[Page 180] 

CHAPTER XIII

LATER LIFE

THIS intercourse with Scott, these travellings together, and this final parting in Dublin, may certainly be called the highest lights, emotionally speaking, of Miss Edgeworth's life. To delve into the more intimate recesses of one's subject is frequently held to be a prerogative of biographers. While a little doubtful as to there having been any particular recesses in this case to delve into, I need not hesitate to express my conviction that Scott–the man, no less than the author–stood for a good deal more in Miss Edgeworth's eyes than did ever that very shadowy personage, M. Edelcrantz. Now he was gone, never, so Fate had decreed, to be seen by her again. The two events, with all their delights prospective and retrospective–the visit to Abbotsford, the return visit to Edgeworthstown–both had become things of the past, and life in County Longford had for the future to resume its accustomed placid course.

It was a placidity not undiversified, fortunately, with pleasurable incidents. Miss Edgeworth had still over twenty years to live, and another successful book to write, before the inevitable end came. There is a characteristic little entry in a letter to her stepmother written in the year 1834, which throws a good deal [Page 181]  of light both upon her position in her own family, and also upon her outlook on life in general:–

"This morning was one of the wettest and most dismal that your Italian son Francis ever paled at. Nevertheless with us all was bright, radiantly bright. The sunshine came out of the post-box, and spread full upon Honora and me at our coffee, as we sat tête-a-tête in her room, between seven and eight. Your delightful accounts of Fanny and Lucy" (the two invalids of the moment) "are more inspiriting than all the blue skies that ever I saw. Not that I mean to affront blue skies, which I like very much in their proper places, poetry inclusive, but they never affect my spirits in the wonderful way they do some folks."

"In their proper places" is nice, and "poetry inclusive" goes well with the rest of the passage!

"Not much given to insist
On utilities not in Utility's list."

"Yesterday when I came down to breakfast I found Sir Humphry Davy, with a countenance radiant with pleasure, eager to tell me that Captain Parry is to be sent out upon a [Page 182]  new Polar Expedition. The same day arrived Leslie Foster, on his way to Roscommon, delighted to find Sir Humphry here; and he made new diversion by the history of the election, of which he was full. He looks ten years older and balder, and seemed glad to find a resting-place here among friends."

Another letter, written in September 1827 to her cousin, Sophy Ruxton, runs as follows:–

"The day before yesterday we were amusing ourselves by telling who, among literary and scientific people, we should wish to come here next day. Francis said Coleridge; I said Herschel. Yesterday morning, as I was returning from my morning walk at half-past eight, I saw a bonnetless maid on the walk, with letter in hand, in search of me. When I opened the letter, I found it was from Mr. Herschel ! and that he was waiting for an answer at Mr. Briggs's inn. I have seldom been so agreeably surprised ! And now that he has spent twenty-four hours here, and that he is gone, I am confirmed in my opinion; and if the fairy were to ask me the question again, I should more eagerly say–'Mr. Herschel, ma'am, if you please.'"

So the years sped on, pleasant, friendly, if not precisely eventful. Marriages and–as was inevitable in so widely extended a circle–deaths were the chief events which are recorded in the course of them. Whether Miss Edgeworth was, or was not, in those days the virtual owner of Edgeworthstown, seems to be doubtful. Mr. Hare asserts that she was, but that view is not borne out by nearer authorities. In any case, hers was undoubtedly the chief guiding hand over its arrangements, and her purse the one that was always open for every emergency. In 1829 a distant relation, "Mrs. Anna Edgeworth, of London," died, as we learn from the family annals, "and bequeathed to [Page 183]  Maria a pair of diamond earrings and pearl bracelets. With the proceeds of these she built a market-house in the village, and a room over it for the Magistrates' Petty Sessions."

Incidents like these show that her benevolence extended to a considerably wider area than even her own widely extended family circle. Her name seems indeed to have been almost as well known in her own part of Ireland for kindliness as for authorship. In the year 1831 she chanced to be on her way back from a visit of some weeks in London, and found on arriving in Dublin that no room was to be had in her usual quarters. It was necessary to go in search of others, and the hotel to which she was directed proved to be, not only very uninviting-looking, but even fuller than the one she had just left. The situation for the moment seemed hopeless, but as usual her name worked miracles.–"While we were parleying with the waiter and chambermaid, a red-eyed, thin-faced man put his head between their shoulders–'My name's Burke, ma'am, and I've just learned your name's Edgeworth, and you're as welcome as life to the best room in my house for anything at all! Only not a room have I vacant till after twelve, then the General will be gone, and you shall have a proper drawing-room, if you'll kindly take up with what you see till after breakfast.'"

To the properly constituted mind there will always be something particularly pleasant about such spontaneous tributes as these, and, however philosophically Miss Edgeworth might take her ordinary triumphs, it is evident, from the fact of her recording it, that an incident like the foregoing gave her quite the right and [Page 184]  human amount of pleasure. Space dwindles, and only a few items, out of the many with which these years were filled, can be given here. In May 1829 her brother William, the engineer, died, as so many of the Sneyd branch of the family had done, of rapid consumption. In the September following Wordsworth visited Edgeworthstown, and is described by Miss Edgeworth as having "a good philosophical bust, and a long, thin, gaunt face, much wrinkled and weather-beaten." In November 1830 she again paid a visit to London, and while absent there her aunt and lifelong correspondent, Mrs. Ruxton, died, a sorrow which for a time seems to have renewed that peculiar sense of desolation which her father's loss had for the first time awakened in her.

Only one more expedition seems to have been made to the Atlantic side of Ireland after the memorable one in the company of Sir Walter Scott and Lockhart. This was in the autumn of 1833, nearly nine years later. A Sir Culling and Lady Smith chanced to be amongst the visitors to Edgeworthstown in the course of that summer–opulent folk apparently, possessors of a "mighty grand" travelling coach, drawn by four horses, and all else to match. At their urgent request Miss Edgeworth was induced to accept a seat in the said travelling coach, and to accompany them in their progress through the west of Ireland, a trip in which it was proposed to include the then almost unattainable region of Connemara.

For strictly personal reasons the most interesting part of that expedition to her present biographer lies in the fact of Miss Edgeworth having on this occasion [Page 185]  made acquaintance with the Martins of Ballinahinch, especially with the remarkable daughter of that house, Mary Martin. In those days the extreme west of Ireland was, to the inhabitants of its more conventional and anglicised eastern portions, almost as foreign, it must be remembered, as if the same set of seas had not enclosed both. So far from there being any railroad across its intricacies, there were not at the time even any driving ones, although the enterprising Nimmo–rival and precursor of Macadam–was just then in the very act of constructing them. Unluckily for our travellers, they were not yet in a sufficiently advanced state to be driven over. "Nimmo's new road, looking like a gravel path," Miss Edgeworth wrote to her brother, "was running parallel to our road of danger, yet, for want of being finished, useless, and most tantalising."

Tantalising, truly, considering that this was the sort of thing that it was destined to supersede:–

"Through eighteen sloughs we went, or were got, at the imminent peril of our lives. Why the carriage was not broken to pieces I cannot tell, but an excellent strong carriage it was, thank Heaven and the builder, whoever he was." . . . "It grew dark, and Sir Culling, very brave, was walking beside the carriage, so when we came to the next bad step, he sank above his knees. How they dragged him out I could not see, and there were we in the carriage stuck fast in a slough, which, we were told, was the last but one before we reached Ballinahinch Castle. Suddenly my eyes were blessed with a twinkling light in the distance–a boy with a lantern. And when, breathless, he panted up to the side of the carriage, and thrust up lantern and note (we still in the slough), how glad I was to see him and it! and to hear him say, 'Then Mr. Martin 's very unaasy about yees–so he is.'" [Page 186] 

The letter describing all this is to be found in the Life and Letters, and was written nearly a year later to her brother Pakenham, who was then in India. From it we ascertain that the visit to the Martins was originally an impromptu, being due entirely to her own terrors over the road. The inn at Clifden, the nearest town, had been their original destination, but, after the coach had stuck fast for the twentieth time, she and Lady Smith persuaded Sir Culling to let her send her card with an appeal for hospitality to Mr. Martin. Needless to say, it was at once responded to. They reached the Castle of Ballinahinch alive, only to find its chimneys on fire! That, however, appeared to be a matter of not the slightest consequence, in fact a mere precursor to the dinner, which is described by Miss Edgeworth as follows:–"Such a dinner! London bons vivants might have blessed themselves! Venison such as Sir Culling declared could not be found in England, except from one or two immense parks; salmon, lobsters, oysters, game; all well cooked and well served, and well placed upon the table. Nothing loaded; all in good taste; wines, such as I was not worthy of, but Sir Culling knew how to praise them; champagne, and all manner of French wines."

More interesting than even Mr. Martin's really remarkable impromptu dinner, was, in Miss Edgeworth's eyes, Mr. Martin's only daughter:–"Miss Martin sat opposite to me, and, with the light of the branch candles full upon her, I saw that she was very young, about seventeen, very fair, with hair which might be called red by rivals, and auburn by friends, her eyes blue grey, prominent, and like some picture I have seen by Leonardo da Vinci." [Page 187] 

As it turned out, Miss Edgeworth was destined to have more extended opportunities for getting acquainted with this Leonardo da Vinci-like daughter of the West than had at first seemed probable. Whether owing to the shocks of her journey, or to some other cause, upon the following day Lady Smith fell seriously ill. It was found to be impossible to move her, and for the next three weeks, the whole party were forced to remain upon the hospitable hands of the Martins. Although nothing could have exceeded their kindness, the sense of isolation, as well as the difficulties about receiving any of their letters, proved to be no small trial to the guests. Three times a week a "gossoon" ran with the post to Oughterard, thirty-six miles away, where the nearest coach passed. "One runs for a day and a night, and then sleeps for a day and a night, while another takes his turn," Miss Edgeworth explained to her brother. Of the manner of life prevailing in the region, and of the patriarchal rule of Mr. Martin himself, she has also much to tell, but above and beyond everything else, her interest is evidently centred in the heiress of all this semi-savage magnificence. On one occasion Miss Martin took Sir Culling Smith and herself to visit the Connemara marble quarries, followed by her usual train of followers. Wishing for an answer from one of the latter, Sir Culling asked her to pass on her inquiry in her own fashion.–"When the question had been put and answered, Sir Culling objected, 'But, Miss Martin, you did not put the question exactly as I asked you to state it.' 'No,' said she, with colour raised and head thrown back, 'no, because I knew how to put it so that my people can understand it. Je sais mon métier de reine.'"

It was the old world and the new one brought face to face with a vengeance! the contrast rendered the more piquant from the fact of the new one being represented by the worthy middle-aged baronet, the old by the girl of seventeen. Miss Edgeworth has her own shrewd comments to make upon it all, and describes with much amusement–"the astonishment of Sir Culling at Miss Martin's want of sympathy with his own really liberal and philanthropic views for Ireland, while she is full of her 'tail'; of her father's fifty-miles-long avenue; also of Æschylus and Euripides, in which she is admirably well read. Do think of a girl of seventeen, in the wilds of Connemara, intimately acquainted with all the beauties of Æschylus and Euripides, and having them as part of her daily thoughts !"

Noteworthy enough, yet to the student of Irish social life there are facts to be remembered about Mary Martin which are even more noteworthy than her knowledge of Æschylus. If she strutted her brief hour with somewhat too queen-like a gait, 'twere harsh to grudge it, remembering what was to be the sequel of it all.–"Don't you think your friend Sir Walter Scott would have liked our people and country ?" the poor Connemara "Princess" one day asked Miss Edgeworth rather wistfully. It was the last chance for Sir Walter, or any other magician, to wave the wand of description over a state of affairs which was even at that moment hurrying to its end. With her keen eye for a situation, Miss Edgeworth in the same letter points out that the state of affairs then prevailing at Ballinahinch was–"not so much a feudal state, as the tail of a feudal state. Dick Martin–father of the [Page 189]  present man–was not only lord of all he surveyed, but lord of all the lives of the people. Now the laws of the land have come in, and rival proprietors have sprung up."

Despite their wide diversity of views, something like a genuine friendship seems to have arisen between the distinguished guest and her entertainers, a sentiment which was evidently especially warm upon Miss Edgeworth's side towards the youngest of those entertainers–"Mary." After nearly four weeks' illness, Lady Smith, however, began to mend. The coach and horses were ordered out of Mr. Martin's stables, where they had all this time been reposing, and a guide was secured to see the party safe out of Connemara, across the endless sloughs. They departed, and these two women–interesting if only from sheer force of contrast–never, so far as I am aware, met again. Eleven years afterwards came the great Famine, and a little later, Mary Martin–having in the interval lost parents, castle, retainers, property, everything–too proud to ask for a help which would have been right joyfully given–left Ireland for ever on board of an emigrant ship, having previously married a cousin of her own, almost poorer than herself. The emigrant ship was–what emigrant ships were in those ghastly years,–and the experience was one from which she never recovered. Although friendly hands were stretched out to her on the further shore, it was too late. She died within a brief period of her arrival in America, and with her, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, an entire type–a type of which, to those who had known her, she remained always the most attractive embodiment–perished also. [Page 190] 

This, it is as well, however, to remember, is a biography, not of Mary Martin, but of Maria Edgeworth! One of the latest in date of the same batch of unprinted letters from which I have already so largely drawn, was written in the year 1836, and contains the following characteristic description of a scene witnessed by Miss Edgeworth upon the return of Lord and Lady Dillon to their estates in Roscommon. It is addressed to her brother Sneyd:–

"Last night between nine and ten o'clock we suddenly heard a burst of noise, of uproar indescribable, at the hall door, yells, screams, huzzas–and such a blaze of light! When we ran out of the dining-room into the hall, we might have thought that the house was on fire. But it was only rejoicings–from a crowd of hundreds of ragged subjects, bearing in their hands, and flourishing high in air, great poles, to which huge blazing wisps of straw were fastened, which streamed to the sparkling night. A strong light was cast on the wild figures, and on the strange, gaunt, savage, comic, expecting, intelligent, grinning, pathetic faces, crowded below, up to the very high hall door steps, upon which Lord and Lady Dillon stood; the sea of heads, as far as eye could reach, ending in darkness visible. It was one of the most striking sights I ever saw–and would have been the finest study for a painter–I wished for Wilkie–but more for Mulready, who has some Irish genius. There is in this County of Roscommon a red dye and a deep blue, such as the Italian painters love, which added much to the picturesque effect of these barbaric rejoicings. Some groups of women and children, young and old, sat on [Page 191]  the lowest step, or leaned against the piers, and there was one prominent face of intense curiosity, that of a bare-necked, red-haired man, half rogue, three-quarters savage, stretching neck in front to listen to the lady, which can never leave my eyes.

"The object of the whole (under these rejoicings) was to obtain leave to hold a market, I believe, at Loughglynn. Petition referred by my lord to Mr. Strickland, the agent, and cause adjourned till his return. So with a whoop, and a screech, and a brandish of yet unextinguished torches, they beat them against the ground and disappeared."

Of other unpublished letters, not less good, there are still a considerable number. Only room, however, can be found in these pages for one more, which, if from its touches of humour alone, is irresistible. It begins with an account of all that Miss Edgeworth saw and did at Armagh, while upon a visit there to her lively scientific friend, Dr. Robinson of the Observatory, and his wife. Then follows her start home, all alone at half-past five upon a pouring wet morning:–

"I was to have left the Observatory on Saturday, but when all packed, and chaise at the door at eight o'clock, it rained and blew such a storm that I really could not go. Stayed till Monday; gave up the visit to Red House; instead of going in postchaise alone to Ardee, found that I could go in a coach which had just begun to run (to oblige me) by Slane to Dublin; so got up at five o'clock on Monday morning–dark ! raining and blowing desperately! The jaunting car having been ordered instead of their chaise I was a little dismayed, but Dr. Robinson was so good as to go [Page 192]  with me, though he had been talking till one o'clock the night before, and had been up long afterwards finishing his observations. [He and Brougham are both of them evidently supernatural beings, and can do without sleep!] Well, in the almost quite dark morning, quarter before six o'clock, he packed me and all my horribly troublesome number of boxes and bags upon the car, and seating himself beside me held a huge umbrella over me–how he held it, Heaven knows, against the wind, and up hill and down hill in that vile hilly town of Armagh (next to Lausanne the most hated by horses). And just as we reached a dark blot in the street which proved to be the coach, 'Stop! Stop for a lady!'–and my boxes were hoisted up, and Dr. Robinson lifted me as you would a doll, from the jaunting car to the coach, and put me safely in without my foot touching wet ground, and without one drop on my bonnet. From the first moment to the last nothing could be kinder than both Dr. and Mrs. Robinson were to me. To have the image of her standing with her thin dressing-gown and nice night-cap on, candle in hand in the passage, to take the last leave of me at a quarter before six that rainy morning, the hall-door open, and the wind draughting–something like friendship that, is it not, my dear ? as Molly Macaulay might say. But I shall never get to the end of my journey ! In the coach, as soon as the grey light of morning made them visible, I saw opposite to me a thin, mild-looking sort of man with a cleric hat on his knees, and a fat 2-volumes-bound-in-one of a jolly mortal, who might have been a Catholic priest, or a prosperous whiskey-selling shopkeeper. The thin man was a priest, a country curate; [Page 193]  and the thick man I know not what, but a wag gratis, and many a joke he cut upon the mild priest, who never soured, always smiled benignantly, not Jesuitically. One instance will tell all. I was at work (Honiton border); I threaded a small needle.

"(Priest. ) 'Well, long as I have lived ' (he could not have lived very long), 'I never saw that done, and would not have believed it possible.'

"(Wag. ) 'No ? Why, then, your Church believes more extraordinary things possible.'

"Presently came in a huge, bang-up-coated, self-sufficient bear of an English agent, with a fur cap on his very handsome head, set at the angle of insolence.

"(Wag. ) 'Sir, you have the advantage of us in having a lady on the same side with you.'

"Down flopped the gentleman without the least pretence of care for the female, and it was well he did not extinguish me. I shrunk, and was saved. Much politics, and three newspapers unfolded, and handed by the bear to all but the female. Almost all his sentences began or ended with 'I have no hesitation in saying'–or 'Decidedly–decidedly.' He was not without sense or even liberality, but he made both almost odious. He talked of hunting men, as if they were animals. I thought he must be either a Revenue officer or an agent, and I afterwards found he is agent to both Lord Bath and Mr. Shirley. He shall be in my books, I promise him, whenever I get to Ireland again. I am much obliged to him, for he has given me many ideas that will work up well."

Unfortunately Miss Edgeworth never did "get to [Page 194]  Ireland again" in this sense of the word. Writing to a brother who seems to have remonstrated with her on the subject, she tells him that Ireland was just then in too uncomfortable a condition–"we are in too perilous a case"–for her to write another Irish story at that time. The excuse may pass, and has been used since then by worse writers, but it will scarcely serve in the case of an author whose best book–and an Irish book to boot–was written amid the terrors and the turmoils of the year ninety-eight! It was in 1830–when already past sixty years of age–that Miss Edgeworth set to work upon the last, and what, at the time it was written, was possibly the most successful of all her novels–namely, Helen. Any reader who will take it down from its shelf, and glance over it, will quickly perceive that it is a novel of a very much more modern type than any other by the same hand. In reading it we are aware that the eighteenth century has at last dropped out of sight, and that we are well out upon the nineteenth, not indeed as yet "Victorian," but in a sort of midway region, on the road to that superior epoch. The old didactic attitude is still visible, but has become decidedly less aggressive. À propos of one of the earlier novels, Lord Jeffrey remarked that–"Miss Edgeworth walks by the side of her characters, as Mentor by the side of Telemachus, keeping them out of all manner of pleasant mischief, and wagging from time to time a monitory finger." The criticism is true of Helen also, but is less true of it than of most of the older books. In his undeniably brilliant novel What will he do with it? the first Lord Lytton is extremely humorous about poor Miss Edgeworth's heroines. Some young woman in that book is declared to be exactly [Page 195]  like one of them–just the same type of "superior girl"; "so rational, so prudent, so well behaved; so free from silly, romantic notions; so replete with solid information." This again may be perfectly true, only where, one asks oneself by way of parenthesis, have Lord Lytton's own adorable heroines got to by this time, or how many novel-readers would undertake to remember so much as a single one of their names ?

In the month of February 1833 we find Miss Edgeworth writing as follows to her cousin Sophy Ruxton:–

"I fear you will be tired of hearing of Helen before you become acquainted with her. Since I wrote to you last, when I left it to your own choice whether to read her before or after you come here, I see much reason, for her sake and my own, to wish that you should put off reading it till after you come to us, and till I have finished it. Now I am in full eagerness finishing, and shall be at the end in three weeks, if I do not stop to do a hundred other things. Therefore, my dear Sophy, and my dear Margaret, I beg you to bear with my changeableness, and let it be till the story is finished."

Finished it was within a couple of months of the writing of this letter. There was still, however, before Miss Edgeworth the task of finding a publisher, and of making a bargain–not a part of the profession of literature which she at all relished, or had ever before been called upon to undertake. A piece of great good fortune, however, befell her, and she was able to secure no less an aid and go-between than Lockhart. Under his auspices the bargain was quickly made, and seems to have been an excellent one, for she received a larger sum for Helen than for any other single book of hers, with the exception of Patronage.

This seems to be the place for furnishing the reader [Page 196]  with a list of the prices received by Miss Edgeworth for her various books, one which I have also been most kindly allowed to copy from her own hitherto unprinted MSS.

COPYRIGHTS TO MARIA AND R. L. EDGEWORTH

These figures are accompanied by a note, in Miss Edgeworth's own handwriting, written as late as the year 1842, only seven years, therefore, before her death. It explains that the books which are marked in the MSS. by a star in red ink were the ones written by her after her father's death–the only ones evidently which she regarded as her own exclusive property. For the copyright of these she received three thousand one hundred pounds, with regard to the expenditure of which we obtain the following characteristic explanation: "I spent of this sum in delightful travelling with my sisters to France, Switzerland, Scotland, and England (including nine or ten months' residence in France, and two winters in London), about two thousand pounds. And I had the pleasure of giving to my brothers and sisters and near relatives from copyright of Helen about five or six hundred. M. E., September 1842."

To give away was clearly for Miss Edgeworth of the nature of an indulgence, one that it behoved her to keep in some check! Not alone did she delight in exercising it, as in this instance, upon a somewhat large scale, but also upon the minutest one possible. Nor was it only her own kith and kin, but all who came within her ken were apt to find themselves the more or less surprised recipients of gifts. The habit of universal present-giving is one which [Page 198]  it is to be feared children alone properly appreciate, and it was one of the ties which bound Miss Edgeworth so closely to her long list of child-friends. Not, however, the only one. What she herself called the "Rosamund instincts"–a love of the most infantile sort of adventures, and of playing the truant generally–survived in her to an almost incredible age. This is a side of her character which has never, I think, been sufficiently emphasised by her biographers, and was probably the one which–combined with her tiny size–brought her into such instant freemasonry with every child she encountered, even accidentally. An anecdote is told in one of Mrs. Richmond Ritchie's prefaces of a little girl who, at a crowded party, suddenly started out of a remote corner, looked at her hard, and said, "I like Simple Susan best," and then rushed away again, overwhelmed by her own audacity. Another tale, reported upon the authority of Lady Monteagle, refers to a dinner-party, at the beginning of which the principal guest (Miss Edgeworth herself) was, to the dismay of her hostess, suddenly found to be missing. After a considerable delay she was tracked to the back-kitchen, to which she had been lured by the children of the house, in order that she might inspect some rabbits which they were rearing in that appropriate home.

From the half-forgotten pages of an old magazine, the following anecdote has recently been disinterred, which bears directly upon this point. The date of the incident is not given, but clearly it must have occurred quite late in Miss Edgeworth's life. Although anonymous, its authenticity stands legibly inscribed, I think, upon its face:–[Page 199] 

"A party of happy young people were travelling half a century ago by train together in England. At one end of their carriage were seated two elderly ladies, one of whom they noticed to be exceedingly small. Strangers at the beginning of the journey, the travellers in time began to exchange remarks with one another, and books soon became the subject on which young and old evidently preferred to talk. At last Miss Edgeworth's works were mentioned: they were great favourites with the young people, and they spoke warmly of the delight that Simple Susan and Lazy Lawrence had been to them in their childish days. Suddenly two of the party looked at each other and smiled, and one of them turning to the little old lady in the corner said: 'We always feel guilty when we hear Miss Edgeworth spoken of, for when we were children we did such a dreadful thing; we cannot imagine now how we could have been so bold. We were very fond of drawing pictures of our pet characters, and of course were always trying to illustrate The Parent's Assistant, and only think! we actually made up a packet of what we considered our best pictures, with our Christian names written under them, and posted it to Miss Edgeworth! What must she have thought of such children?'"

The answer was not long delayed, and reads for all the world like an answer out of a fairy tale:–

"The little old lady's kindly face lighted up with pleasure.–'And I can tell you that those drawings are still carefully treasured,' she replied, 'for I am Maria Edgeworth!'"

In 1835 Mr. and Mrs. George Ticknor visited Edgeworthstown, and the former has left to the world an elaborate record of all that he saw and did there. I cannot say that his letters on the subject appeal to me particularly. He was received by Miss Edgeworth, he tells his correspondent, at the front-door, who explained to him the various people he might expect to meet in the house–no unnecessary precaution for [Page 200]  a stranger entering so large and so complicated a family circle ! He goes on to relate that she was then "almost sixty-seven years of age "; that she was "small, short, and spare"; that she possessed "extremely frank and kind manners, looking straight into your face with a pair of mild, deep grey eyes whenever she speaks." These are the more valuable of the points in his description, unless a reader can be excited by hearing that–"We dined punctually at half-past six, and rejoined the ladies in the library at half-past eight"; or that, on going the Sunday following to church,–"Miss Edgeworth carried her favourite prayer-book in a nice case, and knelt and made the responses very devoutly"; or that finally, upon a portion of the correspondence between her and Sir Walter Scott being shown to him, the comment which it suggested to the distinguished visitor's mind was that it–"seemed to have been extremely creditable to both parties."

England, America, and the Continent all sent visitors to Edgeworthstown during the last two or three decades of Miss Edgeworth's life. It had in fact, to a great degree, come to hold in Ireland the position which Abbotsford for many years held in Scotland; as a place of pilgrimage, one which no self-respecting person visiting the country at that date would like to feel that he or she had missed seeing. Of more local visitors there were also many, amongst whom Mr. and Mrs. Hall, the Irish novelists, ought to be mentioned. Like Mr. Ticknor, Mrs. Hall upon her departure wrote, and moreover published, a somewhat uninspiring report of all that she had seen and heard. Not content with describing the illustrious [Page 201]  authoress herself, she equally minutely describes the less distinguished members of the family, also the library, the village, Sir Walter Scott's pen–an unexpectedly commonplace one–with everything else describable, down to the very chairs and tables. This tribute of admiration being duly returned to her entertainers, "all the world," Miss Edgeworth reports, "were greatly pleased," which obviously was all that could have been desired.

A year or so later another guest appeared at Edgeworthstown, whose name awakens to-day much more response, namely, Edward FitzGerald. Finding himself in Ireland, he took advantage of an invitation given, not by Miss Edgeworth, but by one of her brothers. "I came to this house a week ago," he tells his correspondent, "to visit a male friend." (Even for Edward FitzGerald men and women seem to have been still at that date merely males and females!) The "male friend" had considerately left Edgeworthstown for England the very day before his arrival, and the guest found himself in a house filled exclusively with unknown "females." That older and less gregarious Edward FitzGerald, with whom most of us are more or less acquainted, would probably have fled precipitately, but the younger one seems to have been able to endure such an ordeal with a fair share of philosophy. He remained at Edgeworthstown for over a week, and made himself, as he says, "quite at home."–"All these people very pleasant and kind . . . . The house pleasant; a good library." Of the "great Maria," as he calls her, he goes on to tell his correspondent that she was at the moment in which he was writing–"as busy as a bee, making a catalogue [Page 202]  of her books beside me, and chattering away. We are great friends. She is as lively, active, and cheerful as if she were but twenty. Really a very entertaining person. We talk about Walter Scott, whom she adores, and are merry all the day long."

Another year drifts along after this inspiring description was penned, and we begin to find that the shadows, which none can evade, are at last beginning to gather also about the "great Maria." For some time longer they were still, however, only of the comparatively light and passing variety. One of her two especial sisters, Fanny, had married their friend Mr. Lestock Wilson, and was settled at a distance, in London. The other one, Harriet, was nearer, having married an Irish clergyman, Mr. Butler, and a brisk intercourse seems to have been kept up between their parsonage and Edgeworthstown. After saying that no more letters of Miss Edgeworth were to find place in this volume, I find myself irresistibly drawn into adding two more from the same unprinted supply. Both of these are to Mrs. Butler. From the first we obtain an account of a somewhat serious fall from off a ladder, not elsewhere, I think, mentioned. The original letter describing it, which has been recently in my hands, is adorned with a design supposed to represent herself in the very act of falling:–

"EDGEWORTHSTOWN, March 14, 1839.

"MY DEAREST HARRIET,–I hope the frontispiece which I have sketched for you will make you laugh, and very glad I am not to make you cry! I assure you I had a narrow escape of being a cripple on your hands, and your dear mother's, for life. [Page 203] 

"How I escaped breaking my legs I know not–so entangled were they among the rungs of the broken ladder, as ladder and I came down together–how I cannot conceive! If I had made the least struggle I must have broken both legs, but I let the ladder do just as it pleased, and one-half was so good as to fall clean off one foot, without doing a hap'orth of harm to foot or leg. And the other half of the ladder was content with scraping the skin two half-crowns-worth off my shin-bone, but not cutting through to the bone, leaving most considerately a cherry-red film or skinnikin underneath.

"When I felt the ladder giving way in the middle, I could not conceive what upon the face of the earth was going to happen, and with all speed instinctively I put down one leg to the next rung behind me, but, the ladder having parted in the middle at its hinges, my foot did not reach the parting rung, but slipped between, and down came I, side over the ladder, head foremost, escaped miraculously hitting the corner of the green box, and my velvet cap saved my pate, so that I was only a little stunned, and much be-mazed, and shivering with pain, for the blow on the shin and scraping had been severe, and then there was surprise, and cowardice to boot, and I was afraid of fainting, but delighted to find I had not broken my legs. My first distinct thought–after myself –was, how glad I was the ladder did not break with Willy, whom I had let go up it the very day before. Finding I could stand, I got to the door, and called out to Lockie most manfully, desiring she would go for my mother (your mother was my mother then, observe, as she always is in time of need). She had not left [Page 204]  the breakfast-table, so was with me with the speed of morning light, and doctored, and surgeoned me, and gold-beater-skinned, and sticking-plastered, and gowlanded me, and gave me essence-of-Pity-and-Love mixed properly, which did me all the good in the world. And when I was bandaged and dressed, Francis carried me upstairs most nicely, and I siesta-d on your mother's bed in the evening; went to bed admirably early, and took all that I was required to take."

After this tale of adventure follows what was evidently the underlying purport of the whole letter:–

"I trust that after all this you have shrunk and shivered a little for me ? So now, my dear Harriet, seeing that your heart is opened, I hope that you will be induced to grant me a request ? I own I have cunningly tried to find the lucky moment for working upon one so unwilling to oblige me as you are. An individual will come down from Dublin to Trim in the course of this month, with a note of instruction from me to you and Mr. Butler. Would you be so good as to allow him the use of your drawing-room for one day ? He will lodge and board in Trim, and will intrude upon you only for one day. He brings with him–now for it–I see your countenance change, and fire lighting in your eyes! But Mr. Butler is calm, thank Heaven, and says only, 'What ? What ? Some nonsense of Maria's. Let us hear–poor Maria! she should be indulged at her age–not long, you know, my dear Harriet–be patient–'

"Only a box of curtains! Too late for redress! [Page 205]  They are all ready to be put up, and–I do hope you will not dislike them, my dear Harriet!"

A couple of months after this clandestine arrival of Mrs. Butler's new drawing-room curtains, the foregoing letter was supplemented by the following "humble petition," entreating to be released from a promise made by Miss Edgeworth on that occasion to her sister and brother-in-law, namely, that she would never again climb up the ladder to her beloved "Magpie place." It might serve as a pendant to the postboy's letter in The Absentee:–

To the Honourable and Rev. Mrs. R. Butler

"EDGEWORTHSTOWN, September 27, 1839.

"DEAR AND REVEREND LADY AND SIR,–On account I would not wish to be troublesome I have these two months and more forbore to write to you on the subject ever uppermost in my thoughts, and that 's wearing me to a shadow entirely–meaning the promise I made that was extorted from me in an unlucky moment of trouble, and when I was not myself (to say myself), which all here can witness, and is willing to put their hands and seals to–if required.

"About the ladder, ma'am! My leg is now well, and sounder than ever, thanks be to God, and your Ladyship, with Mrs. Edgeworth, and Miss Lucy above all, and Master Francis, that well-nigh broke his back carrying me up and down (and says I am heavier than his wife–lady, I mean). God bless him, for he says moreover that it's a folly the promise I made, and void ab origine, I think he termed it, being made under bodily fear, and no use in life, seeing the ladder is now stronger than [Page 206]  ever it was, and as strong as any ladder in Christendom. The only fault it ever had, that occasioned the mischance for which it was reprobated, was the hinges, which is now off and condemned, so they are, out and out, and in the old iron room to rust.

"And in short, your Ladyship, I expect, will grant me a dispensation from the rash vow I made never to go up that ladder again, for it would break my heart to be bound to the letter of my rash word that way. Not a day of my life passes but I get in a fever to go up that ladder to my Magpie place where some things are a-wanting for ever. And as to getting other people's legs to go up for me, it's neither here nor there–it can't be–except when your Ladyship is in it, or one of the dear childer–which are not coming that I can see–and in the meanwhile I am fretting to an atomy for my liberty.

"I trust his Reverence will consider me, and I leave it all to your Ladyship, and will abide as in duty bound by whatsomever you say. Only I hope you'll earn the blessings I have ready to shower down upon your head, if you grant the humble prayer and reasonable remonstrance of your poor petitioner,

MARIA–the long-winded."

Not many signs of the solemn moralist, or sober-sided instructress of youth to be seen in all this ! The fact is, the older Maria Edgeworth grew the more did those bonds and ligaments which had so hampered her youth slip away from her, and the more did the natural and spontaneous woman rise to the surface. Towards the end of 1840 she had again a rather serious illness, and was forced to remain for a considerable time in bed. [Page 207]  She recovered, however, and was apparently little the worse–"like one of those pith puppets," as she said of herself, "which you knock down in vain." "Even when flattest in bed," she adds, "I enjoy hearing Harriet Butler read to me till eleven o'clock at night." In 1840 she stayed for some time with her sister, Mrs. Lestock Wilson, in North Audley Street, and saw, and met, and talked with everybody who was worth seeing, meeting, and talking with, at the moment in London. It was on this occasion that Sydney Smith remarked of her–"She does not say witty things, but such a perfume of wit runs through all her conversation as makes it very brilliant"; a very fine compliment, and from an unquestionable judge of the matter in hand. She breakfasted with Rogers, who also invited a special dinner-party to meet her. She saw the young Queen open Parliament, and seems to have lacked little or nothing of her former vigour. It was, however, her last visit to London. After her return home the shadows began perceptibly to thicken, and before long became too dense for even her buoyancy to surmount. In 1846 her brother Francis died, and two years afterwards, in 1848, a yet greater sorrow befell her in the loss of her favourite sister, Fanny, Mrs. Lestock Wilson. Darker and deeper almost than even these personal sorrows was the sorrow and the tragedy of the entire country. The great Irish Famine was no temporary, no transitory event. On the contrary it hung for years, leaden, heavy, unescapable, over the whole of Ireland. Like all other decent Irish families, the Edgeworths denuded themselves of everything, down to the barest necessities of life, and all who were able to do so worked day and night at the relief [Page 208]  of distress. As for Maria, her mere name proved in those dark days to be a perfect tower of strength. She was herself greatly touched and pleased by the readiness with which her appeals for help were responded to in all directions. Amongst many such contributions a hundred and fifty barrels of flour and rice reached her from the children of Boston, labelled simply, "To Miss Edgeworth for her Poor." The very porters who had to carry up these barrels of flour and rice refused, we are told, to be paid, and a woollen comforter had in consequence to be knitted for each of them by her own still active fingers.

She had now crossed the rubicon of eighty, but in spite of this insurmountable fact, and of her many sorrows, public no less than private, her powers of enjoyment seem to have been still almost as strong as ever. "This first of January," she wrote in 1849, "was my eighty-second birthday, and I think I have as much enjoyment from books as ever I had in my life." A notable new one, the first instalment of Macaulay's History, reached her about this time, and she wrote a long letter on the subject to Dr. Holland, which appears to have been sent on to the historian, for we hear of his expressing pleasure in her enjoyment–"a small return for the forty years of enjoyment," so he worded it, which he had had from her. Even the old childish love of small adventures–climbing to forbidden places, and the like–seems, incredible as it may appear, to have survived with her to the very end. In the last stage of all, when she was actually within a couple of weeks of her death, we find her once more having to confess to the crime of having scrambled up to the top of a ladder, this time for the purpose of winding the [Page 209]  family clock. "I am heartily obliged and delighted by your being such a goose, and Richard such a gander," she writes in a letter to her sister, Mrs. Butler, of May 1849, "as to be frightened out of your wits by my going up the ladder to take off the top of the clock. . . . Prudence of M. E., Act II. I summoned Cassidy, let me tell you, and informed him that I was to wind the clock, but that he was promoted to take off the top of it for me.–And then up I went, and I wound the clock, just as I had done before you were born !"

This letter was written upon the seventh of the month, and exactly one fortnight later, upon the morning of the twenty-second of May 1849, Miss Edgeworth was seized by a sudden sensation of pain about the region of the heart, not apparently very severe. A few hours later she died, as she had always wished to do, in the arms of her faithful stepmother. Over such a death no reasonable biographer could desire, or could be expected, to grow gloomy.

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