Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth/Volume 2/Letter 17

To MISS LUCY EDGEWORTH.

WYCOMBE ABBEY, Nov. 4, 1821.

God bless Mr. King! My dear Lucy, we have the best hopes now that your admirable patience and fortitude will be rewarded, and soon. We regretted the three-quarters of an hour Mr. King might have spent with you which were wasted at the coach office, but these are among the minnikin miseries of human life. You must often wonder how people in health, and out of pain, and with the use of their limbs and all their locomotive faculties, can complain of anything. But man is a grumbling animal, not woman.

We are reading Madame de Staël's Dix Années d'Exil with delight. Though there may be too much egotism, yet it is extremely interesting; and though she repeats too often, and uses too many words, yet there are so many brilliant passages, and things which no one but herself could have thought or said, that it will last as long as the memory of Buonaparte lasts on earth. Pray get it and read it; not the plays or poetry which make up the last volume&mdash;why will friends publish all the trash they can scrape together of celebrated people?

Mr. Hales, my dry diplomatist, tells me that Madame de Staël, he was assured by the Swedish minister, provoked Buonaparte, by intriguing to set Bernadotte on the throne of France, and that letters of hers on this subject were intercepted. You will not care much about this, but you may tell it to some of your visitants, who will be in due time as full of Madame de Staël's Dix Années d'Exil as I am at this moment.

Here is an old distich which my dry diplomatist came out with yesterday at dinner, on the ancestor of Hampden. The remains of the Hampden estate are in this neighbourhood, and as we were speaking of our wish to see the place in which the patriot lived, Mr. Hales observed that it is curious how the spirit of dislike to kings had run in the blood of the Hampdens some centuries before Charles' time: they lost three manors in this county, forfeit for a Hampden having struck the Black Prince.


 * Tring, Wing, and Ivanhoe,
 * Old Hampden did forego,
 * For striking the Black Prince a blow.

When this is read you will say he deserved to lose three manors for striking such a Prince.

Besides two spacious bed-chambers and a dressing-room, munificent Lord Carrington would insist upon our having a sitting-room to ourselves, and we have one that is delightful: windows down to the ground, and prospect&mdash;dark woods and river, so pretty that I can scarcely mind what I am saying to you.

Yesterday arrived a Mr. Hay, very well informed about mummies and Egypt, talks well, and as if he lived with all the learned and all the fashionable in London: his account of the unrolling of a mummy which he lately saw in London was most entertaining. All the folds of the thinnest linen which were unwound were laid more smoothly and dextrously, as the best London surgeons declared, than they can now apply bandages: they stood in amazement. The skin was quite tough, the flesh perfect: the face quite preserved, except the bridge of the nose, which had fallen in. Count Ludolf, who has been a fine painter in his day, says he has used mummy pitch, or whatever it is in which mummies are preserved, as a fine brown paint, like bistre, "only bitter to the taste when one sucks one's brush."

Mr. Hay, I find, is private secretary to Lord Melville. It is too much to have a Mr. Hales and a Mr. Hay.