as a
friend,' says Mrs. Edgeworth; 'not, as too many of Sir Walter's guests
did, with neglect.' This is Miss Edgeworth's description of the
Abbotsford family life:--

It is quite delightful to see Scott and his family in the country;
breakfast, dinner, supper, the same flow of kindness, fondness,
and genius, far, far surpassing his works, his letters, and all my
hopes and imagination. His Castle of Abbotsford is magnificent,
but I forget it in thinking of him.

The return visit, when Scotland visited Ireland, was no less successful.
Mrs. Edgeworth writes:--

Maria and my daughter Harriet accompanied Sir Walter and Miss Scott, Mr.
Lockhart, and Captain and Mrs. Scott to Killarney. They travelled in an
open caleche of Sir Walter's....

Sir Walter was, like Maria, never put out by discomforts on a journey,
but always ready to make the best of everything and to find amusement in
every incident. He was delighted with Maria's eagerness for everybody's
comfort, and diverted himself with her admiration of a green
baize-covered door at the inn at Killarney. 'Miss Edgeworth, you are so
mightily pleased with that door, I think you will carry it away with you
to Edgeworthtown.'

Miss Edgeworth's friendships were certainly very remarkable, and comprise
almost all the interesting people of her day in France as well as in
England.[3] She was liked, trusted, surrounded, and she appears to have
had the art of winning to her all the great men. We know the Duke of
Wellington addressed verses to her; there are pleasant intimations of
her acquaintance with Sir James Mackintosh, Romilly, Moore, and Rogers,
and that most delightful of human beings, Sydney Smith, whom she
thoroughly appreciated and admired. Describing her brother Frank, she
says, somewhere, 'I am much inclined to think that he has a natural
genius for happiness; in other words, as Sydney Smith would say, _great
hereditary constitutional joy_.' 'To attempt to Boswell Sydney Smith's
conversation would be to outboswell Boswell,' she writes in another
letter home; but in Lady Holland's memoir of her father there is a
pleasant little account of Miss Edgeworth herself, 'delightful, clever,
and sensible,' listening to Sydney Smith. She seems to have gone the
round of his parish with him while he scolded, doctored, joked his poor
people according to their needs.

Footnote 3: A touching illustration of her abiding influence is to be
found cited in an arti