be in town, I will take my bed at the Albyn Club.  We shall also break off the rather excessive hospitality to which we were exposed, and no longer stand host and hostess to all that do pilgrimage to Melrose.  Then I give up an expensive farm, which I always hated, and turn all my odds and ends into cash.  I do not reckon much on my literary exertions—­I mean in proportion to former success—­because popular taste may fluctuate.  But with a moderate degree of the favour which I have always had, my time my own, and my mind unplagued about other things, I may boldly promise myself soon to get the better of this blow.  In these circumstances, I should be unjust and ungrateful to ask or accept the pity of my friends.  I for one, do not see there is much occasion for making moan about it.  My womankind will be the greater sufferers,—­yet even they look cheerily forward; and, for myself, the blowing off my hat in a stormy day has given me more uneasiness.

I envy your Brighton party, and your fine weather.  When I was at Abbotsford the mercury was down at six or seven in the morning more than once.  I am hammering away at a bit of a story from the old affair of the diablerie at Woodstock in the Long Parliament times.  I don’t like it much.  I am obliged to hamper my fanatics greatly too much to make them effective; but I make the sacrifice on principle; so, perhaps, I shall deserve good success in other parts of the work.  You will be surprised when I tell you that I have written a volume in exactly fifteen days.  To be sure, I permitted no interruptions.  But then I took exercise, and for ten days of the fifteen attended the Court of Session from two to four hours every day.  This is nothing, however, to writing Ivanhoe when I had the actual cramp in my stomach; but I have no idea of these things preventing a man from doing what he has a mind.  My love to all the party at Brighton—­fireside party I had almost said, but you scorn my words—­seaside party then be it.  Lady Scott and Anne join in kindest love.  I must close my letter, for one of the consequences of our misfortunes is, that we dine every day at half-past four o’clock; which premature hour arises, I suppose, from sorrow being hungry as well as thirsty.  One most laughable part of our tragic comedy was, that every friend in the world came formally, just as they do here when a relation dies, thinking that the eclipse of les beaux yeux de ma cassette was perhaps a loss as deserving of consolation.

TO MARIA EDGEWORTH

Time’s revenges

Edinburgh, 23 June, 1830.

MY DEAR MISS EDGEWORTH,