’In the same chapter there is the complaint of a poor widow against her landlord, and the landlord’s reply in his own defence.  This passage was quoted, I am told, by Campbell in one of his celebrated lectures on Eloquence.  It was supposed by him to have been a quotation from a fictitious narrative, but, on the contrary, it is an unembellished fact.  My father was the magistrate before whom the widow and her landlord appeared, and made that complaint and defence, which he repeated, and I may say acted, for me.  The speeches I instantly wrote word for word, and the whole was described exactly from the life of his representation.’

Edgeworth was anxious that his children should have no unpleasant associations with their first steps in reading; he therefore took great pains to find out the easiest way of teaching them to read, and wrote for this purpose A Rational Primer.  Maria adds:  ’Nothing but the true desire to be useful could have induced any man of talents to choose such inglorious labours; but he thought no labour, however humble, beneath him, if it promised improvement in education. . . .  His principle of always giving distinct marks for each different sound of the vowels has been since brought into more general use.  It forms the foundation of Pestalozzi’s plan of teaching to read.  But one of the most useful of the marks in the Rational Primer, the mark of obliteration, designed to show what letters are to be omitted in pronouncing words, has not, I believe, been adopted by any public instructor.’

Among the calls on Edgeworth’s time about 1790 was the management of the embarrassed affairs of a relation; he had some difficulties with the creditors, but in trying to collect arrears of rent he found himself not only in difficulty, but in actual peril.

There existed in Ireland at this time a class of persons calling themselves gentlemen tenants—­the worst tenants in the world —­middlemen, who relet the lands, and live upon the produce, not only in idleness, but in insolent idleness.

This kind of half gentry, or mock gentry, seemed to consider it as the most indisputable privilege of a gentleman not to pay his debts.  They were ever ready to meet civil law with military brag of war.  Whenever a swaggering debtor of this species was pressed for payment, he began by protesting or confessing that ’he considered himself used in an ungentlemanlike manner;’ and ended by offering to give, instead of the value of his bond or promise, ’the satisfaction of a gentleman, at any hour or place. . . .  My father,’ says Maria, ’has often since rejoiced in the recollection of his steadiness at this period of his life.  As far as the example of an individual could go, it was of service in his neighbourhood.  It showed that such lawless proceedings as he had opposed could be effectually resisted; and it discountenanced that braggadocio style of doing business which was once in Ireland too much in fashion.’