I feel for you. I know that this direct praise is scarcely
allowable, but my advanced age and my close connection with you
must be my excuse.--Yours sincerely,
R. L. E.

Tears seem equivalent to something more than the estimated value of Mrs.
Leadbeater's labours. The charming and well-known Mrs. Trench who was
also Mary Leadbeater's friend, writes warmly praising the notes. 'Miss
Edgeworth's notes on your Dialogues have as much spirit and originality
as if she had never before explored the mine which many thought she had
exhausted.'

All these are pleasant specimens of the Edgeworth correspondence, which,
however (following the course of most correspondence), does not seem to
have been always equally agreeable. There are some letters (among others
which I have been allowed to see) written by Maria about this time to an
unfortunate young man who seems to have annoyed her greatly by his
excited importunities.

I thank you [she says] for your friendly zeal in defence of my
powers of pathos and sublimity; but I think it carries you much
too far when it leads you to imagine that I refrain, from
principle or virtue, from displaying powers that I really do not
possess. I assure you that I am not in the least capable of
writing a dithyrambic ode, or any other kind of ode.

One is reminded by this suggestion of Jane Austen also declining to
write 'an historical novel illustrative of the august House of Coburg.'

The young man himself seems to have had some wild aspirations after
authorship, but to have feared criticism.

The advantage of the art of printing [says his friendly Minerva]
is that the mistakes of individuals in reasoning and writing will
be corrected in time by the public, so that the cause of truth
cannot suffer; and I presume you are too much of a philosopher to
mind the trifling mortification that the detection of a mistake
might occasion. You know that some sensible person has observed
that acknowledging a mistake is saying, only in other words, that
we are wiser to-day than we were yesterday.

He seems at last to have passed the bounds of reasonable correspondence,
and she writes as follows:--

Your last letter, dated in June, was many months before it reached
me. In answer to all your reproaches at my silence I can only
assure you that it was not caused by any change