Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth/Volume 1/Letter 52

To MISS RUXTON.

EDGEWORTHSTOWN, Feb. 26, 1805.

I have been reading a power of good books: Montesquieu sur la Grandeur et Décadence des Romains, which I recommend to you as a book you will admire, because it furnishes so much food for thought, it shows how history may be studied for the advantage of mankind, not for the mere purpose of remembering facts and repeating them.

Sneyd has come home to spend a week of vacation with us. He is now full of logic, and we perpetually hear the words syllogisms, and predicates, majors and minors, universals and particulars, affirmatives and negatives, and BAROK and BARBARA, not Barbara Allen or any of her relations: and we have learnt by logic that a stone is not an animal, and conversely that an animal is not a stone. I really think a man talking logic on the stage might be made as diverting as the character of the Apprentice who is arithmetically mad; pray read it: my father read it to us a few nights ago, and though I had a most violent headache, so that I was forced to hold my head on both sides whilst I laughed, yet I could not refrain. Much I attribute to my father's reading, but something must be left to Murphy. I have some idea of writing in the intervals of my severer studies for Professional Education, a comedy for my father's birthday, but I shall do it up in my own room, and shall not produce it till it is finished. I found the first hint of it in the strangest place that anybody could invent, for it was in Dallas's History of the Maroons, and you may read the book to find it out, and ten to one you miss it. At all events pray read the book, for it is extremely interesting and entertaining: it presents a new world with new manners to the imagination, and the whole bears the stamp of truth. It is not well written in general, but there are particular parts admirable from truth of description and force of feeling.

Your little goddaughter Sophy is one of the most engaging little creatures I ever saw, and knows almost all the birds and beasts in Bewick from the tom-tit to the hip-po-pot-a-mus, and names them in a sweet little droll voice.