day must have shaken this faith.  His visits were discontinued and his correspondence dropped.  Other suitors pressed their claims, and often urged an argument which it was beyond his means to supply.  They came provided with what Parson Hugh calls good gifts:  “Seven hundred pounds and possibilities is good gifts.”  Foremost among these dangerous rivals were two men of note in their way:  Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and the eccentric, but amiable Thomas Day.

Mr. Day was a man whose personal charms were not great.  Overgrown, awkward, pitted with the small-pox, he offered no pleasing contrast to the discarded Andre:  but he had twelve hundred pounds a year.  His notions in regard to women were as peculiar as his estimate of his own merit.  He seems to have really believed that it would be impossible for any beautiful girl to refuse her assent to the terms of the contract by which she might acquire his hand.  These were absurd to a degree; and it is not cause for surprise that Miss Sneyd should have unhesitatingly refused them.  Poor Mr. Day was not prepared for such continued ill-luck in his matrimonial projects.  He had already been very unfortunate in his plans for obtaining a perfect wife,—­having vainly provided for the education of two foundlings between whom he promised himself to select a paragon of a helpmate.  To drop burning sealing-wax upon their necks, and to discharge a pistol close to their ears, were among his philosophical rules for training them to habits of submission and self-control; and the upshot was, that they were fain to attach themselves to men of less wisdom, but better taste.  Miss Sneyd’s conduct was more than he could well endure, after all his previous disappointments; and he went to bed with a fever that did not leave him till his passion was cured.  He could not at this time have anticipated, however, that the friendly hand which had aided the prosecution of his addresses was eventually destined to receive and hold the fair prize which so many were contending for.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the ambassador and counsellor of Mr. Day in this affair, was at the very moment of the rejection himself enamored of Miss Sneyd.  But Edgeworth had a wife already,—­a pining, complaining woman, he tells us, who did not make his home cheerful,—­and honor and decency forbade him to open his mouth on the subject that occupied his heart.  He wisely sought refuge in flight, and in other scenes the natural exuberance of his disposition afforded a relief from the pangs of an unlawful and secret passion.  Lord Byron, who met him forty years afterwards, in five lines shows us the man:  if he was thus seen in the dry wood, we can imagine what he was in the green:—­“I thought Edgeworth a fine old fellow, of a clarety, elderly, red complexion, but active, brisk, and endless.  He was seventy, but did not look fifty,—­no, nor forty-eight even.”  He was in France when the death of his father left him to the possession of a good estate,—­and that of his wife occurring in happy concurrence, he lost little time in opening in his own behalf the communications that had failed when he spoke for Mr. Day.  His wooing was prosperous; in July, 1773, he married Miss Sneyd.