This part is reckoned very rich and prosperous. Our living is excellent, meat, milk, eggs, and poultry, and fish so cheap, I feel as if it was quite a pity I cannot eat more at once. _July 6, 1827._ ...We are getting a little outrageous in this county, and very much so in T’p’rary, for we lack potatoes there, and hunger sharpens the wits, so we just _lift_ the flour and potatoes cast for our use. Is it possible that Lord Anglesey is to be our Lord-Lieutenant? Am I really to pray for him, and for the sword the King puts in his hand, every Sunday in church? Oh dear, dear! What a wretched country this is--it wearies the spirit to see it. _Miss Eden to Miss Villiers._ BIGODS, ESSEX, _Sunday, July 1827_. I have been longing for a letter from you. I have not seen an individual out of this house since I entered it three weeks ago, except one day when we dined at Lord Maynard’s,--the most melancholy ceremony, barring a funeral, I ever assisted at. Conversation is one of the social duties not practised in Essex. Mary and I talked our level best, and they must all have thought us either the most delightful people in the world, or the most impudent. The very names of the neighbours are as monosyllabic (a very puzzling word to spell) as their conversation. Mr. Brown and Mr. Wish and Mr. Rush and so on, so contrived, I am certain, to avoid prolixity. The work of education goes on from morning to night. Six small Intellects constantly on the march, and Mary, of course, is hatching a seventh child. I own I am glad I am not married, it is such a tiresome fatiguing life; and though as a visitor I delight in the children, yet I would not be so worn and worried as their mother is on any consideration. I think she fidgets too much about them, but a large family is a great standing fidget of itself, and I suppose one would be the same under the same circumstances. I like this undisturbed sort of life, only the days go so fast when they are all alike. There is a good, hard, reading library in the house, and I am quite glad to find that when I cannot have novels I can read other books just as well. George seems to have found London very amusing to the last. He wrote to me the other day after he had been supping at Lord Alvanley’s, who was in great delight at some Paris pantaloons he had heard of,--_Peau de Pendu_; and if the Pendu was the right size the Pantaloons fitted without a wrinkle and without a seam of course. George is by way now of being settled at Eastcombe. He has had a great many parties down there to dinner, some that must have been hard trials to Sister,--Sir J. Copley amongst others.