Long may you feel impatient to hear from your friends, my dear Sophy,
and long may you express your impatience as agreeably. I have a great
deal bottled, or rather bundled up for you. Though I most earnestly wish
that my father was in that situation [Footnote: M.P. for the County of
Longford.] which Sir T. Fetherstone now graces, and though my father had
done me the honour to let me copy his Election letters for him, I am not
the least infected with the electioneering rage. Whilst the Election
lasted we saw him only a few minutes in the course of the day, then
indeed he entertained us to our hearts' content; now his mind seems
relieved from a disagreeable load, and we have more of his company.

You do not mention Madame Roland, therefore I am not sure whether you
have read her; if you have only read her in the translation which talks
of her Uncle Bimont's dying of a "fit of the gout _translated_ to his
chest," you have done her injustice. We think some of her memoirs
beautifully written, and like Rousseau: she was a great woman and died
heroically, but I don't think she became more amiable, and certainly not
more happy by meddling with politics; _for_--her head is cut off, and
her husband has shot himself. I think if I had been Mons. Roland I
should not have shot myself for her sake, and I question whether he
would not have left undrawn the trigger if he could have seen all she
intended to say of him to posterity: she has painted him as a harsh,
stiff, pedantic man, to whom she devoted herself from a sense of duty;
her own superiority, and his infinite obligations to her, she has taken
sufficient pains to blazon forth to the world. I do not like all this,
and her duty work, and her full-length portrait _of_ herself _by_
herself. The foolish and haughty Madame de Boismorrel, who sat upon the
sofa, and asked her if she ever wore feathers, was probably one of the
remote causes of the French Revolution: for Madame Roland's Republican
spirit seems to have retained a long and lively remembrance of this