“My dear Miss Edgeworth,—I had some days ago your very kind letter, and I thank you for it most sincerely, though very briefly. I much regret the circumstances which have given pain to you or to others; but the truth is, the enormous heaps of letters committed to me were all copied by ladies, and the originals forthwith returned; and I fear besides innumerable blunders of names and dates which, in the most important of them, it cost me no small pains to correct, there may have been, on the part of my dear Sophy and her assistants, many omissions of hints about omission which had come to hand on separate papers. I hope no very serious evil has been occasioned, but consider that she who had been my secretary for years in preparing these Memoirs only lived to see, not to read my first volume, and in her I lost the only person who could have put and kept me right as to a thousand little things.
| 182 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
“I shall bear all you say in mind when I come, if ever, to a second edition. Meantime believe me always most gratefully and affectionately yours,
