“We have only our own every-day family party and should only wish and hope to add to it, to meet you, a sister, who in happy days knew and admired you, even from her childhood (Mrs. Butler née Harriet Edgeworth) and her husband, whom you knew in happy days too, at the late Bishop of Meath’s. Thank you my dear Lord for promising to look for the Bishop’s verses.
Now pray let me thank you in my heart for your answer to this letter.
“Mrs Bushe if she likes me as well as I most humbly believe she does, will put in a good word for us—and her good words can never be said in vain—and must be followed by good deeds.
“I am my dear Lord
with more respect than appears here
And all the sincerely affectionate
regard that has been felt for you (we need not say how many years)—
“Your—to be obliged—humble servant
“Maria Edgeworth
“Edgeworth Town
“Feb. 1st 1837”
CHAPTER IV
OLD FORGOTTEN THINGS
Chief Justice Bushe died in 1843, and Maria Edgeworth in 1849, but Mrs. Bushe lived on till 1857, a delight and an inspiration to her children and grandchildren. To her, even more than to the Chief, may be ascribed the inevitable, almost invariable turn for the Arts, in some form, frequently in all forms, that distinguishes their descendants, and to her also is attributed a quality in story-telling known as “Crampton dash,” which may be explained as an intensifying process, analogous to the swell in an organ.
But few of their grandchildren, that potent and far-reaching first cousinhood of seventy, now remain. Bushes, Plunkets, Coghills, Foxes, Franks, Harrises, they were a notable company, and I imagine that in the middle and later years of the last century they made a clan of no small power and influence. “Dublin is my washpot, over Merrion Square will I cast out my shoe,” they might have said, possibly did say, in their arrogant youth, when “The Family,” good-looking, amusing, and strenuous, “took the flure” in the Dublin society of the ’fifties. From among them came no luminary in Art, specially outstanding, yet there was scarcely one of them without some touch of that spark which is lit by a coal taken from the altar, and is, for want of a better term, called originality; and although the reputations of neither Shakespeare nor Michael Angelo were threatened, they could have provided a club dedicated to “Les Quatz’ Arts” with a very useful selection of members.