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cle in the _Daily News_ of September 7, 1883, published as these proofs are going to press, by 'One Who Knew' Ivan Turgueneff, that great Russian whom we might almost claim if love and admiration gave one a right to count citizenship with the great men of our time. An elder brother of his knew Miss Edgeworth, perhaps at Abbotsford, for he visited Walter Scott there, or at Coppet with Madame de Stael. This man, wise and cultivated in all European literature, 'came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein from which most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work. She took the world as she found it, and selected from it the materials that she thought would be interesting to write about, in a clear and natural style. It was Ivan Turgueneff himself who told me this, says the writer of the article, and he modestly said that he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. He had not the advantage of knowing English; but as a youth he used to hear his brother translate to visitors at his country house in the Uralian Hills passages from _Irish Tales and Sketches_, which he thought superior to her three-volume novels. Turgueneff also said to me, "It is possible, nay probable, that if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of the co. Longford and the squires and squirees, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme simplicity and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones of the earth."' 'During her visit she saw much of my father,' says Lady Holland; 'and her talents as well as her thorough knowledge and love of Ireland made her conversation peculiarly agreeable to him.' On her side Maria writes warmly desiring that some Irish bishopric might be forced upon Sydney Smith, which 'his own sense of natural charity and humanity would forbid him refuse.... In the twinkling of an eye--such an eye as his--he would see all our manifold grievances up and down the country. One word, one _bon mot_ of his, would do more for us, I guess, than ----'s four hundred pages and all the like with which we have been bored.' The two knew how to make good company for one another; the quiet-Jeanie-Deans body could listen as well as give ou
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