Edgeworth's
characters of Irish squires are derived from her ancestors. The family
continued Protestant--the famous Abbe Edgeworth was a convert--and Maria
Edgeworth's great-grandfather was so zealous in the reformed cause as to
earn for himself the sobriquet of "Protestant Frank." His son married a
Welsh lady, who became the mother of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a man who
will always be remembered as the father of his daughter. He was,
however, something more than this; and as the lives of the father and
daughter were throughout so intimately interwoven, a brief account of
his career is needful for a comprehension of hers.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth was born at Bath in 1744, and spent his early
years partly in England, partly in Ireland, receiving a careful
education. In his youth he was known as "a gay philosopher," in the days
when the word philosopher was still used in its true sense of a lover of
wisdom. Light-hearted and gay, good-humored and self-complacent;
possessed of an active and cultivated mind, just and fearless, but
troubled with neither loftiness nor depth of feeling, Richard Lovell
Edgeworth was nevertheless a remarkable personage, when the time at
which he lived is taken into account. He foresaw much of the progress
our own century has made, clearly indicated some of its features, and
actually achieved for agriculture and industry a multitude of
inventions, modest as far as the glory of the world attaches to them,
but none the less useful for the services they render. Many of his
ideas, rejected as visionary and impracticable when he first promulgated
them, have now become the common property of mankind. He was no mere
theorist; when he had established a theory he loved to put it into
practice, and as his theories ranged over many and wide fields, so did
his experiments. Even in late life, when most persons care only to
cultivate repose, he threw himself, with all the ardor of youth, into
schemes of improvement for the good of Ireland; for he was sincerely
devoted to her true welfare, and held in contempt the mock patriotism
that looks only to popularity. In early life he sowed a certain quantity
of wild oats, the result of the super-abundant animal spirits that
distinguished him, and at the age of sixteen contracted a mock-marriage,
which his father found needful to have annulled by a process of law.
After this escapade he was entered at Corpus Christi, Oxford, as a
gentleman commoner. During his residen