I will treat you, my dear Letty, like a lady for once, and write to you upon blue-edged paper, because you have been ill: if you should be well before you receive this, I shall repent of the extravagance of my friendship. I believe it was you—or my aunt, the teller of all good things—who told me of a lady who took a long journey to see her sister, who she heard was very ill; but, unfortunately, the sister was well before she got to her journey's end, and she was so provoked, that she quarrelled with her well sister, and would never have anything more to do with her.
You will look very blank when you come back from the sea, and find what doings there have been at Black Castle in your absence. Anna was extremely sorry that she could not see you again before she left Ireland; but you will soon be in the same kingdom again, and that is one great point gained, as Mr. Weaver, a travelling astronomical lecturer, who carried the universe about in a box, told us. "Sir," said he to my father, "when you look at a map, do you know that the east is always on your right hand, and the west on your left?"—"Yes," replied my father, with a very modest look, "I believe I do."—"Well," said the man of learning, "that's one great point gained."
To MRS. RUXTON.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, 1795.
My father returned late on Friday night, bringing with him a very bad and a very good thing; the bad thing was a bad cold—the good is Aunt Mary Sneyd. Emmeline was delayed some days at Lichfield by the broken bridges, and bad roads, floods and snows, which have stopped man, and beast, and mail coaches. Mr. Cox, the man who sells camomile drops under the title of Oriental Pearls, wrote an apology to my Aunt Mary for neglecting to send the Pearls in the following elegant phrase: "That the mistake she mentioned he could no ways account for but by presuming that it must have arisen from impediments occasioned by the inclemencies of the season!"
When my father went to see Lord Charlemont, he came to meet him, saying,
"I must claim relationship with you, Mr. Edgeworth. I am related to the
Abbé Edgeworth, who is I think an honour to the kingdom—I should say to
human nature."
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, April 11, 1795.
My father and Lovell have been out almost every day, when there are no robbers to be committed to jail, at the Logograph.[Footnote: A name invented to suit the anti-Gallican prejudices of the day.] This is the new name instead of the Telegraph, because of its allusion to the logographic printing press, which prints words instead of letters. Phaenologue was thought of, but Logograph sounds better. My father will allow me to manufacture an essay on the Logograph, he furnishing the solid materials and I spinning them. I am now looking over, for this purpose, Wilkins's Real Character, or an Essay towards a Universal Philosophical Language. It is a scarce and very ingenious book; some of the phraseology is so much out of the present fashion, that it would make you smile: such as the synonym for a little man, a Dandiprat. Likewise two prints, one of them a long sheet of men with their throats cut, so as to show the windpipe whilst working out the different letters of the alphabet. The other print of all the birds and beasts packed ready to go into the ark.
Sir Walter James has written a very kind and sensible letter to my father, promising all his influence with his Viceregal brother-in-law about the telegraph. My father means to get a letter from him to Lord Camden, and present it himself, though he rather doubts whether, all things taken together, it is prudent to tie himself to Government. The raising the militia has occasioned disturbances in this county. Lord Granard's carriage was pelted at Athlone. The poor people here are robbed every night. Last night a poor old woman was considerably roasted: the man, who called himself Captain Roast, is committed to jail, he was positively sworn to here this morning. Do you know what they mean by the White Tooths? Men who stick two pieces of broken tobacco pipes at each corner of the mouth, to disguise the face and voice.
April 20.