marks
and notes, will still give him a sort of existence with me.
Unintelligible as such fond chimeras may appear to many people, I am
persuaded they are not so to you.'

Maria Edgeworth adds: 'Generous people understand each other. Mrs
Day, of a noble disposition herself, always distinguished in my
father the same generosity of disposition. She had, she said, ever
considered him as "the most purely disinterested and proudly
independent of Mr. Day's friends."'

Edgeworth was a devoted father; and the loss of his daughter Honora,
a gifted girl of fifteen, was a great blow to him. She was the child
of his beloved wife Honora, and he had taken great pleasure in
guiding her studies and watching the development of her character.
Ever since he had settled in his Irish home one of Edgeworth's chief
interests had been the education of his large family; Maria records
with pride that at the age of seven Honora was able to answer the
following questions:

'If a line move its own length through the air so as to produce a
surface, what figure will it describe?'

She answered, 'A square!

She was then asked:

'If that square be moved downwards or upwards in the air the space
of the length of one of its own sides, what figure will it, at the
end of its motion, have described in the air?'

After a few minutes' silence she answered, 'A cube.'

Edgeworth was careful to train not only the reasoning powers, but
also the imaginative faculty of his children; he delighted in good
poetry and fiction, and read aloud well, and his daughter writes:
'From the Arabian Tales to Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and the Greek
tragedians, all were associated in the minds of his children with
the delight of hearing passages from them first read by their
father.'

He was an enthusiastic admirer of the ancient classics--Homer and
the Greek tragedians in particular. From the best translations of
the ancient tragedies he selected for reading aloud the most
striking passages, and Pope's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' he read
several times to his family, in certain portions every day.

In his grief for his child, Edgeworth turned to his earliest friend,
his sister, the favourite companion of his childhood, and from her
he received all the consolation that affectionate sympathy could
give; but, as he said, 'for real grief there is no sudden cure; all
human resource is in time and occupation.'

It was about this time that Darwin published the now forgotten p