Though Miss Edgeworth was now past fifty, she showed neither bodily nor mental signs of advancing years. Indeed, mentally she was as fresh and as young as ever, and her letters reflect the same pleasure in life and all it offers that they evinced throughout. Only on New Year's day, which was also her birthday, does she indulge in any reflections concerning the flight of time. Here is a letter written in 1825:—
A happy new year to you, my dearest aunt, to you to whom I now look, as much as I can to any one now living, for the rays of pleasure that I expect to gild my bright evening of life. As we advance in life, we become more curious, more fastidious in gilding and gilders. We find to our cost that all that glitters is not gold, and your every-day bungling carvers and gilders will not do. Our evening gilders must be more skillful than those who flashed and daubed away in the morning of life, and gilt with any tinsel the weathercock for the morning sun. You may perceive, my dear aunt, by my having got so finely to the weathercock and the rising sun, that I am out of the hands of my dear apothecaries, and playing away again with a superfluity of life. (N. B.—I am surprisingly prudent.) Honora's cough has almost subsided, and Lucy can sit upright the greater part of the day. "God bless the mark!" as Molly Bristow would say, if she heard me; "don't be bragging."
Not many days later, when her stepmother and some friends, "poor souls and full-dress bodies," had gone out to dinner, she penned another long letter to the same correspondent, a letter delightfully fresh in tone and full of her personality:—
In a few days I trust—you know I am a great truster—you will receive a packet franked by Lord Bathurst, containing only a little pocket-book—Friendship's Offering for 1825, dizened out. I fear you will think it too fine for your taste, but there is in it, as you will find, the old Mental Thermometer, which was once a favorite of yours. You will wonder how it came there. Simply thus: Last autumn came by the coach a parcel containing just such a book as this for last year, and a letter from Mr. Lupton Relfe—a foreigner settled in London—and he prayed in most polite bookseller strain that I would look over my portfolio for some trifle for this book for 1825. I might have looked over "my portfolio" till doomsday, as I have not an unpublished scrap, except Taken for Granted. But I recollected the Mental Thermometer, and that it had never been out, except in the Irish Farmer's Journal, not known in England. So I routed in the garret, under pyramids of old newspapers, with my mother's prognostics that I never should find it, and loud prophecies that I should catch my death, which I did not; but dirty and dusty and cobwebby, I came forth, after two hours' groveling, with my object in my hand; cut it out, added a few lines of new end to it, and packed it off to Lupton Relfe, telling him that it was an old thing written when I was sixteen. Weeks elapsed, and I heard no more, when there came a letter exuberant in gratitude, and sending a parcel containing six copies of the new memorandum-book, and a most beautiful twelfth edition of Scott's poetical works, bound in the most elegant manner, and with most beautifully engraved frontispieces and vignettes, and a £5 note. I was quite ashamed—but I have done all I could for him by giving the Friendship's Offering to all the fine people I could think of. The set of Scott's works made a nice New Year's gift for Harriet; she had seen this edition at Edinburgh and particularly wished for it. The £5 note I have sent to Harriet Beaufort to be laid out in books for Fanny Stewart. Little did I think the poor old Thermometer would give me so much pleasure. Here comes the carriage rolling round. I feel guilty. What will my mother say to me—so long a letter at this time of night? Yours affectionately, in all the haste of guilt, conscience-stricken; that is, found out.
No: all safe, all innocent—because not found out.
Finis.
By the author of Moral Tales and Practical Education.
In 1825 Scott paid his long-promised visit to Edgeworthstown. He came in August, bringing with him his daughter, Lockhart and Mr. Crampton, a surgeon friend of the Edgeworths, "who equally gratified both the novelists by breaking the toils of his great practice to witness their meeting on his native soil." Miss Edgeworth writes:—
I am glad that kind Crampton had the reward of this journey; though frequently hid from each other by clouds of dust in their open carriage, they had, as they told us, never ceased talking They like each other as much as two men of so much genius and so much benevolence should, and we rejoice to be the bond of union.
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