TO MRS. LEADBEATER.
Bursledon Lodge, July 30, 1811.
Pray indulge me with the characters of the youthful part of your family. I once heard Lady Yarmouth say, to justify herself for liking a disagreeable young man better than a sensible old one—‘I have a decided taste for youth.’ Now, though this is not my case, in her sense of the phrase, yet I certainly have particular pleasure in contemplating the characters and actions of those who are fresh from the hand of nature, and alive to all the enjoyments she so liberally bestows: ‘Hope waits upon the flowery prime.’
Your Good Nature appears to me a beautiful poem, and I strongly recommend its publication. It will be a valuable addition to the small number of those one may put into the hands of youth, without feeling any secret wish to expunge even a line. Thanks for your eulogium on Clarkson. He is not enough praised by the world. The first promoter of every good work is always less valued than he ought. Like the foundation stone, like the precious seed, his fame too often lies buried.
The opening of your book on old age, reminds me of an anecdote of the late Duke of Queensberry, which I had from an earwitness. Leaning over the balcony of his beautiful villa near Richmond, where every pleasure was collected which wealth could purchase or luxury devise, he followed with his eyes the majestic Thames, winding through groves and buildings of various loveliness, and exclaimed, ‘Oh, that wearisome river, will it never cease running, running, and I so tired of it!’ To me this anecdote conveys a strong moral lesson, connected with the well-known character of the speaker, a professed voluptuary, who passed his youth in pursuit of selfish pleasures, and his age in vain attempts to elude the relentless grasp of ennui.
I gather from the following, evidently the sketch of a preface, that it was my Mother’s intention to edit a selection from the correspondence of the two honoured friends of her youth, one a connexion by her first marriage, whose names are mentioned at its close. It has a further value to me, as expressive of her sentiments in respect of the posthumous publication of letters.
Sept. 1811.—Many letters and fragments never intended for publication, have lately been drawn from the shade, and exhibited in the glare of day, without any prominent merit to entitle them to notice; yet all have been widely read; and the fastidious critic, who exclaims against the vanity of editors, and the folly of obtruding private letters on the public, is not always the last to peruse the decried volume. Is it not unfair that works which contribute so largely to general entertainment, should meet with general censure? Where nothing is published that the dead would have wished to conceal, or that can hurt the feelings of the living, it is a blameless gratification to diffuse and prolong the remembrance of those we have loved, to place all that remains of them on earth beyond the reach of those accidents to which MSS. are liable, and to enlarge through their means the stock of innocent amusement. It may even be added, that the curiosity excited by anecdote and private letters turns to general good, by substituting sketches from nature for the monstrous fictions and insipid ravings of modern novels.
Will the editor be excused for adding another volume to the class in question? The characters of those who wrote the following letters were of no common order. Many will recollect having been exhilarated by the wit and humour of Edward Tighe; some, too, will read with interest the ardent expressions of the eccentric but highly gifted Mansergh St. George, whose talents, sensibility, quick sense of honour, and high courage, commanded admiration; though by some strange fatality they never reached the end for which they seemed designed by Providence, and were buried in an untimely grave.