Good-bye, dear Eleanor,[190] mind you get better. It is foolish to be ill; I found it so myself. Love to all. Your affectionate Aunt,
E. E.
Miss Eden to Miss Villiers.
[EYAM RECTORY], STONEY MIDDLETON,
August 1824.
MY DEAR MISS VILLIERS, George has gone to Scotland to kill the poor dumb grouse (or grice), as they ought to be in the plural, but I will transmit your direction to him, and if he can do what you wish I daresay he will, though I have an idea it is the sort of thing about which people chuse to look really important, and say they cannot interfere.
...Dear Lady Chichester![191] How lucky it is that people’s letters are so like themselves. It is perhaps not unnatural but amusing too, I did not know till Lady Buckinghamshire mentioned it the other day when she was talking of this marriage that the Chichesters have the strongest possible feeling on the subject of connexion, and she said they would look on this marriage as a positive calamity. How very absurd it is, and it is a shame of Lady Chichester to exaggerate George Osborne’s[192] faults so much. He was not in fact very much to blame, in his disagreement with Lord Francis, and if it were not the way of the Osborne family to make their family politics the subject of their jokes to all the world, George would have been reckoned just as good as any boy of his age. I imagine that even Lord Chichester has found his son liked his own way as well as the rest of the world, but perhaps Lady Chichester and he do not impart to each other the little difficulties they find with those separate little families you mention....
We are so settled here that it seems as if we had never gone away, I believe one changes one’s self as well as Horses at Barnet, I lose all my recollections of London, “that great city where the geese are all swans and the fools are all witty” and take up the character of the Minister’s sister, as I hear myself called in the village. Robert’s house is very comfortable, and I think this much the most beautiful country I have seen since I saw the Pyrenees. Some people might think it verging on the extreme of picturesque and call it wild, but I love a mountainous country. I go sketching about with the slightest success, the rocks are too large and obstinate and won’t be drawn.
Mrs. Lamb[193] came here Sunday, and we must return the visit some day, but by a great mercy I broke the spring of the pony carriage the other day. Your ever affectionate
E. E.