Fanny Edgeworth is now Fanny Wilson; [Footnote: Frances Maria, eldest daughter of the fourth Mrs. Edgeworth, married Lestock P. Wilson, Esq., of London.] I can hardly believe it! She is gone! I feel it, and long must feel it, with anguish, selfish anguish. But she will be happy—of that I have the most firm, delightful conviction; and therefore all that I cannot help now feeling is, I know, only surface feeling, and will soon pass away. The more I have seen and known of Lestock, the more I like him and love him, and am convinced I shall always love him, whose every word and look bears the stamp and value of sincerity.
Both their voices pronounced the words of the marriage vow with perfect clearness and decision. Mr. Butler performed the ceremony with great feeling and simplicity. I will tell my dearest aunt and you all the little circumstances; at present they are all in confusion, great and small, near and distant, and I am sick at heart in the midst of it all with the shameful, weak, selfish, uppermost sorrow of parting with this darling child.
To MRS. EDGEWORTH.
BLOOMFIELD, Jan. 19, 1829.
An immense concourse of people, cavalcade and carriages innumerable, passed by here to-day. We saw it, and you will see it all in the newspapers. Banners with Constitutional Agitation printed in black, _M_obility and Nobility in black, crape hatbands, etc. Lord Anglesea's two little sons riding between two officers, in the midst of the hurricane mob, struck me most. One of the boys, a little midge, seemed to stick on the horse by accident, or by mere dint of fearlessness: the officer put his arm round him once, and set him up, the boy's head looking another way, and the horse keeping on his way, through such noise, and struggling, and waves multitudinous of mob.
There is an entertaining article in the Quarterly Review on The Subaltern. I do not like that on Madame de Genlis—coarse, and over-doing the object by prejudice and virulence. The review of Scott's Prefaces is ungrounded and confused—how different from his own writing! But there is an article worth all the rest put together, on Scientific Institutions, written in such a mild, really philosophical spirit, such a pure, GREAT MAN'S desire to do good; I cannot but wish and hope it might prove to be Captain Beaufort's. If you have not read it, never rest till you do.
To CAPTAIN BASIL HALL.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, March 12, 1829.
… If I could, as you say, flatter myself that Sir Walter Scott was in any degree influenced to write and publish his novels from seeing my sketches of Irish character, I should indeed triumph in the "thought of having been the proximate cause of such happiness to millions."
In what admirable taste Sir Walter Scott's introduction [Footnote: To the new edition of Waverley.] is written! No man ever contrived to speak so delightfully of himself, so as to gratify public curiosity, and yet to avoid all appearance of egotism,—to let the public into his mind, into all that is most interesting and most useful to posterity to know of his history, and yet to avoid all improper, all impertinent, all superfluous disclosures.