ure you have given us, great in proportion
to the opinion we had formed of the work we had just perused, and,
believe me, every opinion I have in this letter expressed was
formed before any individual in the family had peeped to the end of
the book, or knew how much we owed you.

Your obliged and grateful

MARIA EDGEWORTH.

To this letter Ballantyne replied; thus, even towards Miss Edgeworth,
Scott kept up his anonymity. A little later she tells a friend: "Scott
says upon his honor that he had nothing to do with _Guy Mannering_,
though he had a little to do, he says, with _Waverley_."

The following winter was spent by the family at Dublin, for the sake of
first-class medical advice for Mr. Edgeworth. That indefatigable,
active-minded old man meantime, though far from well, made experiments
on wheel carriages and published a report. There was much gaiety and
some interesting society to enliven the winter, but nothing worthy of
note is recorded by Miss Edgeworth. Anxiety on account of her beloved
father was uppermost in her mind, yet she continued to write, and was
busy upon some plays and upon preparing a third edition of _Patronage_.
In this third edition she made some important alterations, changing the
_denouement_ to gratify remonstrances that had reached her. She did not
like this alteration, and doubted the propriety of making it after a
work had gone through two editions. Her father, however, approved, and
the public was more satisfied. There was certainly much that was
unnatural in the previous course of the tale, in which the newly-married
wife refuses to go abroad with her adored husband, but lets him go alone
and remains with her father, who, it is true, was in grief, but who had
another daughter to console him. This might be Edgeworthian, but it was
not human nature; and the incident gave universal offense.

Every new book of value found its way to Edgeworthstown, and was eagerly
read and discussed by the family. Miss Austen was soon an established
favorite, while Mrs. Inchbald had long been valued. An occasional
correspondence was maintained with her. Writing of the _Simple Story_,
Miss Edgeworth says:--

By the force that is necessary to repress feelings we judge of the
intensity of the feeling, and you always contrive to give us by
intelligible but simple signs the measure of this force. Writers of
inferior genius waste their words in describing feel