The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Volume 1Edgeworth, Maria
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The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Volume 1
Edgeworth, Maria
Edgeworth, Maria, 1768-1849; Novelists, Irish -- 19th century -- Biography
You will look very blank when you come back from the sea, and find what
doings there have been at Black Castle in your absence. Anna was
extremely sorry that she could not see you again before she left
Ireland; but you will soon be in the same kingdom again, and _that is
one great point gained_, as Mr. Weaver, a travelling astronomical
lecturer, who carried the universe about in a box, told us. "Sir," said
he to my father, "when you look at a map, do you know that the east is
always on your right hand, and the west on your left?"--"Yes," replied
my father, with a very modest look, "I believe I do."--"Well," said the
man of learning, "_that's one great point gained._"
_To_ MRS. RUXTON.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, 1795.
My father returned late on Friday night, bringing with him a very bad
and a very good thing; the bad thing was a bad cold--the good is Aunt
Mary Sneyd. Emmeline was delayed some days at Lichfield by the broken
bridges, and bad roads, floods and snows, which have stopped man, and
beast, and mail coaches. Mr. Cox, the man who sells camomile drops under
the title of Oriental Pearls, wrote an apology to my Aunt Mary for
neglecting to send the Pearls in the following elegant phrase: "That the
mistake she mentioned he could no ways account for but by presuming that
it must have arisen from impediments occasioned by the inclemencies of
the season!"
When my father went to see Lord Charlemont, he came to meet him, saying,
"I must claim relationship with you, Mr. Edgeworth. I am related to the
Abbé Edgeworth, who is I think an honour to the kingdom--I should say to
human nature."
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, _April 11, 1795._
My father and Lovell have been out almost every day, when there are no
robbers to be committed to jail, at the Logograph.[Footnote: A name
invented to suit the anti-Gallican prejudices of the day.] This is the
new name instead of the Telegraph, because of its allusion to the
logographic printing press, which prints words instead of letters.
Phaenologue was thought of, but Logograph sounds better. My father will
allow me to manufacture an essay on the Logograph, he furnishing the
solid materials and I spinning them. I am now looking over, for this
purpose, Wilkins's _Real Character, or an Essay towards a Universal
Philosophical Language._ It is a scarce and very ingenious book; some of
the phraseology is so much out of the present fashion, that it would
make you smile: such as the synonym for a little man, a Dandiprat.
Likewise two prints, one of them a long sheet of men with their throats
cut, so as to show the windpipe whilst working out the different letters
of the alphabet. The other print of all the birds and beasts packed
ready to go into the ark.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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