Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth/Volume 1/Letter 72

MARIA EDGEWORTH to MISS RUXTON.

EDGEWORTHSTOWN, June 1809.

A copy of Tales of Fashionable Life reached us yesterday in a Foster frank: they looked well enough,&mdash;not very good paper, but better than Popular Tales. I am going to write a story called "To-day," as a match for "To-morrow," in which I mean to show that Impatience is as bad as Procrastination, and the desire to do too much to-day, and to enjoy too much at present, is as bad as putting off everything till to-morrow. What do you think of this plan? Write next post, as, while my father is away, I am going to write a story for his birthday. My other plan was to write a story in which young men of all the different professions should act a part, like the "Contrast" in higher life, or the "Freeman Family," only without princes, and without any possible allusion to our own family. I have another sub-plan of writing "Coelebina in search of a Husband," without my father's knowing it, and without reading Coelebs, that I may neither imitate nor abuse it.

I daresay you can borrow Powell's Sermons from Ardbraccan or Dr. Beaufort; the Primate lent them to my father. There is a charge on the connection between merit and preferment, and one discourse on the influence of academical studies and a recluse life, which I particularly admire, and wish it had been quoted in Professional Education.

Mr. Holland, a grand-nephew of Mr. Wedgwood's, and son to a surgeon at Knutsford, Cheshire, and intended for a physician, came here in the course of a pedestrian tour&mdash;spent two days&mdash;very well informed. Ask my mother when she goes to you to tell you all that Mr. Holland told us about Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Marcet, who is the author of Conversations on Chemistry&mdash;a charming woman, by his account.