The glebe lands lie beyond the village.  They reach as far as the church on its high plateau, from which you can see the Wicklow Hills on a fine day, and the lovely shifting of the lights of the landscape.  The remains of the great pew of the Edgeworth family, with its carved canopy of wood, is still a feature in the bare church from which so much has been swept away.  The names of the fathers are written on the chancel walls, and a few medallions of daughters and sisters also.  In the churchyard, among green elder bushes and tall upspringing grasses, is the square monument erected to Mr. Edgeworth and his family; and as we stood there the quiet place was crossed and recrossed by swallows with their beating crescent wings.

III

Whatever one may think of Mr. Edgeworth’s literary manipulations and of his influence upon his daughter’s writings, one cannot but respect the sincere and cordial understanding which bound these two people together, and realise the added interest in life, in its machinery and evolutions, which Maria owed to her father’s active intelligence.  Her own gift, I think, must have been one for perceiving through the minds of others, and for realising the value of what they in turn reflected; one is struck again and again by the odd mixture of intuition, and of absolute matter of fact which one finds in her writings.

It is difficult to realise, when one reads the memoirs of human beings who loved and hated, and laughed and scolded, and wanted things and did without them, very much as we do ourselves, that though they thought as we do and felt as we do (only, as I have said, with greater vehemence), they didn’t look like us at all; and Mr. Edgeworth, the father of Maria Edgeworth, the ‘gay gallant,’ the impetuous, ingenious, energetic gentleman, sat writing with powdered hair and a queue, with tights and buckles, bolt upright in a stiff chair, while his family, also bequeued and becurled and bekerchiefed, were gathered round him in a group, composedly attentive to his explanations, as he points to the roll upon the table, or reads from his many MSS. and notebooks, for their edification.

To have four wives and twenty-two children, to have invented so many machines, engines, and curricles, steeples and telegraph posts, is more than commonly falls to the lot of one ordinary man, but such we know was Mr. Edgeworth’s history told by his own lips.

I received by chance an old newspaper the other day, dated the 23rd July 1779.  It is called the London packet, and its news, told with long s’s and pretty curly italics, thrills one even now as one looks over the four short pages.  The leading article is entitled ’Striking Instance of the perfidy of France.’  It is true the grievance goes back to Louis XIV., but the leader is written with plenty of spirit and present indignation.  Then comes news from America and the lists of New Councillors elected: