uring an
interval of sickness and exquisite pain."

Thanks to the kindness of her publisher, she was able on Mr. Edgeworth's
birthday (May, 1817) to put the printed volumes into his hands. It was
the last book of hers to which he was to write a preface, and it was
characteristic, like his others:--

In my seventy-fourth year I have the satisfaction of seeing another
work of my daughter brought before the public. This was more than I
could have expected from my advanced age and declining health. I
have been reprehended by some of the public critics for the notices
which I have annexed to my daughter's works. As I do not know their
reasons for this reprehension, I cannot submit even to their
respectable authority. I trust, however, the British public will
sympathize with what a father feels for a daughter's literary
success, particularly as this father and daughter have written
various works in partnership. The natural and happy confidence
reposed in me by my daughter puts it in my power to assure the
public that she does not write negligently. I can assert that twice
as many pages were written for these volumes as are now printed.

And now, indulgent reader, I beg you to pardon this intrusion, and
with the most grateful acknowledgments I bid you farewell forever.

RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH.

This preface was dated May 31st, 1817. On June 13th Mr. Edgeworth died,
retaining to the last, as he had prayed, his intellectual faculties. His
death was an acute grief to the whole family, a terrible, an irreparable
blow to his eldest daughter. She was almost overwhelmed by sorrow, and
during the first months that followed her father's death she wrote
scarcely any letters. She had not the heart to do so; besides, her
eyesight had been so injured by weeping, as well as by overwork the
previous winter, when she had been sitting up at night, struggling with
her grief and writing _Ormond_, that it caused real alarm to her
friends. She was unable to use her eyes without pain; "the tears," she
said, "felt like the cutting of a knife." On this account, as well as
from her sorrow, the rest of the year is a blank in her life. In the
late autumn she went to stay at Black Castle with Mrs. Ruxton, who
cheered and nursed her. With rare strength of mind she followed the
medical directions to abstain from reading and writing. Needlework, too,
of which she was fond