Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/213

Rh make me get up and come out and stand up to play tricks for them—and this I am not able or inclined to do. I am afraid I should growl—I never could be as good-humored as Sir Walter Scott used to be, when rattled for and made to "come out and stand on his hind legs" as he used to describe it, and then go quietly to sleep again.

I shall use my privilege of 72—rising 73—and shall keep in my comfortable den—I will not go out. "Nobody asked you, Ma'am," to play Lion, may perhaps be said or sung to me, and I shall not be sorry nor mortified by not being asked to exhibit,—but heartily happy to be with my sisters and their family and family friends—All for which I go—knowing my own mind very well I speak the mere plain truth. I shall return home to Edgeworthstown before the London Season, as it is called, commences, i.e. by the end of March, or at the very beginning of April.

This is all I have, for the present, to tell you of my dear self, or of our family doings or plannings. You see I depend enough on the sincerity of your curiosity and sympathy, and I thank you in kind for all you have been so affectionately good to tell me of yourselves.

I have been lately reading Thibeaudeau's ten volumes of the History of Napoleon—Le Consulat and l'Empire"—immediately after having read the life of Washington by Sparks, a book which I think I mentioned to you had been sent to me by an American Jewess of Philadelphia, Miss Gratz. A most valuable present—a most interesting work it is. The comparison between the characters, power, deeds, fortune and fate of Washington and Napoleon continually pressed on my mind as I read their lives; and continually I wished that some modern Plutarch with more of religious, if not more of moral and political knowledge and philosophy than the ancient times afforded, would draw a parallel—no not a parallel, for that could not be—but a comparison between Napoleon and Washington. It would give in the result a comparison between Moral and Intellectual power on the highest scale, and with the fullest display in which they have ever been seen in two national heroes. The superior, the universal abilities of Bonaparte, his power of perseverance, of transition, of resource, of comprehensiveness, of adaptation of means to ends and all tending to his own aggrandisement, and his appetite for dominion growing with what it fed upon, have altogether been most astonishingly displayed in the Frenchman's history of Napoleon. The integrity, disinterestedness, discretion, persevering adherence to one great purpose, marking the character and the career of Washington, are all faithfully portrayed by his American biographer, and confirmed by state papers and by the testimony of an independent World. The comparison between what Napoleon and Washington did living, and left dying, of the fruits and consequences of their deeds, would surely