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