There is a little oval picture at the National Gallery in Dublin, the photograph of a sketch at Edgeworthstown House, which gives one a very good impression of the family as it must have appeared in the reigns of King George and the third Mrs. Edgeworth.  The father in his powder and frills sits at the table with intelligent, well-informed finger showing some place upon a map.  He is an agreeable-looking youngish man; Mrs. Edgeworth, his third wife, is looking over his shoulder; she has marked features, beautiful eyes, she holds a child upon her knee, and one can see the likeness in her to her step-daughter Honora, who stands just behind her and leans against the chair.  A large globe appropriately stands in the background.  The grown-up ladies alternate with small children.  Miss Edgeworth herself, sitting opposite to her father, is the most prominent figure in the group.  She wears a broad leghorn hat, a frizzed coiffure, and folded kerchief; she has a sprightly, somewhat French appearance, with a marked nose of the RETROUSSE order.  I had so often heard that she was plain that to see this fashionable and agreeable figure was a pleasant surprise.

Miss Edgeworth seems to be about four-and-twenty in the sketch; she was born in 1767; she must have been eleven in 1778, when Mr. Edgeworth finally came over to Ireland to settle on his own estate, and among his own people.  He had been obliged some years before to leave Edgeworthstown on account of Mrs. Honora Edgeworth’s health; he now returned in patriarchal fashion with Mrs. Elizabeth Edgeworth, his third wife, with his children by his first, second, and third marriages, and with two sisters-in-law who had made their home in his family.  For thirty-five years he continued to live on in the pretty old home which he now adapted to his large family, and which, notwithstanding Miss Edgeworth’s objections, would have seemed so well fitted for its various requirements.  The daughter’s description of his life there, of his work among his tenants, of his paternal and spirited rule, is vivid and interesting.  When the present owner of Edgeworthstown talked to us of his grandfather, one felt that, with all his eccentricities, he must have been a man of a far-seeing mind and observation.  Mr. Erroles Edgeworth said that he was himself still reaping the benefit of his grandfather’s admirable organisation and arrangements on the estate, and that when people all around met with endless difficulties and complications, he had scarcely known any.  Would that there had been more Mr. Edgeworths in Ireland!

Whatever business he had to do, his daughter tells us, was done in the midst of his family.  Maria copied his letters of business and helped him to receive his rents.  ‘On most Irish estates,’ says Miss Edgeworth, ’there is, or there was, a personage commonly called a driver,—­a person who drives and impounds cattle for rent and arrears.’  The drivers are, alas! from time to time too necessary in collecting Irish rents.