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 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 sublimity; 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 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 reasonable 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.