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Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir by Richard Lovell Edgeworth
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his tenants, and how an active mind will always find objects of
interest without constantly requiring what are called amusements;
for the leisure class should be like Sundays in a week, and as the
ideal Sunday should be a day when we can store up good and beautiful
thoughts to refresh us during the week, a day when there is no
hurry, no urgent business to trouble us, a day when we have time to
rise above the sordid details of life and enjoy its beauties; so it
seems to me that those who are not obliged to work for their living
should do their part in the world by adding to its store of good and
wise thoughts, by cultivating the arts and raising the standard of
excellence in them, and by bringing to light truths which had been
forgotten, or which had been hidden from our forefathers.

Richard Edgeworth was eminently a practical man, impulsive, as we
learn from his imprudent marriage at nineteen, but with a strong
sense of duty. His mother, who was Welsh, brought him up in habits
of thrift and industry very unlike those of his ancestors, which he
records in the early pages of his Memoirs. His great-grandmother
seems to have been a woman of strong character and courage in spite
of her belief in fairies and her dread of them, for he writes that
'while she was living at Liscard, she was, on some sudden alarm,
obliged to go at night to a garret at the top of the house for some
gunpowder, which was kept there in a barrel. She was followed
upstairs by an ignorant servant girl, who carried a bit of candle
without a candlestick between her fingers. When Lady Edgeworth had
taken what gunpowder she wanted, had locked the door, and was
halfway downstairs again, she observed that the girl had not her
candle, and asked what she had done with it; the girl recollected,
and answered that she had left it "stuck in the barrel of black
salt." Lady Edgeworth bid her stand still, and instantly returned by
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