gentleman who lies awake all 
 night after reading it; and Mrs. Inchbald promises a 
 candid opinion, which, however, we do not get. Besides 
 
I70 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 stories and novels, Mrs. Opie was the author of several 
 poems and verses which were much admired. There was^ 
 an impromptu to Sir James Mackintosh, which brought a 
 long letter in return, and one of her songs was quoted by 
 Sydney Smith in a lecture at the Koyal Institution. Mrs.. 
 Opie was present, and she used to tell in after times ' how 
 unexpectedly the compliment came upon her, and how she 
 shrunk down upon her seat in order to screen herself from 
 observation.' 
 
 The lines are indeed charming : — 
 
 Go, youth, beloved in distant glades, 
 
 New friends, new hopes, new joys to find, 
 Yet sometimes deign 'midst fairer maids 
 
 To think on her thou leav'st behind. 
 Thy love, thy fate, dear youth to share 
 
 Must never be my happy lot ; 
 But thou may'st grant this humble prayer, 
 
 Forget me not, forget me not. 
 
 Yet should the thought of my distress 
 
 Too painful to thy feelings be, 
 Heed not the wish I now express. 
 
 Nor ever deign to think of me ; 
 But oh ! if grief thy steps attend, 
 
 If want, if sickness be thy lot, 
 And thou require a soothing friend, 
 
 Forget me not, forget me not. 
 
MRS. OP IE. 171 
 
 VI. 
 
 The little household was a modest one, but we read of 
 a certain amount of friendly hospitality. Country neigh- 
 bours from Norfolk appear upon the scene ; we find 
 Northcote dining and praising the toasted cheese. Mrs. 
 Opie's heart never for an instant ceased to warm to her 
 old friends and companions. She writes an amusing 
 account to Mrs. Taylor of her London home, her interests 
 and visitors, ' her happy and delightful life.' She worked, 
 she amused herself, she received her friends at home and 
 went to look for them abroad. Among other visits, Mrs. 
 Opie speaks of one to an old friend who has ' grown 
 plump,' and of a second to ' Betsy Fry ' who, notwithstand- 
 ing her comfortable home and prosperous circumstances, has 
 grown lean. It would be difficult to recognise under this 
 familiar cognomen and description the noble and dignified 
 woman whose name and work are still remembered with 
 affectionate respect and wonder by a not less hard-working, 
 but less convinced and convincing generation. This 
 friendship was of great moment to Amelia Opie in after 
 days, at a time when her heart was low and her life very 
 sad and solitary ; but meanwhile, as I have said, there 
 were happy times for her ; youth and youthful spirits and 
 
172 MRS, OPIE, . 
 
 faithful companionship were all hers, and troubles had 
 not yet come. 
 
 One day Mrs. Opie gives a characteristic account of a 
 visit from Mrs. Taylor's two sons. ' " John," said I, " will 
 you take a letter from me to your mother ? " " Certainly," 
 replied John, " for then I shall be sure of being welcome." 
 " Fy," retmned I. " Mr. Courtier, you know you want 
 nothing to add to the heartiness of the welcome you will 
 receive at home." " No, indeed," said Kichard, " and if Mrs. 
 Opie sends her letter by you it will be one way of making 
 it less valued and attended to than it would otherwise be." 
 To the truth of this speech I subscribed and wrote not. 
 I have heard in later days a pretty description of the 
 simple home in which all these handsome, cultivated, and 
 remarkable young people grew up round their noble- 
 minded mother.' One of Mrs. John Taylor's daughters 
 became Mrs. Eeeve, the mother of Mr. Henry Eeeve, 
 another was Mrs. Austin, the mother of Lady Duff Grordon. 
 
 Those lean kine we read of in the Bible are not 
 peculiar to Egypt and to the days of Joseph and his 
 brethren. The unwelcome creatures are apt to make 
 their appearance in many a country and many a house- 
 hold, and in default of their natural food to devour 
 all sorts of long-cherished fancies, hopes, and schemes. 
 Some time after his marriage, Opie suddenly, and for no 
 
MRS. OP IE. 173 
 
 reason, found himself without employment, and the severest 
 trial they experienced during their married life, says his 
 wife, was during this period of anxiety. She, however, 
 cheered him womanfully, would not acknowledge her own 
 dismay, and Opie, gloomy and desponding though he was, 
 continued to paint as regularly as before. Presently 
 orders began to flow in again, and did not cease until his 
 death. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Their affairs being once more prosperous, a long- hoped- 
 for dream became a reality, and they started on an expe- 
 dition to Paris, a solemn event in those days and not 
 lightly to be passed over by a biographer. One long war 
 was ended, another had not yet begun. The Continent 
 was a promised land, fondly dreamt of though unknown. 
 ' At last in Paris ; at last in the city which she had sa 
 longed to see!' Mrs. Opie's description of her arrival 
 reads a comment upon history. As they drive into the 
 town, everywhere chalked up upon the walls and the 
 houses are inscriptions concerning ' L'Indivisibilite de la 
 Republique.' How many subsequent writings upon the 
 wall did Mrs. Opie live to see ! The English party find 
 rooms at a hotel facing the Place de la Concorde, where the 
 guillotine, that token of order and tranquillity, was thea 
 
174 ^^^' OPIE. 
 
 perpetually standing. The young wife's feelings may be 
 imagined when within an hour of their arrival Opie, who 
 had rushed off straight to the Louvre, returned with a 
 face of consternation to say that they must leave Paris at 
 once. The Louvre was shut ; and, moreover, the whiteness 
 of everything, the houses, the ground they stood on, all 
 dazzled and blinded him. He was a lost man if he re- 
 mained ! By some happy interposition they succeed in 
 getting admission to the Louvre, and as the painter 
 wonders and admires his nervous terrors leave him. The 
 picture left by Miss Edgeworth of Paris Society in the 
 early years of the century is more brilliant, but not more 
 interesting than Mrs. Opie's reminiscences of the fleeting 
 scene, gaining so much in brilliancy from the shadows all 
 round about. There is the shadow of the ghastly 
 guillotine upon the Place de la Concorde, the shadows of 
 wars but lately over and yet to come, the echo in the air 
 of arms and discord ; meanwhile a brilliant, agreeable, 
 :flashing Paris streams with sunlight, is piled with treasures 
 and trophies of victory, and crowded with well-known 
 characters. We read of Kosciusko's nut-brown wig con- 
 cealing his honourable scars ; Massena's earrings flash in 
 the sun ; one can picture it all, and the animated inrush 
 of tourists, and the eager life stirring round about the 
 livalls of the old Louvre. 
 
MRS. OP IE. 175 
 
 It was at this time that they saw Talma perform, and 
 years after, in her little rooms in Lady's Field at Norwich, 
 Mrs. Opie, in her Quaker dress, used to give an imitation 
 of the great actor and utter a deep ' Cain, Cain, where art 
 thou ? ' To which Cain replies in sepulchral tones. 
 
 "We get among other things an interesting glimpse of 
 Fox standing in the Louvre Grallery opposite the picture 
 of St. Jerome by Domenichino, a picture which, as it is 
 said, he enthusiastically admired. Opie, who happened to 
 he introduced to him, then and there dissented from this 
 opinion. 'You must be a better judge on such points 
 than I am,' says Fox; and Mrs. Opie proudly writes of 
 the two passing on together discussing and comparing the 
 pictures. She describes them next standing before the 
 ' Transfiguration ' of Eaphael. The Louvre in those days 
 must have been for a painter a wonder palace indeed. The 
 ' Venus de' Medici ' was on her way ; it was a time of 
 miracles, as Fox said. Meanwhile Mrs. Opie hears some- 
 one saying that the First Consul is on his way from the 
 Senate, and she hurries to a window to look out. ' Bonaparte 
 seems very fond of state and show for a Eepublican,' says 
 Mrs. Fox. Fox himself half turns to the window, then 
 looks back to the pictures again. As for Opie, one may be 
 sure his attention never wandered for one instant. 
 
 They saw the First Consul more than once. The 
 
176 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 Pacificator, as he was then called, was at the height of his 
 popularity ; on one occasion they met Fox with his wife on 
 his arm crossing the Carrousel to the Tuileries, where they 
 are also admitted to a ground-floor room, from whence they 
 look upon a marble staircase and see several officers ascend- 
 ing, ' one of whom, with a helmet which seemed entirely 
 of gold, was Eugene de Beauhamais. A few minutes 
 afterwards,' she says, ' there was a rush of officers down 
 the stairs, and among them I saw a short pale man with 
 his hat in his hand, who, as I thought, resembled Lord 
 Erskine in profile. . . .' This of course is Bonaparte, 
 unadorned amidst all this studied splendour, and wearing 
 only a little tricoloured cockade. Maria Cosway, the 
 painter, who was also in Paris at the time, took them to 
 call at the house of Madame Bonaparte mere, where they 
 were received by ' a blooming, courteous ecclesiastic, 
 powdered and with purple stockings and gold buckles, and 
 a costly crucifix. This is Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of 
 Bonaparte. It is said that when Fox was introduced to 
 the First Consul he was warmly welcomed by him, and 
 was made to listen to a grand harangue upon the ad- 
 vantages of peace, to which he answered scarcely a word ; 
 though he was charmed to talk with Madame Bonaparte, 
 and to discuss with her the flowers of which she was so 
 fond.' The Opies met Fox again in England some years 
 
MRS. OP IE. 177 
 
 after, when he sat to Opie for one of his finest portraits. 
 It is now at Holker, and there is a characteristic description 
 of poor Opie, made nervous by the criticism of the many 
 friends, and Fox, impatient but encouraging, and again 
 whispering, ' Don't attend to them ; you must know best.' 
 
 VIII. 
 
 ' Adeline Mowbray ; or. Mother and Daughter,' was 
 published by Mrs. Opie after this visit to the Continent. 
 It is a melancholy and curious story, which seems to have 
 been partly suggested by that of poor Mary Wollstonecraft, 
 whose prejudices the heroine shares and expiates by a fate 
 hardly less pathetic than that of Mary herself. The book 
 reminds one of a very touching letter from Grod win's wife 
 to Amelia Alderson, written a few weeks before her death, 
 in which she speaks of her ' contempt for the forms of a 
 world she should have bade a long good-night to had she 
 not been a mother.' Justice has at length been done to 
 this mistaken but noble and devoted woman, and her story 
 has lately been written from a wider point of view than 
 Mrs. Opie's, though she indeed was no ungenerous advocate. 
 Her novel seems to have given satisfaction ; ' a beautiful 
 story, the most natural in its pathos of any fictitious 
 narrative in the language,' says the ' Edinburgh,' writing 
 
 N 
 
178 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 with more leniency than authors now expect. Another 
 reviewer, speaking with discriminating criticism, says of 
 Mrs. Opie : ' She does not reason well, but she has, like 
 most accomplished women, the talent of perceiving truth 
 without the process of reasoning. Her language is often 
 inaccurate, but it is always graceful and harmonious. She 
 can do nothing well that requires to be done with formality ; 
 to make amends, however, she represents admirably every- 
 thing that is amiable, generous, and gentle.' 
 
 Adeline Mowbray dies of a broken heart, with the fol- 
 lowing somewhat discursive farewell to her child : ' There 
 are two ways in which a mother can be of use to her 
 daughter ; the one is by instilling into her mind virtuous 
 principles, and by setting her a virtuous example, the other 
 is by being to her, in her own person, an awful warning ! ' 
 
 One or two of Opie's letters to his wife are given in 
 the memoir. They ring with truth and tender feeling. 
 The two went to Norwich together on one occasion, when 
 Opie painted Dr. Sayers, the scholar, who, in return for 
 his portrait, applied an elegant Greek distich to the 
 painter. Mrs. Opie remained with her father, and her 
 husband soon returned to his studio in London. When 
 she delayed, he wrote to complain. ' My dearest Life, I 
 cannot be sorry that you do not stay longer, though, as I 
 
MRS. OP IE. 179 
 
 said, on your father's account, I would consent to it. 
 Pray, Love, forgive me, and make yourself easy. I did 
 not suspect, till my last letter was posted, that it might 
 be too strong. I had been counting almost the hours till 
 your arrival for some time. As to coming down again 
 I cannot think of it, for though I could perhaps better 
 spare the time at present from painting than I could at 
 any part of the last month, I find I must now go hard to 
 work to finish my lectures, as the law says they must be 
 delivered the second year after the election.' 
 
 The Academy had appointed Opie Professor of Paint- 
 ing in the place of Fuseli, and he was now trying his hand 
 at a new form of composition, and not without well- 
 deserved success. But the strain was too great for this 
 eager mind. Opie painted all day ; of an eveuing he 
 worked at his lectures on painting. From September to 
 February he allowed himself no rest. He was not a man 
 who worked with ease ; all he did cost him much effort 
 and struggle. After delivering his first lecture, he com- 
 plained that he could not sleep. It had been a great 
 success ; his colleagues had complimented him, and accom- 
 panied him to his house. He was able to complete the 
 course, but immediately afterwards he sickened. No one 
 could discover what was amiss ; the languor and fever 
 increased day by day. 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o MRS. OPIE. 
 
 His wife nursed him devotedly, and a favourite sister 
 of his came to help her. Afterwards it was of consolation 
 to the widow to remember that no hired nurse had been by 
 his bedside, and that they had been able to do everything 
 for him themselves. One thing troubled him as he lay 
 dying ; it was the thought of a picture which he had not 
 been able to complete in time for the exhibition. A friend 
 and former pupil finished it, and brought it to his bedside. 
 He said with a smile, ' Take it aw^ay, it will do now.' 
 
 To the last he irpagined that he was painting upon 
 this picture, and he moved his arms as though he were at 
 work. His illness was inflammation of the brain. He 
 was only forty-five when he died, and he was buried in 
 St. Paul's, and laid by Sir Joshua, his great master. 
 
 The portrait of Opie, as it is engraved in Alan 
 Cunningham's Life, is that of a simple, noble-looking 
 man, with a good thoughtful face and a fine head. North- 
 cote, -Nollekens, Home Tooke, all his friends spoke warmly 
 of him. 'A man of pow^erful understanding and ready 
 apprehension,' says one. ' Mr. Opie crowds more wisdom 
 into a few words than almost anybody I ever saw,' says 
 another. 'I do not say that he was always right,' says 
 Northcote ; ' but he always put your thoughts into a new 
 track that was worth following.' Some two years after 
 his death the lectures which had cost so much were 
 
MRS. OP IE. i8i 
 
 published, with a memoir by Mrs. Opie. Sir James 
 Mackintosh has written one of his delightful criticisms 
 upon the book : — 
 
 The cultivation of every science and the practice of every 
 art are in fact a species of action, and require ardent zeal and 
 unshaken courage. . . . Originality can hardly exist without 
 vigour of character. . . . The discoverer or inventor may 
 indeed be most eminently wanting in decision in the general 
 concerns of life, but he must possess it in those pursuits in 
 which he is successful. Opie is a remarkable instance of the 
 natural union of these superior qualities, both of which he 
 possesses in a high degree. . . . He is inferior in elegance to 
 Sir Joshua, but he is superior in strength ; he strikes more, 
 though he charms less. . . . Opie is by turns an advocate, a 
 controvertist, a panegyrist, a critic ; Sir Joshua more uniformly 
 fixes his mind on general and permanent principles, and cer- 
 tainly approaches more nearly to the elevation and tranquiUity 
 which seem to characterise the philosophic teacher of an elegant 
 art. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Mrs. Opie went back, soon after her husband's death, 
 to Norwich, to her early home, her father's ;^house; nor 
 was she a widow indeed while she still had this tender 
 love and protection. 
 
 That which strikes one most as one reads the accounts 
 of Mrs. Opie is the artlessness and perfect simplicity of 
 her nature. The deepest feeling of her life was her 
 tender love for her father, and if she remained younger 
 
1 82 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 than most women do, it may have been partly from the 
 gi'eat blessing which was hers so long, that of a father's 
 home. Time passed, and by degrees she resumed her old 
 life, and came out and about among her friends. Sorrow 
 does not change a nature, it expresses certain qualities which 
 have been there all along. 
 
 So Mrs. Opie came up to London once more, and 
 welcomed and was made welcome by many interesting 
 people. Lord Erskine is her friend always; she visits 
 Madame de Stael ; she is constantly in company with 
 Sydney Smith, the ever-welcome as she calls him. Lord 
 Bryon, Sheridan, Lord Dudley, all appear upon her scene. 
 There is a pretty story of her singing her best to Lady 
 Sarah Napier, old, blind, and saddened, but still happy in 
 that she had her sons to guide and to protect her steps. 
 Among her many entertainments, Mrs. Opie amusingly 
 describes a dinner at Sir James Mackintosh's, to which 
 most" of the guests had been asked at different hours, 
 varying from six to half-past seven, when Baron William 
 von Humboldt arrives. He writes to her next day, calling 
 her Mademoiselle Opie, ' no doubt from my juvenile 
 appearance,' she adds, writing to her father. It is indeed 
 remarkable to read of her spirits long after middle life, her 
 interest and capacity for amusement. She pays 4L for 
 a ticket to a ball given to the Duke of Wellington ; she 
 
MRS. OP IE. 183 
 
 describes this and many other masquerades and gaieties, 
 and the blue ball, and the pink ball, and the twenty-seven 
 carriages at her door, and her sight of the Emperor of 
 Kussia in her hotel. When the rest of the ladies crowd 
 round, eager to touch his clothes, Mrs. Opie, carried away 
 by the general craze, encircles his wrist with her finger 
 and thumb. Apart from these passing fancies, she is in 
 delightful society. 
 
 Baron Alderson, her cousin and friend, was always kind 
 and affectionate to her. The pretty little story is well 
 known of his taking her home in her Quaker dress in the 
 Judges' state-coach at Norwich, saying, ' Come, Brother 
 Opie,' as he offered her his arm to lead her to the carriage. 
 She used to stay at his house in London, and almost the 
 last visit she ever paid was to him. 
 
 One of the most interesting of her descriptions is that 
 of her meeting with Sir Walter Scott and with Wordsworth 
 at a breakfast in Mount Street, and of Sir Walter's delight- 
 ful talk and animated stories. One can imagine him 
 laughing and describing a Cockney's terrors in the High- 
 lands, when the whole hunt goes galloping down the crags, 
 as is their North-country fashion. 'The gifted man,' 
 says Mrs. Opie, with her old-fashioned adjectives, ' con 
 descended to speak to me of my " Father and Daughter.' 
 He then went on faithfully to praise his old friend Joanna 
 
i84 MRS. OPIE. 
 
 Baillie and her tragedies, and to describe a tragedy he 
 once thought of writing himself. He should have had 
 no love in it. His hero should have been the micle 
 of his heroine, a sort of misanthrope, with only one 
 affection in his heart, love for his niece, like a solitary 
 gleam of sunshine lighting the dark tower of some ruined 
 and lonely dwelling.' 
 
 'It might perhaps be a weakness,' says the Friend, 
 long after recalling this event, ' but I must confess how 
 greatly I was pleased at the time.' No wonder she was 
 pleased that the great wizard should have liked her novel. 
 
 It would be impossible to attempt a serious critique of 
 Mrs. Opie's stories. They are artless, graceful, written 
 with an innocent good faith which disarms criticism. 
 That Southey, Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh should also 
 have read them and praised them may, as I have said, 
 prove as much for the personal charm of the writer, and 
 her warm sunshine of pleasant companionship, as for the 
 books themselves. They seem to have run through many 
 editions, and to have received no little encouragement. 
 Morality and sensation alternate in her pages. Monsters 
 abound there. They hire young men to act base parts, to 
 hold villainous conversations which the husbands are 
 intended to overhear. They plot and scheme to ruin the 
 fair fame and domestic happiness of the charming heroines. 
 
MRS. OP IE. 185 
 
 but they are justly punished, and their plots are defeated. 
 One villain, on his way to an appointment with a married 
 woman, receives so severe a blow upon the head from her 
 brother, that he dies in agonies of fruitless remorse. 
 Another, who incautiously boasts aloud his deep-laid 
 scheme against Constantia's reputation in the dark recesses 
 of a stage-coach, is unexpectedly seized by the arm. A 
 stranger in the corner, whom he had not noticed, was no 
 other than the baronet whom Constantia has loved all 
 along. The dawn breaks in brightly, shining on the 
 stranger's face : baffled, disgraced, the wicked schemer 
 leaves the coach at the very next stage, and Constantia's 
 happiness is ensured by a brilliant marriage with the man 
 she loves. ' Lucy is the dark sky,' cries another lovely 
 heroine, ' but you, my lord, and my smiling children, 
 these are the rainbow that illumines it ; and who would 
 look at the gloom that see the many tinted Iris ? not I, 
 indeed.' 'Valentine's Eve,' from which this is quoted, 
 was published after John Opie's death. So was a novel 
 called ' Temper,' and the ' Tales of Eeal Life.' Mrs. Opie, 
 however, gave up writing novels when she joined the 
 Society of Friends. 
 
 For some years past, Mrs. Opie had been thrown more 
 and more in the company of a very noble and remarkable 
 race of men and women living quietly in their beautiful 
 
1 86 MRS. OP IE, 
 
 homes in the neighbourhood of Norwich, but of an influ- 
 ence daily growing — handsome people, prosperous, generous, 
 with a sort of natural Priesthood belonging to them. 
 Scorning to live for themselves alone, the Grurneys were 
 the dispensers and originators of a hundred useful and 
 benevolent enterprises in Norwich and elsewhere. They 
 were Quakers, and merchants, and bankers. How much 
 of their strength lay in their wealth and prosperity, how 
 much in their enthusiasm, their high spirits, voluntarily 
 curbed, their natural instinct both to lead and to protect, 
 it would be idle to discuss. It is always difficult for 
 people who believe in the all-importance of the present to 
 judge of others, whose firm creed is that the present is 
 nothing as compared to the future. Chief among this 
 remarkable family was Elizabeth Grurney, the wife of 
 Josiah F'l'y, the mother of many children, and the good 
 angel, indeed, of the unhappy captives of those barbarous 
 days,- prisoners, to whose utter gloom and misery she brought 
 some rays of hope. There are few figures more striking than 
 that of the noble Quaker lady starting on her generous 
 mission, comforting the children, easing the chains of the 
 captives. No domineering Jellyby, but a motherly, deep- 
 hearted woman ; shy, and yet from her veiy timidity gain- 
 ing an influence, which less sensitive natures often fail to 
 win. One likes to imagine the dignified sweet face coming 
 
MRS. OP IE. 187 
 
 in — the comforting Friend in the quiet garb of the Quaker 
 woman standing at the gates of those terrible places, bid- 
 ding the despairing prisoners be of good hope. 
 
 Elizabeth Fry's whole life was a mission of love and 
 help to others ; her brothers and her many relations 
 heartily joined and assisted her in many plans and efforts . 
 
 For Joseph John Grurney, the head of the Norwich 
 family, Mrs. Opie is said to have had a feeling amounting 
 to more than friendship. Be this as it may, it is no wonder 
 that so warm-hearted and impressionable a woman should 
 have been influenced by the calm goodness of the friends 
 with whom she was now thrown. It is evident enough, 
 nor does she attempt to conceal the fact, that the admira- 
 tion and interest she feels for John Joseph Grurney are very 
 deep motive powers. There comes a time in most lives, 
 especially in the lives of women, when all the habits and 
 certainties of youth have passed away, when life has to be 
 built up again upon the foundations indeed of the past, the 
 friendships, the memories, the habits of early life, but with 
 new places and things to absorb and to interest, new hearts 
 to love. And one day people wake up to find that the 
 friends of their choice have become their home. People 
 are stranded perhaps seeking their share in life's allowance, 
 and suddenly they come upon something, with all the 
 charm which belongs to deliberate choice, as well as that of 
 
i88 MRS. OPIE. 
 
 natural affinity. How well one can realise the extraordinary- 
 comfort that Amelia Opie must have found in the kind 
 friends and neighbours with whom she was now thrown ! 
 Her father was a very old man, dying slowly by inches. 
 Her own life of struggle, animation, intelligence, was 
 over, as she imagined, for ever. No wonder if for a time 
 she was carried away, if she forgot her own nature, her 
 own imperative necessities, in sympathy with this new 
 revelation. Here was a new existence, here was a Living 
 Church ready to draw her within its saving walls. John 
 Joseph Grurney must have been a man of extraordinary 
 personal influence. For a long time past he had been 
 writing to her seriously. At last, to the surprise of the 
 world, though not without long deliberation and her 
 father's full approval, she joined the Society of Friends, 
 put on their dress, and adopted their peculiar phraseology. 
 People were surprised at the time, but I think it would 
 have Ireen still more surprising if she had not joined them. 
 J. J. Gurney, in one of his letters, somewhat magnificently 
 describes Mrs. Opie as offering up her many talents and 
 accomplishments a brilliant sacrifice to her new-found per- 
 suasions. ' Illustrations of Lying,' moral anecdotes on the 
 borderland of imagination, are all that sh§ is henceforth 
 allowed. ' I am bound in a degree not to invent a story, 
 because when I became a Friend it was required of me not 
 
MRS. OP IE. , 189 
 
 to do so, she writes to Miss Mitford, who had asked her to 
 contribute to an annual. Miss Mitford's description of 
 Mrs. Opie, ' Quakerised all over, and calling Mr. Haydon 
 ' Friend Benjamin,' is amusing enough ; and so also is the 
 account of the visiting card she had printed after she became 
 a Quaker, with ' Amelia Opie,' without any prefix, as is the 
 Quaker way ; also, as is not their way, with a wreath of 
 embossed pink roses surrounding the name. There is 
 an account of Mrs. Opie published in the 'Edinburgh 
 Review,' in a delightful article entitled the ' Worthies of 
 Norwich,' which brings one almost into her very presence. 
 
 Amelia Opie at the end of the last century and Amelia 
 Opie in the garb and with the speech of a member of the 
 Society of Friends sounds like two separate personages, but no 
 one who recollects the gay little songs which at seventy she 
 used to sing with lively gesture, the fragments of drama to 
 which, with the zest of an innate actress, she occasionally 
 treated her young friends, or the elaborate faultlessness of her 
 appearance — the shining folds and long train of her pale satin 
 draperies, the high, transparent cap, the crisp fichu crossed 
 over the breast, which set off" to advantage the charming little 
 plump figure with its rounded lines — could fail to recognise the 
 same characteristics which sparkled about the wearer of the 
 pink calico domino in which she frolicked incognito ' till she 
 was tired ' at a ball given by the Duke of Wellington in 1814, 
 or of the eight blue feathers which crowned the waving tresses 
 of her flaxen hair as a bride. 
 
 Doctor Alderson died in October 1825, and Mrs. Opie was 
 
190 MRS. OPIE. 
 
 left alone. She was very forlorn when her father died. 
 She had no close ties to carry her on peacefully from middle 
 age to the end of life. The great break had come ; she was 
 miserable, and, as mourners do, she falls upon herself and 
 beats her breast. All through these sad years her friends 
 at Northrepps and at Earlham were her chief help and 
 consolation. As time passed her deep sorrow was calmed, 
 when peaceful memories had succeeded to the keen anguish 
 of her good old father's loss. She must have suffered 
 deeply ; she tried hard to be brave, but her courage failed 
 her at times : she tried hard to do her duty ; and her 
 kindness and charity were unfailing, for she was herself 
 still, although so unhappy. Her journals are pathetic in 
 their humility and self-reproaches for imaginary omissions. 
 She is lonely ; out of heart, out of hope. ' I am so dis- 
 satisfied with myself that I hardly dare ask or expect a 
 blessing upon my labours,' she says ; and long lists of kind 
 and fetiguing offices, of visits to sick people and poor people, 
 to workhouses and prisons, are interspersed with expressions 
 of self-blame. 
 
 The writer can remember as a child speculating as she 
 watched the straight-cut figure of a Quaker lady standing 
 in the deep window of an old mansion that overlooked the 
 Luxembourg Gardens at Paris, with all their perfume and 
 
MRS. OPIE. 191 
 
 "blooming scent of lilac and sweet echoes of children, while 
 the quiet figure stood looking down upon it all from — to a 
 child — such an immeasurable distance. As one grows older 
 one becomes more used to garbs of different fashions and 
 cut, and one can believe in present sunlight and the scent 
 of flowering trees and the happy sound of children's voices 
 going straight to living hearts beneath their several dis- 
 guises, and Mrs. Opie, notwithstanding her Quaker dress, 
 loved bright colours and gay sunlight. She was one of those 
 who gladly made life happy for others, who naturally turned 
 to bright and happy things herself. When at last she began 
 to recover from the blow which had fallen so heavily upon 
 her she went from Norwich to the Lakes and Fells for re- 
 freshment, and then to Cornwall, and among its green seas 
 and softly clothed cliffs she found good friends (as most 
 people do who go to that kind and hospitable county), and 
 her husband's relations, who welcomed her kindly. As she 
 recovered by degrees she began to see something of her old 
 companions. She went to London to attend the May meet- 
 ings of the Society, and I heard an anecdote not long ago 
 which must have occurred on some one of these later visits 
 there. 
 
 One day when some people were sitting at breakfast at 
 Samuel Kogers's, and talking as people do who belong to 
 the agreeable classes, the conversation happened to turn 
 
192 MRS. OPIE. 
 
 upon the affection of a father for his only child, when an 
 elderly lady who had been sitting at the table, and who 
 was remarkable for her Quaker dress, her frills and spotless 
 folds, her calm and striking appearance, started up suddenly, 
 burst into a passion of tears, and had to be led sobbing 
 out of the room. She did not return, and the lady who 
 remembers the incident, herself a young bride at the time, 
 told me it made all the more impression upon her at the time 
 because she was told that the Quaker lady was Mrs. Opie. 
 My friend was just b3ginning her life. Mrs. Opie must 
 have been ending hers. It is not often that women, when 
 youth is long past, shed sudden and passionate tears of mere 
 emotion, nor perhaps would a Quaker, trained from early 
 childhood to calm moods and calm expressions, have been 
 so suddenly overpoweringly affected ; but Mrs. Opie was no 
 born daughter of the community, she was excitable and 
 impulsive to the last. I have heard a lady who knew her 
 well -describe her, late in life, laughing heartily and impet- 
 uously thrusting a somewhat starched-up Friend into a deep 
 arm-chair exclaiming, ' I will hurl thee into the bottomless 
 
 pit.' 
 
 X. 
 
 At sight of thee, O Tricolor, 
 
 I seem to feel youth's hours return, 
 
 The loved, the lost ! 
 
 So writes Mrs. Opie at the age of sixty, reviving, 
 
 delighting, as she catches sight of her beloved Paris once 
 
MFS. OP IE. 193 
 
 more, and breathes its clear and life-giving air, and looks 
 out across its gardens and glittering gables and spires, and 
 again meets her French acquaintances, and throws herself 
 into their arms and into their interests with all her old 
 warmth and excitability. The little grey bonnet only gives 
 certain incongruous piquancy to her pleasant, kind-hearted 
 exuberance. She returns to England, but far-away echoes 
 reach her soon of changes and revolutions concerning all 
 the people for whom her regard is so warm. In August, 
 1830, came the news of a new revolution — ' The Chamber 
 of Deputies dissolved for ever; the liberty of the press 
 abolished ; king, ministers, court, and ambassadors flying 
 from Paris to Vincennes ; cannon planted against the city ; 
 5,000 people killed, and the Kue de Kivoli running with 
 blood.' No wonder such rumours stirred and overwhelmed 
 the staunch but excitable lady. ' You will readily believe 
 how anxious, interested, and excited I feel,' she says ; and 
 then she goes on to speak of Lafayette, ' miraculously pre- 
 served through two revolutions, and in chains and in a 
 dungeon, now the leading mind in another conflict, and 
 lifting not only an armed but a restraining hand in a third 
 revolution.' 
 
 Her heart was with her French friends and intimates, 
 and though she kept silence she was not the less deter- 
 mined to follow its leading, and, without announcing her 
 
 o 
 
194 MRS. OPIE. 
 
 intention, she started off from Norwich and, after tra- 
 velling without intermission, once more arrived in her 
 beloved city. Bat what was become of the Revolution ? 
 ' Paris seemed as bright and peaceful as I had seen it 
 thirteen months ago ! The people, the busy people 
 passing to and fro, and soldiers, omnibuses, cabriolets, 
 citadenes, carts, horsemen hurrying along the Rue de 
 Rivoli, while foot passengers were crossing the gardens, or 
 loungers were sitting on its benches to enjoy the beauty 
 of the May-November.' She describes two men crossing 
 the Place Royale singing a national song, the result of the 
 Revolution : — 
 
 Pour briser leurs masses profondes, 
 Qui conduit nos drapeaux sanglants, 
 C'est la Liberte de deux mondes, 
 C'est Lafayette en cheveux blancs. 
 
 Mrs. Opie was full of enthusiasm for noble Lafayette 
 surveying his court of turbulent intrigue and shifting 
 politics ; for Cuvier in his own realm, among more 
 tranquil laws, less mutable decrees. She should have 
 been bom a Frenchwoman, to play a real and brilliant 
 part among all these scenes and people, instead of only 
 looking on. Something stirred in her veins too eager and 
 bubbling for an Englishwoman's scant share of life and 
 outward events. No wonder that her friends at Norwich 
 
MRS. OPIE, 195 
 
 were anxious, and urged her to return. They heard of 
 her living in the midst of excitement, of admiration, and 
 with persons of a different religion and way of thinking to 
 themselves. Their warning admonitions carried their 
 weight ; that little Quaker bonnet which she took so much 
 care of was a talisman, drawing the most friendly of 
 Friends away from the place of her adoption. But she 
 came back unchanged to her home, to her quiet associa- 
 tions ; she had lost none of her spirits, none of her cheer- 
 ful interest in her natural surroundings. As life burnt on 
 her kind soul seemed to shine more and more brightly. 
 Every one came to see her, to be cheered and warmed by 
 her genial spirit. She loved flowers, of which her room 
 was full. She had a sort of passion for prisms, says her 
 biographer ; she had several set in a frame and mounted 
 like a screen, and the colour flew about the little room. 
 She kept up a great correspondence ; she was never tired 
 of writing, though the letters on other people's business 
 were apt to prove a serious burden at times. But she lives 
 on only to be of use. ' Take care of indulging in little 
 selfishnesses,' she writes in her diary ; * learn to consider 
 others in trifles : the mind so disciplined will find it easier 
 to fulfil the greater duties, and the character will not 
 exhibit that trying inconsistency which one sees in great 
 and often in pious persons.' Her health fails, but not her 
 
 o 2 
 
196 MRS. OP IE. 
 
 courage. She goes up to London for the last time to her 
 cousin's house. She is interested in all the people she 
 meets,[in their wants and necessities, in the events of the 
 time. She returns home, contented with all; with the 
 house which she feels so 'desirable to die in,* with her 
 window through which she can view the woods and rising 
 ground of Thorpe. ' My prisms to-day are quite in their 
 glory,' she^writes ; ' the atmosphere must be very clear, 
 for the radiance is brighter than ever I saw it before ; ' and 
 then she wonders whether the mansions in heaven will be 
 draped in such brightness ; and so to the last the gentle, 
 bright, rainbow lady remained surrounded by kind and 
 smiling faces, by pictures, by flowers, and with the light 
 of her favourite prismatic colours shining round about the 
 couch on which she lay. 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 1776—1817. 
 
 * A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes 
 origiuaux. Les geris du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre 
 les hommes.' — Pascal. 
 
 * I DID not know that you were a studier of character,' 
 says Bingiey to Elizabeth. ' It must be an amusing study.' 
 
 'Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. 
 They have at least that advantage.' 
 
 ' The country,' said Darcy, ' can in general supply but 
 few subjects for such a study. In a country neighbourhood 
 you move in a very confined and unvarying society.' 
 
 ' But people themselves alter so much,' Elizabeth 
 answers, 'that there is something new to be observed in 
 them for ever.' 
 
 ' Yes, indeed,' cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by Darcy's 
 manner of mentioning a country neighbourhood ; ' I assure 
 you that we have quite as much of that going on in the 
 country as in town.' 
 
 ' Everybody was surprised, and Darcy, after looking at 
 her for a moment, turned silently away. Mrs. Bennet, who 
 
198 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 fancied she liad gained a complete victory over him, con- 
 tinued her triumph.' 
 
 These people belong to a whole world of familiar 
 acquaintances, who are, notwithstanding their old-fash- 
 ioned dresses and quaint expressions, more alive to us than 
 a great many of the people among whom we live. We 
 know so much more about them to begin with. Notwith- 
 standing a certain reticence and self-control which seems 
 to belong to their age, and with all their quaint dresses, 
 and ceremonies, and manners, the ladies and gentlemen in 
 ' Pride and Prejudice ' and its companion novels seem like 
 living people out of our own acquaintance transported 
 bodily into a bygone age, represented in the half-dozen 
 books that contain Jane Austen's works. Dear books ! 
 bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in which the 
 homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very 
 bores_are enchanting. 
 
 Could we but study our own bores as Miss Austen must 
 have studied hers in her country village, what a delightful 
 world this might be ! — a world of Norris's economical great 
 walkers, with dining-room tables to dispose of; of Lady 
 Bertrams on sofas, with their placid ' Do not act anything 
 improper, my dears; Sir Thomas would "not like it;' of 
 Bonnets, Goddards, Bates's ; of Mr. CoUins's ; of Kush- 
 brooks, with two-and-forty speeches apiece — a world of 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 199 
 
 Mrs. Eltons Inimitable woman ! she must be alive 
 
 at this very moment, if we but knew where to find her, 
 her basket on her arm, her nods and all-importance, with 
 Maple Grrove and the Sucklings in the background. She 
 would be much excited were she aware how she is esteemed 
 by a late Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is well ac- 
 quainted with Maple Grove and Selina too. It might 
 console her for Mr. Knightly's shabby marriage. 
 
 All these people nearly start out of the pages, so natural 
 and unaffected are they, and yet they never lived except in 
 the imagination of one lady with bright eyes, who sat 
 down some seventy years ago to an old mahogany desk in 
 a quiet country parlour, and evoked them for us. One 
 seems to see the picture of the unknown friend who has 
 charmed us so long — charmed away dull hours, created 
 neighbours and companions for us in lonely places, con- 
 ferring happiness and harmless mirth upon generations 
 to come. One can picture her as she sits erect, with her 
 long and graceful figure, her full round face, her bright 
 eyes cast down, — Jane Austen, ' the woman of whom 
 England is justly proud' — whose method generous 
 Macaulay has placed near Shakespeare. She is writing 
 in secret, putting away her work when visitors come 
 in, unconscious, modest, hidden at home in heart, as 
 she was in her sweet and womanly life, with the wis- 
 
200 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 dom of the serpent indeed and the harnalessness of a 
 dove. 
 
 Some one said just now that many people seem to be so 
 proud of seeing a joke at all, that they impress it upon you 
 until you are perfectly wearied by it. Jane Austen was not 
 of these ; her humour flows gentle and spontaneous ; it is 
 no elaborate mechanism nor artificial fountain, but a bright 
 natural stream, rippling and trickling over every stone and 
 sparkling in the sunshine. We should be surprised now- 
 a-days to hear a young lady announce herself as a studier of 
 character. From her quiet home in the country lane this 
 one reads to us a real page from the absorbing pathetic 
 humorous book of human nature — a book that we can 
 most of us understand when it is translated into plain 
 English ; but of which the quaint and illegible characters 
 are often difficult to decipher for ourselves. It is a study 
 which, with all respect for Darcy's opinion, must require 
 something of country-like calm and concentration and 
 freedom of mind. It is difficult, for instance, for a too 
 impulsive student not to attribute something of his own 
 moods to his specimens instead of dispassionately contem- 
 plating them from a critical distance^ 
 
 Besides the natural fun and wit and life of her 
 characters, ' all perfectly discriminated,' as Macaulay says, 
 Jane Austen has the gift of telling a story in a way that 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 201 
 
 has never been surpassed. She rules her places, times, 
 characters, and marshals them with unerring precision. 
 In her special gift for organisation she seems almost un- 
 equalled. Her picnics are models for all future and past 
 picnics; her combinations of feelings, of conversation, of 
 gentlemen and ladies, are so natural and lifelike that read- 
 ing to criticise is impossible to some of us — the scene carries 
 us away, and we forget to look for the art by which it is 
 recorded. Her machinery is simple but complete ; events 
 group themselves so vividly and naturally in her mind 
 that, in describing imaginary scenes, we seem not only to 
 read them, but to live them, to see the people coming and 
 going: the gentlemen courteous and in top-boots, the 
 ladies demure and piquant; we can almost hear them 
 tedking to one another. No retrospects ; no abrupt flights ; 
 as in real life days and events follow one another. Last 
 Tuesday does not suddenly start into existence all out of 
 place ; nor does 1790 appear upon the scene when we are 
 ivell on in '21. Countries and continents do not fly from 
 hero to hero, nor do long and divergent adventures happen 
 to unimportant members of the company. With Jane 
 Austen days, hours, minutes succeed each other like clock- 
 work, one central figure is always present on the scene, that 
 figure is always prepared for company. Miss Edwards's 
 <;url-papers are almost the only approach to dishabille in 
 
202 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 her stories. There are postchaises in readiness to convey 
 the characters from Bath or Lyme to Uppercross, to 
 FuUerton, from Gracechmrch Street to Meryton, as their 
 business takes them. Mr. Knightly rides from Brunswick 
 Square to Hartfield, by a road that Miss Austen herself 
 must have travelled in the curricle with her brother, driving 
 to London on a summer's day. It was a wet ride for Mr. 
 Knightly, followed by that never-to-be-forgotten after- 
 noon in the shrubbery, when the wind had changed into a 
 softer quarter, the clouds were carried off, and Emma,, 
 walking in the sunshine, with spirits freshened and 
 thoughts a little relieved, and thinking of Mr. Knightly 
 as sixteen miles away, meets him at the garden door ; and 
 everybody, I think, must be the happier, for the happiness 
 and certainty tliat one half-hour gave to Emma and her 
 ' indifferent ' lover. 
 
 There is a little extract from one of Miss Austen's- 
 lettera- to a niece, which shows that all this successful 
 organisation was not brought about by chance alone, but 
 came from careful workmanship. 
 
 ' Your aunt C.,' she says, ' does not like desultory 
 novels, and is rather fearful that yours will be too much 
 so — that there will be too frequent a change from one set 
 of people to another, and that circumstances will be some- 
 times introduced of apparent consequence, which will lead 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 203 
 
 to nothing. It will not be so great an objection to me. 
 I allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature 
 and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story. . . .' 
 
 But, though the sins of a wandering story may be 
 covered, the virtues of a well-told one make themselves 
 felt unconsciously, and without an effort. Some books 
 and people are delightful, we can scarce tell why ; they are 
 not so clever as others that weary and fatigue us. It is a 
 certain effort to read a story, however touching, that is 
 disconnected and badly related. It is like an ill-drawn 
 picture, of which the colouring is good. Jane Austen 
 possessed both gifts of colour and of drawing. She could 
 see human nature as it was ; with near-sighted eyes, it is 
 true ; but having seen, she could combine her picture by 
 her art, and colour it from life. How delightful the people 
 are who play at cards, and pay their addresses to one 
 another, and sup, and discuss each other's affairs ! Take 
 Mr. Bennet's reception of his sons-in-law. Take Sir 
 Walter Elliot compassionating the navy and Admiral 
 Baldwin — ' nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a 
 dab of powder at top — a wretched example of what a sea- 
 faring life can do, for men who are exposed to every climate 
 and weather until they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity 
 they are not knocked on the head at once, before they 
 reach Admiral Baldwin's age. . . .' Or shall we quote the 
 
204 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 scene of Fanny Price's return when she comes to visit 
 her family at Portsmouth ; in all daughterly agitation and 
 excitement, and the brother's and father's and sister's recep- 
 tion of her. ... 'A stare or two at Fanny was all the 
 voluntary notice that her brother bestowed, but he made 
 no objection to her kissing him, though still entirely 
 engaged in detailing further particulars of the " Thrush's " 
 going out of harbour, in which he had a strong right of 
 interest, being about to commence his career of seamanship 
 in her at this very time. After the mother and daughter 
 have received her, Fanny's seafaring father comes in, and 
 does not notice her at first in his excitement. " Captain 
 Walsh thinks you will certainly have a cruise to the west- 
 ward with the ' Elephant ' by I wish you may. But 
 
 old Scholey was saying just now that he thought you would 
 be sent first to the ' Texel.' Well, well, we are ready what- 
 ever happens. But by you lost a fine sight by not 
 
 being here in the morning to see the ' Thrush ' go out of 
 harbour. I would not have been out of the way for a 
 thousand pounds. Old Scholey ran in at breakfast time to 
 say she had slipped her moorings and was coming out. I 
 jumped up and made but two steps to the platform. If 
 ever there was a perfect beauty afloat she is one ; and 
 there she lies at Spithead, and anybody in England would 
 take her for an eight-and-twenty. I was upon the plat- 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 205 
 
 form for two hours this afternoon looking at her. She lies 
 close to the 'Endymion,' between her and the 'Cleopatra/ 
 just to the eastward of the sheer hulk." ' 
 
 ' " Ha ! " cried William, " thaVs just where I should 
 have put her myself. It's the best berth in Spithead. But 
 here is my sister, sir ; here is Fanny, turning and leading 
 her forward — it is so dark you do not see her." ' 
 
 ' With an acknowledgment that he had quite forgot 
 her, Mr. Price now received his daughter, and having given 
 her a cordial hug and observed that she was grown into a 
 woman and he supposed would be wanting a husband soon, 
 seemed veiy much inclined to forget her again.' 
 
 How admirably it is all told ! how we hear them all 
 talking ! 
 
 From her own brothers Jane Austen learned her 
 accurate knowledge of ships and seafaring things, from 
 her own observation she must have gathered her delightful 
 droll science of men and women and their ways and various 
 destinations. Who will not recognise Mrs. Norris in that 
 master- touch by which she removes the curtain to save Sir 
 Thomas's feelings, that curtain which had been prepared 
 for the private theatricals he so greatly disapproved of? 
 Mrs. Norris thoughtfully carries it off to her cottage, where 
 she happened to be particularly in want of green baize. 
 
2o6 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 II. 
 
 The charm of friends of pen-and-ink is their un- 
 changeableness. We go to them when we want them. We 
 know where to seek them ; we know what to expect from 
 them. They are never preoccupied ; they are always 
 * at home ; ' they never turn their backs nor walk away as 
 people do in real life, nor let their houses and leave the 
 neighbourhood, and disappear for weeks together; they 
 are never taken up with strange people, nor suddenly 
 absorbed into some more genteel society, or by some 
 nearer fancy. Even the most volatile among them is to 
 be counted upon. We may have neglected them, and yet 
 when we meet again there are the familiar old friends, 
 and we seem to find our own old selves again in their 
 company. For us time has, perhaps, passed away ; feelings 
 have swept by, leaving interests and recollections in their 
 place ; but at all ages there must be days that belong to 
 our youth, hours that will recur so long as men forbear 
 and women remember, and life itself exists. Perhaps the 
 most fashionable marriage on the tajpis no longer excites 
 us very much, but the sentiment of an Emma or an Anne 
 Elliot comes home to some of us as vividly as ever. It is 
 something to have such old friends who are so young. An 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 207 
 
 Emma, blooming, without a wrinkle or a grey hair, after 
 twenty years' acquaintance ; an Elizabeth Bennet, sprightly 
 and charming ever. ... 
 
 In the ' Koundabout Papers ' there is a passage about 
 the pen-and-ink friends my father loved : — 
 
 ' They used to call the good Sir Walter the '« Wizard of 
 the North." What if some writer should appear who can 
 write so enchantingly that he shall be able to call into 
 actual life the people whom he invents ? What if Mignon, 
 and Margaret, and Groetz von Berlichingen are alive now 
 (though I don't say they are visible), and Dugald Dalgetty 
 and Ivanhoe were to step in at that open window by the 
 little garden yonder ? Suppose Uncas and our noble old 
 Leather Stocking were to glide in silent ? Suppose Athos, 
 Porthos, and Aramis should enter, with a noiseless swagger, 
 curling their moustaches ? And dearest Amelia Booth, on 
 Uncle Toby's arm ; and Tittlebat Titmouse with his hair 
 dyed green ; and all the Crummies company of comedians, 
 with the Gril Bias troop ; and Sir Koger de Coverley ; and 
 the greatest of all crazy gentlemen, the Knight of La 
 Mancha, with his blessed squire ? I say to you, I look 
 rather wistfully towards the window, musing upon these 
 people. Were any of them to enter, I think I should not 
 be very much frightened. . . .' 
 
 Are not such friends as these, and others unnamed here. 
 
2o8 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 but who will come unannounced to join the goodly company^ 
 creations that, like some people, do actually make part of 
 our existence, and make us the better for theirs ? To 
 express some vague feelings is to stamp them. Have we 
 any one of us a friend in a Knight of La Mancha, a 
 Colonel Newcome, a Sir Eoger de Coverley? They live 
 for us even though they may have never lived. They are, 
 and do actually make part of our lives, one of the best and 
 noblest parts. To love them is like a direct communica- 
 tion with the great and generous minds that conceived 
 them. 
 
 It is difficult, reading the novels of succeeding genera- 
 tions, to determine how much each book reflects of the 
 time in which it was written ; how much of its character 
 depends upon the mind and the mood of the writer. The 
 greatest minds, the most original, have the least stamp of 
 the age, the most of that dominant natural reality which 
 belongs to all gTeat minds. We know how a landscape 
 changes as the day goes on, and how the scene brightens 
 and gains in beauty as the shadows begin to lengthen. 
 The clearest eyes must see by the light of their own hour. 
 Jane Austen's literary hour must have been a midday hour : 
 bright, unsuggestive, with objects standing clear, without 
 much shadow or elaborate artistic efifect. Our own age 
 
JANE AUSTEN, 209 
 
 is more essentially an age of strained emotion, little 
 remains to us of starch, or powder, or courtly reserve. 
 What we have lost in calm, in happiness, in tranquillity, 
 we have gained in emphasis. Our danger is now, not of 
 expressing and feeling too little, but of expressing more 
 than we feel. 
 
 The living writers of to-day lead us into distant realms 
 and worlds undreamt of in the placid and easily contented 
 gigot age. Our characters travel by rail and are no longer 
 confined to postchaises. There is certainly a wide dif- 
 ference between Miss AustenV heroines and, let us say, a 
 Maggie TuUiver. One would be curious to know whether, 
 between the human beings who read Jane Austen's books 
 to-day and those who read them fifty years ago, there is as 
 great a contrast. One reason may be, perhaps, that cha- 
 racters in novels are certainly more intimate with us and 
 on less ceremonious terms than in Jane Austen's days, 
 when heroines never gave up a certain gentle self-respect 
 and humour and hardness of heart in which some modern 
 types are a little wanting. Whatever happens they 
 could for the most part speak of quietly and without 
 bitterness. Love with them does not mean a passion so 
 much as an interest, deep, silent, not quite incompatible 
 with a secondary flirtation. Marianne Dashwood's tears 
 are evidently meant to be dried. Jane Bennet smiles, sighs 
 
 p 
 
2IO JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 and makes excuses for Bingley's neglect. Emma passes 
 one disagreeable morning making up her mind to the 
 unnatural alliance between Mr. Knightly and Harriet 
 Smith. It was the spirit of the age, and, perhaps, one 
 nx)t to be unenvied. It was not that Jane Austen herself 
 was incapable of understanding a deeper feeling. In the 
 last written page of her last written book, there is an 
 expression of the deepest and truest experience. Annie 
 Elliot's talk with Captain Benfield is the touching utter- 
 ance of a good woman's feelings. They are speaking of 
 men and of women's affections. ' You are always labour- 
 ing and toiling,' she says, ' exposed to every risk and hard- 
 ship. Your home, country, friends, all united; neither 
 time nor life to be called your own. It would be too hard, 
 indeed (with a faltering voice), if a woman's feelings were 
 to be added to all this.' 
 
 Further on she says, eagerly : ' I hope I do justice to 
 all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. 
 Grod forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faith- 
 ful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures. I should 
 deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true 
 attachment and constancy were known only by woman. 
 No ! I believe you capable of everything good and great 
 in your married lives. I believe you equal to every 
 important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance so 
 
JANE AUSTEN. i\i 
 
 long as — if I may^be allowed the expression — so long as you 
 have an object ; I mean while the woman you love lives 
 and lives for you. All the jprivilege I claim for my own 
 sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not court it) 
 is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is 
 gone.* 
 
 She could not immediately have uttered another 
 sentence — her heart was too full, her breath too much 
 oppressed. 
 
 Dear Anne Elliot ! — sweet, impulsive, womanly, tender- 
 hearted — one can almost hear her voice, pleading the 
 cause of all true women. In those days when, perhaps, 
 people's nerves were stronger than they are now, sentiment 
 may have existed in a less degree, or have been more ruled 
 by judgment, it may have been calmer and more matter- 
 of-fact ; and yet Jane Austen, at the very end of her life, 
 wrote thus. Her words seem to ring in our ears after 
 they have been spoken. Anne Elliot must have been 
 Jane Austen herself, speaking for the last time. There is 
 something so true, so womanly about her, that it is im- 
 possible not to love her most of all. She is the bright- 
 eyed heroine of the earlier novels, matured, softened, 
 cultivated, to whom fidelity has brought only greater depth 
 and sweetness instead of bitterness and pain. 
 
 What a difficult thing it would be to sit down and try to 
 
 p 2 
 
212 JANE AUSTEN, 
 
 enumerate the dififerent influences by which our lives have 
 been affected — influences of other lives, of art, of nature, of 
 place and circumstance, — of beautiful sights passing before 
 our eyes, or painful ones : seasons following in their 
 course — hills rising on our horizons — scenes of ruin and 
 desolation — crowded thoroughfares — sounds in our ears,, 
 jarring or harmonious — the voices of friends, calling, 
 warning, encouraging — of preachers preaching — of people 
 in the street below, complaining, and asking our pity! 
 What long processions of human beings are passing before 
 us! What trains of thought go sweeping through our 
 brains I Man seems a strange and ill-kept record of many 
 and bewildering experiences. Looking at oneself — not as 
 oneself, but as an abstract human being — one is lost in 
 wonder at the vast complexities which have been brought 
 to bear upon it ; lost in wonder, and in disappointment 
 perhaps, at the discordant result of so great a harmony. 
 Only we know that the whole diapason is beyond our 
 grasp : one man cannot hear the note of the grasshoppers, 
 another is deaf when the cannon sounds. Waiting among 
 these many echoes and mysteries of every kind, and light 
 and darkness, and life and death, we seize a note or two of 
 the great symphony, and try to sing ; and ^because these 
 notes happen to jar, we think all is discordant hopeless- 
 ness. Then come pressing onward in the crowd of life, 
 
JANE AUSTEN, 213 
 
 voices with some of the notes that are wanting to our 
 own part — voices tuned to the same key as our own, or to 
 an accordant one ; making harmony for us as they pass us 
 by. Perhaps this is in life the happiest of all expe- 
 rience, and to few of us there exists any more complete 
 ideal. 
 
 And so now and then in our lives, when we learn to 
 love a sweet and noble character, we all feel happier and 
 better for the goodness and charity which is not ours, and 
 yet which seems to belong to us while we are near it. 
 Just as some people and states of mind affect us un- 
 comfortably, so we seem to be true to ourselves with a 
 truthful person, generous-minded with a generous nature ; 
 life seems less disappointing and self-seeking when we 
 think of the just and sweet and unselfish spirits, moving 
 untroubled among dinning and distracting influences. 
 These are our friends in the best and noblest sense. We 
 are the happier for their existence, — it is so much gain 
 to us. They may have lived at some distant time, we 
 may never have met face to face, or we may have known 
 them and been blessed by their love ; but their light 
 shines from afar, their life is for us and with us in 
 its generous example ; their song is for our ears, and we 
 hear it and love it still, though the singer may be lying 
 dead. 
 
214 JANE AUSTEN, 
 
 III. 
 
 A little book, written by one of Jane Austen's nephews^ 
 tells with a touching directness and simplicity the story 
 of this good and gifted woman, whose name has long, 
 been a household word among us, but of whose history 
 nothing was known until this little volume appeared. 
 It is but the story of a country lady, of quiet days follow- 
 ing quiet days of seasons in their course of common events; 
 and yet the history is deeply interesting to those who 
 loved the writer of whom it is written ; and as we turn 
 from the story of Jane Austen's life to her books again, we 
 feel more than ever that she, too, was one of those true 
 friends who belong to us inalienably — simple, wise, con- 
 tented, living in others, one of those whom we seem to 
 have a right to love. Such people belong to all human- 
 kind by the very right of their wide and generous sym- 
 pathies, of their gentle wisdom and loveableness. Jane 
 Austen's life, as it is told by Mr. Austen Legh, is very 
 touching, sweet, and peaceful. It is a country landscape,, 
 where the cattle are grazing, the boughs of the great elm- 
 tree rocking in the wind : sometimes, as we read, they 
 come falling with a crash into the sweep ; birds are flying 
 about the old house, homely in its simple rule. The 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 215 
 
 rafters cross the whitewashed ceilings, the beams project 
 into the room below. We can see it all : the parlour with 
 the horsehair sofa, the scant, quaint furniture, the old- 
 fashioned garden outside, with its flowers and vegetables 
 combined, and along the south side of the garden the 
 green terrace sloping away. 
 
 There is a pretty description of the sisters' devotion to 
 one another (when Cassandra went to school little Jane 
 accompanied her, the sisters could not be parted), of the 
 family party, of the old place, ' where there are hedge- 
 rows winding, with green shady footpaths within the copse ; 
 where the earliest primroses and hyacinths are found.' 
 There is the wood-walk, with its rustic seats, leading to 
 the meadows ; the church-walk leading to the church, 
 ' which is far from the hum of the village, and within 
 sight of no habitation, except a glimpse of the grey manor- 
 house through its circling screen of sycamores. Sweet 
 violets, both purple and white, grow in abundance beneath 
 its south wall. Large elms protrude their rough branches, 
 old hawthorns shed their blossoms over the graves, and 
 the hollow yew-tree must be at least coeval with the 
 church,' 
 
 One may read the account of Catherine Morland's 
 home with new interest, from the hint which is given of 
 its likeness to the old house at Steventon, where dwelt the 
 
2i6 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 unknown friend whose voice we seem to hear at last, and 
 whose face we seem to recognise, her bright eyes and 
 brown curly hair, her quick and graceful figure. One can 
 picture the children who are playing at the door of the 
 old parsonage, and calling for Aunt Jane. One can 
 imagine her pretty ways with them, her sympathy for the 
 active, their games and imaginations. There is Cassandra. 
 She is older than her sister, more critical, more beautiful, 
 more reserved. There is the mother of the family, with 
 her keen wit and clear mind ; the handsome father — ' the 
 handsome proctor,' as he was called; the five brothers, 
 driving up the lane. Tranquil summer passes by, the 
 winter days go by ; the young lady still sits writing at 
 the old mahogany desk, and smiling, perhaps, at her own 
 fancies, and hiding them away with her papers at the 
 sound of coming steps. Now, the modest papers, printed 
 and reprinted, lie in every hand, the fancies disport 
 themselves at their will in the wisest brains and the most 
 foolish. 
 
 It must have been at Steventon — Jane Austen's earliest 
 home — that Mr. Collins first made his appearance (Lady 
 Catherine not objecting, as we know, to his occasional 
 absence on a Sunday, provided another clergyman was 
 engaged to do the duty of the day), and here, conversing 
 with Miss Jane, that he must have made many of his pro- 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 217 
 
 foundest observations upon human nature ; remarking, 
 among other things, that resignation is never so perfect 
 as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its 
 value in our estimation, and propounding his celebrated 
 theory about the usual practice of elegant females. It 
 must have been here, too, that poor Mrs. Bennet declared, 
 with some justice, that once estates are entailed, one can 
 never tell how they will go ; here, too, that Mrs. Allen's 
 sprigged muslin and John Thorpe's rodomontades were 
 woven ; that his gig was built, ' curricle-hung lamps, 
 seat, trunk, sword-case, splashboard, silver moulding, all, 
 you see, complete. The ironwork as good as new, or 
 
 better. He asked fifty guineas I closed with 
 
 him directly, threw down the money, and the carriage was 
 mine.' 
 
 ' And I am sure,' said Catherine, ' I know so little of 
 such things, that I cannot judge whether it was cheap or 
 dear.' 
 
 'Neither the one nor the other,' says John Thorpe. 
 
 Mrs. Palmer was also bom at Steventon — that good- 
 humoured lady in ' Sense and Sensibility,' who thinks it 
 so ridiculous that her husband never hears her when she 
 speaks to him. We are told that Marianne and EUinor 
 have been supposed to represent Cassandra and Jane 
 Austen ; but Mr. Austen Legh says that he can trace no 
 
2i8 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 resemblance. Jane Austen is not twenty when this book 
 is written, and only twenty-one when ' Pride and Preju- 
 dice ' is first devised. 
 
 Cousins presently come on the scene, and amongst 
 them the romantic figure of a young, widowed Comtesse 
 de Feuillade, flying from the Kevolution to her uncle's 
 home. She is described as a clever and accomplished 
 woman, interested in her young cousins, teaching them 
 French (both Jane and Cassandra knew French), helping 
 in their various schemes, in their theatricals in the barn. 
 She eventually marries her cousin, Henry Austen. The 
 simple family annals are not without their romance ; but 
 there is a cruel one for poor Cassandra, whose lover dies 
 abroad, and his death saddens the whole family-party. Jane,, 
 too, ' receives the addresses ' (do such things as addresses 
 exist nowadays ?) ' of a gentleman possessed of good cha- 
 racter and fortune, and of everything, in short, except the 
 subtle power of touching her heart.' One cannot help 
 wondering whether this was a Henry Crawford or an Elton 
 or a Mr. Elliot, or had Jane already seen the person 
 that even Cassandra thought good enough for her sister ? 
 
 Here, too, is another sorrowful story. The sisters' fate 
 (there is a sad coincidence and similarity in it) was to be 
 undivided ; their life, their experience was the same. Some 
 one without a name takes leave of Jane one day, promising 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 219 
 
 to come back. He never comes back : long afterwards 
 they hear of his death. The story seems even sadder than 
 Cassandra's in its silence and uncertainty, for silence and 
 uncertainty are death in life to some people 
 
 There is little trace of such a tragedy in Jane Austen's 
 books — not one morbid word is to be found, not one vain 
 regret. Hers was not a nature to fall crushed by the 
 overthrow of one phase of her manifold life. She seems 
 to have had a natural genius for life, if I may so speak ;, 
 too vivid and genuinely unselfish to fail her in her need.. 
 She could gather every flower, every brightness along her 
 road. Grood spirit, content, all the interests of a happy 
 and observant nature were hers. Her gentle humour and 
 wit and interest cannot have failed. 
 
 It is impossible to calculate the difference of the grasp 
 by which one or another human being realises existence 
 and the things relating to it, nor how much more vivid life 
 seems to some than to others. Jane Austen, while her 
 existence lasted, realised it, and made the best use of the 
 gifts that were hers. Yet, when her life was ending, then 
 it was given to her to understand the change that was at 
 hand ; as willingly as she had lived, she died. Some 
 people seem scarcely to rise up to their own work, to their 
 own ideal. Jane Austen's life, as it is told by her nephew , 
 is beyond her work, which only contained one phase of 
 
220 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 that sweet and wise nature — the creative, observant, out- 
 ward phase. For her home, for her sister, for her friends, 
 she kept the depth and tenderness of her bright and 
 gentle sympathy. She is described as busy with her neat 
 and clever fingers sewing for the poor, working fanciful 
 keepsakes for her friends. There is the cup and ball that 
 she never failed to catch ; the spillikens lie in an even 
 ring where she had thrown them ; there are her letters, 
 straightly and neatly folded, and fitting smoothly in their 
 creases. There is something sweet, orderly, and consistent 
 in her character and all her tastes — in her fondness for 
 Crabbe and Cowper, in her little joke that she ought to 
 be a Mrs. Crabbe. She sings of an evening old ballads to 
 old-fashioned tunes with a low sweet voice. 
 
 Further on we have a glimpse of Jane and her sister in 
 their mobcaps, young still, but dressed soberly beyond 
 their years. One can imagine 'Aunt Jane,' with her 
 brother's children round her knee, telling her delightful 
 stories or listening to theirs, with never-failing sympathy. 
 One can fancy Cassandra, who does not like desultory 
 novels, more prudent and more reserved, and somewhat 
 less of a playfellow, looking down upon the group with 
 elder sister's eyes. 
 
 Here is an extract from a letter written at Steventon 
 in 1800;— 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 221 
 
 ' 1 have two messages : let me get rid of them, and 
 then my paper will be my own. Mary fully intended 
 writing by Mr. Charles's frank, and only happened entirely 
 to forget it, but will write soon ; and my father wishes 
 Edward to send him a memorandum of the price of hops. 
 
 ' We have had a dreadful storm of wind in the fore- 
 part of the day, which has done a great deal of mischief 
 among our trees. I was sitting alone in the drawing-room 
 when an odd kind of crash startled me. In a moment 
 afterwards it was repeated. I then went to the window. 
 I reached it just in time to see the last of our two highly 
 valued elms descend into the sweep ! ! ! 
 
 ' The other, which had fallen, I suppose, in the first 
 crash, and which was nearest to the pond, taking a more 
 easterly direction, sank among our screen of chestnuts and 
 firs, knocking down one spruce-fir, breaking off the head 
 of another, and stripping the two corner chestnuts of 
 several branches in its fall. This is not all : the maple 
 bearing the weathercock was broken in two, and what I 
 regret more than all the rest is, that all the three elms that 
 grew in Hall's Meadow, and gave such ornament to it, are 
 gone.' 
 
 A certain Mrs. Stent comes into one of these letters 
 ' ejaculating some wonder about the cocks and hens.' Mrs* 
 
222 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 Stent seems to have tried their patience, and will be known 
 henceforward as having bored Jane Austen. 
 
 They leave Steventon when Jane is about twenty-five 
 years of age and go to Bath, from whence a couple of 
 pleasant letters are given us. Jane is writing to her sister. 
 She has visited Miss A., who, like all other young ladies, 
 is considerably genteeler than her parents. She is heartily 
 glad that Cassandra speaks so comfortably of her health 
 and looks : could travelling fifty miles produce such an 
 immediate change ? ^ You were looking poorly when you 
 were here, and everybody seemed sensible of it.' Is there 
 any charm in a hack postchaise ? But if there were, Mrs. 
 Craven's carriage might have undone it all. Then Mrs. 
 Stent appears again. ' Poor Mrs. Stent, it has been her 
 lot to be always in the way ; but we must be merciful, for 
 perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves, 
 unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody.' Else- 
 where she writes, upon Mrs. 's mentioning that she 
 
 had sent the 'Rejected Addresses 'to Mr. H., 'I began 
 talking to her a little about them, and expressed my hope 
 of their having amused her. Her answer was, " Oh dear, 
 yes, very much ; very droll indeed ; the opening of the 
 house and the striking up of the fiddles ! " What she 
 meant, poor woman, who shall say ? ' 
 
 But there is no malice in Jane Austen. Hers is the 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 223 
 
 ■charity of all clear minds, it is only the muddled who are 
 intolerant. All who love Emma and Mr. Knightly must 
 remember the touching little scene in which he reproves 
 her for her thoughtless impatience of poor Miss Bates's 
 volubility. 
 
 ' You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she 
 had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an 
 honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits and in the 
 pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her. . . . This 
 is not pleasant to you, Emma, and it is very far from 
 pleasant to me, but I must, I will, I will tell you truths 
 while I am satisfied with proving myself your friend by 
 Tery faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time 
 or other do me greater justice than you can do me 
 now.' 
 
 ' While they talked they were advancing towards the 
 carriage : it was ready, and before she could speak again 
 he had handed her in. He had misinterpreted the feeling 
 which kept her face averted and her tongue motionless.' 
 Mr. Knightly's little sermon, in its old-fashioned English, 
 is as applicable now as it was when it was spoken. We 
 know that he was an especial favourite with Jane Austen. 
 
224 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Mr. Austen died at Bath, and his family removed to 
 Southampton. In 1811, Mrs. Austen, her daughters, and 
 her niece, settled finally at Chawton, a house belonging to 
 Jane's brother, Mr. Knight (he was adopted by an uncle, 
 whose name he took), and from Chawton all her literary 
 work was given to the world. ' Sense and Sensibility,' 
 ' Pride and Prejudice,' were already written ; but in the 
 next five years, from thirty-five to forty, she set to work 
 seriously, and wrote ' Mansfield Park,' ' Emma,' and ' Per- 
 suasion.' Any one who has written a book will know what 
 an amount of labour this represents. . . . One can pic- 
 ture to oneself the little family scene which Jane describes 
 to Cassandra. ' Pride and Prejudice ' just come down in a 
 parcel from town ; the imsuspicious Miss B. to dinner \ 
 and "Jane and her mother setting to in the evening and 
 reading aloud half the first volume of a new novel sent down 
 by the brother. Unsuspicious Miss B. is delighted. Jane 
 complains of her mother's too rapid way of getting on ; 
 ' though she perfectly understands the characters herself, 
 she cannot speak as they ought. Upon the whole, how- 
 ever,' she says, ' I am quite vain enough and well -satisfied 
 enough.' This is her own criticism of ' Pride and Pre- 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 225 
 
 judice ' : — ' The work is rather too light, and bright, and 
 sparkling. It wants shade. It wants to be stretched out 
 here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be 
 had ; if not, of solemn specious nonsense about something 
 unconnected with the story — an essay on writing, a critique 
 on Walter Scott or the ' History of Bonaparte.' 
 
 And so Jane Austen lives quietly working at her labour 
 of love, interested in her ' own darling children's ' success ; 
 ' the light of the home,' one of the real living children 
 says afterwards, speaking in the days when she was no 
 longer there. She goes to London once or twice. Once 
 slie lives for some months in Hans Place, nursing a brother 
 through an illness. Here it was that she received some 
 little compliments and messages from the Prince Eegent, 
 to whom she dedicated ' Emma.' He thanks her and ac- 
 knowledges the handsome volumes, and she laughs and 
 tells her publisher that at all events his share of the 
 offering is appreciated, whatever hers may be ! We are 
 also favoured with some valuable suggestions from Mr. 
 Clarke, the Eoyal librarian, respecting a very remarkable 
 clergyman. He is anxious that Miss Austen should de- 
 lineate one who ' should pass his time between the metro- 
 polis and the country, something like Beattie's minstrel, 
 entirely engaged in literature, and no man's enemy but 
 his own.' Failing to impress this character upon the 
 
 Q 
 
226 JANE AUSTEN. 
 
 authoress, he makes a fresh suggestion, and proposes that 
 she should write a romance illustrative of the august house 
 of Coburg. ' It would be interesting,' he says, ' and very 
 properly dedicated to Prince Leopold.' 
 
 To which the authoress replies: 'I could no more 
 write a romance than an epic poem. I could not seriously 
 sit down to write a romance under any other motive than 
 to save my life ; and if it were indispensable for me to 
 keep it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or 
 other people, I am sure I should be hung before the first 
 chapter.' 
 
 There is a delightful collection of friends, suggestions 
 which she has put together, but which is too long to be 
 quoted here. She calls it, ' Plan of a Novel, as suggested 
 by various Friends.' 
 
 All this time, while her fame is slowly growing, life 
 passes in the same way as in the old cottage at Chawton» 
 Aunt Jane, with her young face and her mob-cap, makes 
 play-houses for the children, helps them to dress up,, 
 invents imaginary conversations for them, supposing that 
 they are all grown up, the day after a ball. One can 
 imagine how delightful a game that must have seemed to 
 the little girls. She built her nest, did this good woman, 
 happily weaving it out of shreds, and ends, and scraps of 
 daily duty, patiently put together ; and it was from this 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 227 
 
 nest that she sang the song, bright and brilliant, with 
 quaint thrills and unexpected cadences, that reaches us 
 even here through near a century. The lesson her life 
 seems to teach us is this : Don't let us despise our nests — 
 life is as much made of minutes as of years; let us 
 complete the daily duties ; let us patiently gather the 
 twigs and the little scraps of moss, of dried grass together, 
 and see the result! — a whole, completed and coherent, 
 beautiful even without the song. 
 
 We come too soon to the story of her death. And yet 
 did it come too soon ? A sweet life is not the sweeter for 
 being long. Jane Austen lived years enough to fulfil her 
 mission. She lived long enough to write six books that 
 were masterpieces in their way — to make a world the 
 happier for her industry. 
 
 One cannot read the story of her latter days, of her 
 patience, her sweetness, and gratitude, without emotion. 
 There is family trouble, we are not told of what nature. 
 She falls ill. Her nieces find her in her dressing-gown, 
 like an invalid, in an arm-chair in her bedroom ; but she 
 gets up and greets them, and, pointing to seats which had 
 been arranged for them by the fire, says : "^ There is a 
 chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, 
 Caroline.' But she is too weak to talk, and Cassandra 
 takes them away. 
 
228 JANE AUSTEN, 
 
 At last they persuade her to go to Winchester, to a 
 well-known doctor there. 
 
 'It distressed me,' she says, in one of her last, dying 
 letters, ' to see Uncle Henry ' and William Knight, who 
 kindly attended us, riding in the rain almost the whole 
 way. We expect a visit from them to-morrow, and hope 
 they will stay the night ; and on Thursday, which is a 
 confirmation and a holiday, we hope to get Charles out to 
 breakfast. We have had but one visit from ^^m, poor 
 
 fellow, as he is in the sick room Grod bless you, 
 
 dear E. ; if ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed 
 as I have been. . . .' 
 
 But nursing does not cure her, nor can the doctor save 
 her to them all, and she sinks from day to day. To the 
 end she is full of concern for others. 
 
 * As for my dearest sister, my tender, watchfal, inde- 
 fatigable nurse has not been made ill by her exertions,' 
 she writes. 'As to what I owe her, and the anxious 
 affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can 
 only cry over it, and pray Grod to bless them more and 
 more.' 
 
 One can hardly read this last sentence with dry eyes. 
 It is her parting blessing and farewell to those she had 
 blessed all her life by her presence and her love — that 
 love which is beyond death ; and of which the benediction 
 
JANE AUSTEN. 229 
 
 remains, not only spoken in words, but by tbe ever-present 
 signs and the tokens of those lifetimes which do not end 
 for us as long as we ourselves exist. 
 
 They asked her when she was near her end if there 
 was anything she wanted. 
 
 ' Nothing but death,' she said. Those were her last 
 words. She died on the 18th of July, 1817, and was 
 buried in Winchester Cathedral, where she lies not unre- 
 membered. 
 
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