Dear mother, I wish you could see her! Without any
pershality, I do think she will grow up a regular bewty!" I
thought of Miss Jenkyns, grey, withered, and wrinkled, and I
wondered if her mother had known her in the courts of heaven: and
then I knew that she had, and that they stood there in angelic
guise.
There was a great gap before any of the rector's letters appeared.
And then his wife had changed her mode of her endorsement. It was
no longer from, "My dearest John;" it was from "My Honoured
Husband." The letters were written on occasion of the publication
of the same sermon which was represented in the picture. The
preaching before "My Lord Judge," and the "publishing by request,"
was evidently the culminating point--the event of his life. It had
been necessary for him to go up to London to superintend it through
the press. Many friends had to be called upon and consulted before
he could decide on any printer fit for so onerous a task; and at
length it was arranged that J. and J. Rivingtons were to have the
honourable responsibility. The worthy rector seemed to be strung
up by the occasion to a high literary pitch, for he could hardly
write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin. I
remember the end of one of his letters ran thus: "I shall ever
hold the virtuous qualities of my Molly in remembrance, dum memor
ipse mei, dum spiritus regit artus," which, considering that the
English of his correspondent was sometimes at fault in grammar, and
often in spelling, might be taken as a proof of how much he
"idealised his Molly;" and, as Miss Jenkyns used to say, "People
talk a great deal about idealising now-a-days, whatever that may
mean.
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