Page:Castle Rackrent and The Absentee - Edgeworth (1895).djvu/42

xxxviii merry anecdotes during her visit to him. Miss Edgeworth, who scarcely mentions her own works, seems much interested at this time in a book called Mary and her Cat, which she is reading with some of the children.

Little scraps of news (I cannot resist quoting one or two of them) come in oddly mixed with these personal records of work and family talk. "There is news of the Empress (Marie Louise), who is liked not at all by the Parisians; she is too haughty, and sits back in her carriage when she goes through the streets." Of "Josephine, who is living very happily, amusing herself with her gardens and her shrubberies." This ci-devant Empress and Kennedy and Co., the seedsmen, are in partnership, says Miss Edgeworth. And then among the lists of all the grand people Maria meets in London in 1813 (Madame de Stael is mentioned as expected), she gives an interesting account of an actual visitor, Peggy Langan, who was granddaughter to Thady in Castle Rackrent. Peggy went to England with Mrs. Beddoes, and was for thirty years in the service of Mrs. Haldimand we are told, and was own sister to Simple Susan.

The story of the Absentee is a very simple one, and concerns Irish landlords living in England, who ignore their natural duties and station in life, and whose chief ambition is to take their place in the English fashionable world. The grand English ladies are talking of Lady Clonbrony.

"If you knew all she endures to look, speak, move, breathe like an Englishwoman, you would pity her," said Lady Langdale.

"Yes, and you cawnt conceive the peens she teeks to talk of the teebles and cheers and to thank Q, and with so much teeste to speak pure English," says Mrs. Dareville.

"Pure cockney, you mean," said Lady Langdale.