[{0a}] The Watsons and Lady Susan are not included in this reprint.
[{1}] I went to represent my father, who was too unwell to attend himself, and thus I was the only one of my generation present.
[{3}] My chief assistants have been my sisters, Mrs. B. Lefroy and Miss Austen, whose recollections of our aunt are, on some points, more vivid than my own. I have not only been indebted to their memory for facts, but have sometimes used their words. Indeed some passages towards the end of the work were entirely written by the latter.
I have also to thank some of my cousins, and especially the daughters of Admiral Charles Austen, for the use of letters and papers which had passed into their hands, without which this Memoir, scanty as it is, could not have been written.
[{5}] There seems to have been some doubt as to the validity of this election; for Hearne says that it was referred to the Visitor, who confirmed it. (Hearne’s Diaries, v.2.)
[{6}] Mrs. Thrale writes Dr. Lee, but there can be no doubt of the identity of person.
[{31}] The celebrated Beau Brummel, who was so intimate with George IV. as to be able to quarrel with him, was born in 1771. It is reported that when he was questioned about his parents, he replied that it was long since he had heard of them, but that he imagined the worthy couple must have cut their own throats by that time, because when he last saw them they were eating peas with their knives. Yet Brummel’s father had probably lived in good society; and was certainly able to put his son into a fashionable regiment, and to leave him 30,000 pounds. [{31a}] Raikes believes that he had been Secretary to Lord North. Thackeray’s idea that he had been a footman cannot stand against the authority of Raikes, who was intimate with the son.
[{31a}] Raikes’s Memoirs, vol. ii p. 207.
[{35}] See ‘Spectator,’ No. 102, on the Fan Exercise. Old gentlemen who had survived the fashion of wearing swords were known to regret the disuse of that custom, because it put an end to one way of distinguishing those who had, from those who had not, been used to good society. To wear the sword easily was an art which, like swimming and skating, required to be learned in youth. Children could practise it early with their toy swords adapted to their size.
[{41}] Mrs. Gaskell, in her tale of ‘Sylvia’s Lovers,’ declares that this hand-spinning rivalled harp-playing in its gracefulness.