My dearest aunt and friend--friend of my youth and age, and beloved
sister of my father, how many titles you have to my affection and
gratitude, and how delightful it is to me to feel them all! Since I have
parted from you, I have felt still more than when I was with you the
peculiar value to me of your sympathy and kindness. I find my spirits
sink beyond my utmost effort to support them when I leave you, and they
rise involuntarily when I am near you, and recall the dear trains of old
associations, and the multitude of ideas I used to have with him who is
gone for ever. Thank you, my dear aunt, for your most kind and touching
letter. You have been for three months daily and hourly soothing, and
indulging, and nursing me body and mind, and making me forget the sense
of pain which I could not have felt suspended in any society but yours.
My uncle's opinion and hints about the Life I have been working at this
whole week. Nothing can be kinder than Lovell is to all of us.
I have read two-thirds of Bishop Watson's life. I think he bristles his
independence too much upon every occasion, and praises himself too much
for it, and above all complains too much of the want of preferment and
neglect of him by the Court. I have Madame de Staël's Memoirs of her
father's private life: I have only read fifty pages of it--too much of a
French Éloge--too little of his private life. There is a _Notice_ by
Benjamin Constant of Madame de Staël's life prefixed to this work, which
appears to me more interesting and pathetic than anything Madame de
Staël has yet said of her father.
_February 21._
I must and will write to my Aunt Ruxton to-day, if the whole College of
Physicians, and the whole conclave of cardinal virtues, with Prudence
primming up her mouth at the head of them, stood before me. I entirely
agree with you, my dearest aunt, on one subject, as indeed I generally
do on most subjects, but particularly about _Northanger Abbey_ and
_Persuasion._ The behaviour of the General in _Northanger Abbey_,
packing off the young lady without a servant or the common civilities
which any bear of a man, not to say gentleman, would have shown, is
quite outrageously out of drawing and out of nature. _Persuasion_--
excepting the tangled, useless histories of the family in
the first fifty pages--appears to me, especially in all that relates to
poor Anne and her lover, to be exceedingly interesting and natural. The
love and the lover admirably well drawn: don't you see Captain
Wentworth, or rather don't you in her place feel him taking the
boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa?
And is not the first meeting after their long separation admirably well
done? And the overheard conversation about the nut? But I must stop: we
have got no farther than the disaster of Miss Musgrave's jumping off the
steps.