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 Killarney. They travelled in an open calèche of Sir Walter's….
Sir Walter was, like Maria, never put out by discomforts on a journey, but always ready to make the best of everything and to find amusement in every incident. He was delighted with Maria's eagerness for everybody's comfort, and diverted himself with her admiration of a green baize-covered door at the inn at Killarney. 'Miss Edgeworth, you are so mightily pleased with that door, I think you will carry it away with you to Edgeworthtown.'
Miss Edgeworth's friendships were certainly very remarkable, and comprise almost all the interesting people of her day in France as well as in England.[3] She was liked, trusted, surrounded, and she appears to have had the art of winning to her all the great men. We know the Duke of Wellington addressed verses to her; there are pleasant intimations of her acquaintance with Sir James Mackintosh, Romilly, Moore, and Rogers, and that most delightful of human beings, Sydney Smith, whom she thoroughly appreciated and admired. Describing her brother Frank, she says, somewhere, 'I am much inclined to think that he has a natural genius for happiness; in other words, as Sydney Smith would say, great hereditary constitutional joy.' 'To attempt to Boswell Sydney Smith's conversation would be to outboswell Boswell,' she writes in another letter home; but in Lady Holland's memoir of her father there is a pleasant little account of Miss Edgeworth herself, 'delightful, clever, and sensible,' listening to Sydney Smith. She seems to have gone the round of his parish with him while he scolded, doctored, joked his poor people according to their needs.
'During her visit she saw much of my father,' says Lady Holland; 'and her talents as well as her thorough knowledge and love of Ireland made her conversation peculiarly agreeable to him.' On her side Maria writes warmly desiring that some Irish bishopric might be forced upon Sydney Smith, which 'his own sense of natural charity and humanity would forbid him refuse…. In 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 bon 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 talking 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 everything. 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.
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 Staël's upon herself, in a letter to M. Dumont. 'Vraiment elle était digne de l'enthousiasme, mais elle se perd dans votre triste utilité.' It is difficult 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.
XV.