s
keenly. Another sorrow quickly followed. Honora, the only daughter of
Mrs. Honora Edgeworth, a girl of fifteen, endowed with beauty and
talents, fell a victim to the family disease. The next year Lovell, the
now only surviving child of Honora, also showed signs of consumption. It
became needful to remove him from Ireland, and Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth
therefore crossed to England, leaving Maria in charge of the other
children. A house was taken at Clifton, and here Miss Edgeworth and her
charges rejoined their parents. The conveying so large a party so long a
journey in those days was no small undertaking for a young woman of
twenty-four. The responsibility was terrible to her, though she
afterwards dwelt only on the comic side. At one of the inns where they
slept, the landlady's patience was so much tried by the number of
little people getting out of the carriage and the quantity of luggage,
that she exclaimed: "Haven't you brought the kitchen grate too?"

At Clifton the Edgeworths resided for two years. Miss Edgeworth writes
to her Uncle Ruxton:--

We live just the same kind of life that we used to do at
Edgeworthstown, and though we move amongst numbers, are not moved
by them, but feel independent of them for our daily amusement. All
the _phantasmas_ I had conjured up to frighten myself vanished
after I had been here a week, for I found that they were but
phantoms of my imagination, as you very truly told me. We live very
near the Downs, where we have almost every day charming walks, and
all the children go bounding about over hill and dale along with
us.

In a later letter she says that they are not quite as happy here as at
home, but have a great choice of books which they enjoy. While at
Clifton the eldest son visited them. His Rousseau education had turned
him out an ungovernable child of nature; he neither could nor would
learn, so there remained no alternative but to allow him to follow his
inclinations, which happily led him towards nothing more mischievous
than a sailor's life. At Clifton, too, they became acquainted with Dr.
Beddoes, who soon after married Maria's sister Anna, and became the
father of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the poet of Death. A baby child also
died within those two years, which thus embraced meetings, partings,
courtships, much pleasant social intercourse, and much serious study.
For Maria it also included a visit to an old school-fellow in Lond