edy. The authoresses themselves, to do them justice,
seem to have been very little dazzled by all this excitement. Hannah
More contentedly retires with her maiden sisters to the Parnassus on
the Mendip Hills, where they sew and chat and make tea, and teach the
village children. Dear Joanna Baillie, modest and beloved, lives on to
peaceful age in her pretty old house at Hampstead, looking through
tree-tops and sunshine and clouds towards distant London. 'Out there
where all the storms are,' I heard the children saying yesterday as
they watched the overhanging gloom of smoke which, veils the city of
metropolitan thunders and lightning. Maria Edgeworth's apparitions as
a literary lioness in the rush of London and of Paris society were but
interludes in her existence, and her real life was one of constant
exertion and industry spent far away in an Irish home among her own
kindred and occupations and interests. We may realise what these were
when we read that Mr. Edgeworth had no less than four wives, who all
left children, and that Maria was the eldest daughter of the whole
family. Besides this, we must also remember that the father whom she
idolised was himself a man of extraordinary powers, brilliant in
conversation (so I have been told), full of animation, of interest, of
plans for his country, his family, for education and literature, for
mechanics and scientific discoveries; that he was a gentleman widely
connected, hospitably inclined, with a large estate and many tenants to
overlook, with correspondence and acquaintances all over the world; and
besides all this, with various schemes in his brain, to be eventually
realised by others of which velocipedes, tramways, and telegraphs were
but a few of the items.

One could imagine that under these circumstances the hurry and
excitement of London life must have sometimes seemed tranquillity itself
compared with the many and absorbing interests of such a family. What
these interests were may be gathered from the pages of a very interesting
memoir from which the writer of this essay has been allowed to quote. It
is a book privately printed and written for the use of her children by
the widow of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and is a record, among other
things, of a faithful and most touching friendship between Maria and her
father's wife--'a friendship lasting for over fifty years, and unbroken
by a single cloud of difference or mistrust.' Mrs. Edgeworth, who was
Miss Beaufort be