Instructive, interesting, and entertaining: Roget on Physiology, with reference to Theology—one of the Bridgewater Treatises, full of facts the most curious, arranged in the most beautifully luminous manner. The infinitely large, and the infinitely small in creation, admirably displayed.
Hannah More's Letters: many of them entertaining—many admirable for manner and matter, altogether too much; two volumes would have been better than four.
Inglis's Ireland: I think he is an honest writer, a man of great observation and ability, and a true admirer of the beauties of nature. He exaggerates and makes some mistakes, as all travellers do.
Still drops from life some withering joy away.
Year after year, we must witness these sad losses. Aunt Alicia gone! and Aunt Bess Waller, of whom you were so fond. What an amiable and highly cultivated mind she had, and so hospitable and kind.
To MISS RUXTON.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, March 31, 1835.
Harriet told me, my dear Sophy, that she found you in bed, reading Popular Tales, or some of my old things—thank you, thank you, my dear, for loving them. I hope that this will find you better, and that your Black Castle walks, leaning on that kind Isabella's arm, will have quite restored you.
I have been reading Roget's most admirable Bridgewater Treatise—admirable in every way, scientific, moral, and religious, in the most deep and exalted manner—religious, raising the mind through nature's works up to nature's GOD, which must increase and exalt piety where it exists, and create and confirm the devotional feelings where they have lain dormant. All his facts are most curious, and the exclamation, "how fearfully and wonderfully we are made," may be extended to the ugliest tadpole that wabbles in a ditch till he is a frog, and the microscope invented by that creature man endowed with—
Luckily a hair in my pen stopped me, or I might have gone on to another page, in my hot fit of enthusiasm.