No letter from you, but the weather is so fine I cannot participate in ——’s fears of your having been drowned. I dined yesterday with the ——s; only the ——s and the ——s. Mr. —— was sensible enough in his talk, but I wish he had not told me in his wife’s hearing something about having thrown himself away,—which sounded very odd,—and being very low-spirited in consequence in his youthful years, but having reconciled himself to it by degrees. Lady M. has a great desire to please the present and criticize the absent. At the same time, I think her a pleasing as well as valuable woman; but the spirit of petty criticism is so strong in us Irish, that scarcely any degree of goodness lulls it to sleep. I am becoming in too great request as a chaperone, which I must stifle, as I have no taste for duennaship. Miss E—— is growing stouter and stouter in her manners, and she and the N——s stump about the room with a deportment which appears to me a mixture of a ploughboy going over rough ground and a grenadier marching to the charge. A lady asked me yesterday in a half-audible whisper, ‘Who is that strange-looking ghost?’ ‘Lady Prudentia ——.’ It was curious to see the effect of the first of these three words. She was spell-bound. Regret at having lost a good acquaintance, and remorse at having called an Earl’s daughter a strange-looking person, with surprise at the simplicity and external humility which reigns in that school, were all visibly depicted on her countenance.
Adieu. I have mused much on you since we parted, ‘chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancies,’—bitter only in the thought that time and chance happen to those who love, as to others.
TO THE SAME.
Bath, Oct., 1816.
As to Mrs. M., she only thinks aloud, and shows what other women, equally devoid of sense with herself, keep to themselves. I can bear her very well; but those who envy others perfect self-satisfaction, and groundless but happy-making vanity, must dislike her. Indeed, it can only be groundless vanity that makes any one happy. Any other kind is enlightened even by its own successes to see their futility. ‘A coup sûr si la vanité a rendu quelqu’un heureux, celui là était un sot.’ So says Rousseau, and Mrs. M. is a practical commentary.
I am reading Mrs. Marcet’s Political Economy. It is all Say, thrown into dialogue, with the objections which might be made. This is a good plan for chemistry, where a well-educated and thinking person may begin the book entirely ignorant of the subject. But it is a bad plan for political economy, on which every one has some information, more or less. One has not patience to be stopped every minute by a foolish objection, to which one knows the answer. It may do as an elementary book; but though I could read her Chemistry, I cannot read this; and I should suppose the effect would be similar on all grown people. It shows a laudable spirit of industry, but I think it unfair to Say, of whom it is a sort of unavowed translation; for though she professes it to give the quintessence of other authors, all of it which I have read, except what is avowedly quoted, is cribbed from him without even changing his phrases. She is very nonsensical about the Poor Laws, saying that the diffusion of education will give the poor a ‘spirit of dignity and independence’ that will prevent them from taking advantage of them. Now, the answer to this position is, that the willingness and eagerness of the poor to become paupers—to receive from the taxes levied on their fellow-subjects money or support, for which no equivalent is given by them—has kept pace with, instead of being checked by, the diffusion of education; and that education never yet made any man refuse a sinecure, which is relief from the kingdom instead of the parish.
I have found a person here who almost openly forms herself on my model, and quotes my old sayings, long forgotten by me, as authority; but I have gone over so much ground since, that she is like a Catholic, who obeys the early Councils, without knowing that two or three others since that time have promulgated different decrees; and, as I am not the Pope, I am sometimes puzzled to reconcile them.
—— is going to receive his wanderer again. I cannot laugh at him, as others do. In a man, not otherwise deficient in sense and firmness, so much confiding love for a wife—against experience,—against probability,—against hope,—against advice,—against all but affection,—is in my eyes interesting, and partakes of the feelings a superior being might have for erring mortals.