Among others Sir William Hamilton has left a pleasing description of Miss Edgeworth.  ’If you would study and admire her as she deserves, you must see her at home,’ says he, ’and hear her talk.  She knows an infinite number of anecdotes about interesting places and persons, which she tells extremely well, and never except when they arise naturally out of the subject. . . .  To crown her merits, she seemed to take a prodigious fancy to me, and promised to be at home, and made me promise to be at Edgeworthstown for a fortnight some time next vacation.’  We owe to him also an amusing sketch of some other collateral members of the family; the fine animated old lady, who immediately gets him to explain the reason why a concave mirror inverts while a convex mirror leaves them erect; the young ladies, one of whom was particularly anxious to persuade him that the roundness of the planets was produced by friction, perhaps by their being shaken together like marbles in a bag.

There is also an interesting letter from Sir W. Hamilton at Edgeworthstown on 23rd September 1829.  Wordsworth is also staying there.  ’After some persuasion Francis and I succeed in engaging Mr. Wordsworth in many very interesting conversations.  Miss Edgeworth has had for some time a very serious illness, but she was able to join us for dinner the day that I arrived, and she exhibited in her conversations with Mr. Wordsworth a good deal of her usual brilliancy; she also engaged Mr. Marshall in some long conversations upon Ireland, and even Mr. Marshall’s son, whose talent for silence seems to be so very profound, was thawed a little on Monday evening, and discussed after tea the formation of the solar system.  Miss Edgeworth tells me that she is at last employed in writing for the public after a long interval, but does not expect to have her work soon ready for publication.’ [There is a curious criticism of Miss Edgeworth by Robert Hall, the great preacher, which should not be passed over.  ‘As to her style,’ he says, ’she is simple and elegant, content to convey her thoughts in their most plain and natural form, that is indeed the perfection of style. . . .  In point of tendency,’ he continues, ’I should class her books among the most irreligious I ever read. . . .  She does not attack religion nor inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it. . . .  No works ever produced so bad an effect on my own mind as hers.’]

Besides Wordsworth and Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Marshall, we presently come to Sir John Herschell.  ’I saw your admirable friend Miss Edgeworth lately in town,’ he writes to Hamilton; ’she is a most warm admirer of yours, and praise such as hers is what any man might be proud of.’  Later on Miss Edgeworth, corresponding with Sir W. Hamilton, tells him she is ill and forbidden to write, or even to think.  This is what she thinks of thinking:  ’I am glad to see that the severe sciences do not destroy the energy and grace of the imagination, but only chasten it and impart their philosophical influence.’