hich tale was most successful. Many of these
were taken from books, but most were original. While entertaining her
companions Maria studied their characters. It was at school she
developed her keen penetration into the motives that sway actions. Here
also she saw numbers, though on a small scale, and could estimate the
effect of the voice on the multitude and the ease with which a mass can
be governed. Very early indeed her father encouraged her to put her
imaginings on paper; a remarkable proof of his enlightenment, for those
were the days when female authorship was held in slight esteem, when for
a woman to use her pen was regarded as a dangerous stepping beyond her
boundary, which exposed her to suspicion and aversion. Soon after Mrs.
Honora Edgeworth's death Mr. Edgeworth wrote:--

I also beg that you will send me a tale, about the length of a
_Spectator_, upon the subject of GENEROSITY. It must be taken from
history or romance, and must be sent the day se'nnight after you
receive this, and I beg you will take some pains about it.

The same subject was given to a lad at Oxford, and Mr. Sneyd was chosen
as umpire. He pronounced Maria's far the best. "An excellent story," he
said, "and extremely well written, but where is the generosity?"--a
saying which became a household proverb. This first story is not
preserved, but Miss Edgeworth used to say that there was in it a
sentence of inextricable confusion between a saddle, a man and his
horse.

The same year Maria was removed from her unpretentious school to a
fashionable establishment in London. Here she was to learn deportment
and the showy accomplishments that in those days constituted the chief
branches of a young lady's education. She was duly tortured on
blackboards, pinioned in iron collars, made to use dumb-bells, and some
rather stringent measures were taken to draw out her muscles and
increase her stature. In vain; by nature she was a small woman, and
small she remained. She also learnt to dance with grace in the days when
dancing was something more dignified than a tearing romp, but music she
failed in utterly. She had no taste for this art, and her music master,
with a wisdom unhappily too rare, advised her to abandon the attempt to
learn. She had been so well grounded in French and Italian, that when
she came to do the exercises set her, she found them so easy that she
wrote out at once those intended for the whole quarter, keeping the