A visit from Sir Humphrey Davy during the summer was a great delight. Miss Edgeworth speaks of the range and pitch of his mind with high praise, and relates besides an amusing anecdote that he told:—
Sir Humphrey repeated to us a remarkable criticism of Bonaparte's on Talma's acting: "You don't play Nero well; you gesticulate too much; you speak with too much vehemence. A despot does not need all that; he need only pronounce. Il sait qu'il se suffit. And," added Talma, who told this to Sir Humphrey, "Bonaparte, as he said this, folded his arms in his well-known manner, and stood as if his attitude expressed the sentiment."
A little later another sister was taken from the family circle by marriage; this time it was Miss Edgeworth's travelling companion and friend Harriet, who married Mr. Butler, a clergyman. The home party was thinning, and Miss Edgeworth, who liked to have a large number of her loved ones about her, felt this keenly. But happily young nephews and nieces were springing up to take the place of those who were gone and fill the house with that sunshine of child life and child laughter, that had seldom been absent from its walls.
She wrote to her brother about a little nephew:—
How you will like that child and make it see "upper air." How long since those times when you used to show its mother and Harriet upper air! Do you remember how you used to do it to frighten me, and how I used to shut my eyes when you threw them up, and how you used to call me to look! Ah! le bon temps! But we are all very happy now, and it is delightful to hear a child's voice cooing, or even crying, again in this house.
She was devoted to children, and never happier than when surrounded by them. They in their turn loved the kind little old lady—for she was getting an old lady now—who played with them so merrily, who entered into all their fun, who told them such pretty stories,
