To MISS RUXTON.
December 1809.
I have spent five delightful days at Sonna and Pakenham Hall. Mrs. Tuite's kindness and Mr. Chenevix's various anecdotes, French and Spanish, delighted us at Sonna; and you know the various charms both for the head and heart at Pakenham Hall.
I have just been reading, for the fourth time, I believe, The Simple
Story, which I intended this time to read as a critic, that I might
write to Mrs. Inchbald about it; but I was so carried away by it that I
was totally incapable of thinking of Mrs. Inchbald or anything but Miss
Milner and Doriforth, who appeared to me real persons whom I saw and
heard, and who had such power to interest me, that I cried my eyes
almost out before I came to the end of the story: I think it the most
pathetic and the most powerfully interesting tale I ever read. I was
obliged to go from it to correct Belinda for Mrs. Barbauld, who is
going to insert it in her collection of novels, with a preface; and I
really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone
Belinda, that I could have torn the pages to pieces: and really, I have
not the heart or the patience to correct her. As the hackney coachman
said, "Mend you! better make a new one."