I have read two-thirds of Bishop Watson's life. I think he bristles his independence too much upon every occasion, and praises himself too much for it, and above all complains too much of the want of preferment and neglect of him by the Court. I have Madame de Staël's Memoirs of her father's private life: I have only read fifty pages of it--too much of a French Éloge--too little of his private life. There is a _Notice_ by Benjamin Constant of Madame de Staël's life prefixed to this work, which appears to me more interesting and pathetic than anything Madame de Staël has yet said of her father. _February 21._ I must and will write to my Aunt Ruxton to-day, if the whole College of Physicians, and the whole conclave of cardinal virtues, with Prudence primming up her mouth at the head of them, stood before me. I entirely agree with you, my dearest aunt, on one subject, as indeed I generally do on most subjects, but particularly about _Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion._ The behaviour of the General in _Northanger Abbey_, packing off the young lady without a servant or the common civilities which any bear of a man, not to say gentleman, would have shown, is quite outrageously out of drawing and out of nature. _Persuasion_-- excepting the tangled, useless histories of the family in the first fifty pages--appears to me, especially in all that relates to poor Anne and her lover, to be exceedingly interesting and natural. The love and the lover admirably well drawn: don't you see Captain Wentworth, or rather don't you in her place feel him taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa? And is not the first meeting after their long separation admirably well done? And the overheard conversation about the nut? But I must stop: we have got no farther than the disaster of Miss Musgrave's jumping off the steps. I am going on, but very slowly, and not to my satisfaction with my work. _To_ MRS. SNEYD EDGEWORTH. EDGEWORTHSTOWN, _March 27._