George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[430] or agreeable than yesterday, but less exciting. We went to church with the family, who all seemed Episcopalians in principle and practice. Miss Edgeworth carried her favorite Prayer-book in a nice case, and knelt and made all the responses very devoutly. The church is small, but neat, and their pew is the place of honor in it, with a canopy and recess as large as any two other pews. . . . . On one side of the altar was a small, plain, oval tablet, to the memory of their grandfather, bearing no inscription but his name, and the time of his birth and death; and on the other side was one exactly like it,. . . . to their father, who died in 1817. The whole had the air of decency and reverence that ought always to be found in a village church; but the sermon was Calvinistic, from a young man, and the congregation very small, making a striking contrast to the congregation which poured out from the Catholic chapel in the neighborhood, so as to fill and throng the highway.

The Edgeworths have always been on the most kindly terms with their Catholic neighbors and tenantry, but, like many other Protestants whom I have met, they feel rather uncomfortably at the encroaching spirit which the Emancipation Bill has awakened in the whole Catholic population of the island, and the exclusive character and tone assumed by the priests, who have every day, as they assure me, more and more the air of claiming superiority; especially where, as in the case of Edgeworthtown, the old priests have been removed, and Jesuits placed in their stead.

After lunch,—there is only one service in the church,—Miss Edgeworth showed me a good many curious letters from Dumont,— one in particular, giving an account of Madame de Stael's visit, in 1813, to Lord Lansdowne at Bowood, for a week, when Mackintosh, Romilly, Schlegel, Rogers, and a quantity more of distinguished people were there; but Miss Edgeworth declined, not feeling apparently willing to live in a state of continual exhibition for so long a time. It was, however, very brilliant, and was most brilliantly described by Dumont. One thing amused me very much. Madame de Stael, who had just been reading the ‘Tales of Fashionable Life,’—then recently published,—with great admiration, said to Dumont of Miss Edgeworth: ‘Vraiment elle était digne de l'enthousiasme, mais elle se perd dans votre triste utilitye.’ It seemed to delight Miss Edgeworth excessively, and it was to show me this that she looked up the letters.

In the evening she showed me her long correspondence with Sir Walter Scott, at least his part of it. The whole seemed to have been extremely creditable to both parties. As soon as ‘Waverley’ was