n imitating the Irish, because he never
overstepped the modesty or the assurance of nature. He marked
exquisitely the happy confidence, the shrewd wit of the people,
without condescending to produce effect by caricature. He knew not
only their comic talents, but their powers of pathos; and often when
he had just heard from them some pathetic complaint, he has repeated
it to me while the impression was fresh. In the chapter on Wit and
Eloquence in Irish Bulls, there is a speech of a poor freeholder to
a candidate, who asked for his vote; this speech was made to my
father when he was canvassing the county of Longford. It was
repeated to me a few hours afterwards, and I wrote it down
instantly, without, I believe, the variation of a word.

'In the same chapter there is the complaint of a poor widow against
her landlord, and the landlord's reply in his own defence. This
passage was quoted, I am told, by Campbell in one of his celebrated
lectures on Eloquence. It was supposed by him to have been a
quotation from a fictitious narrative, but, on the contrary, it is
an unembellished fact. My father was the magistrate before whom the
widow and her landlord appeared, and made that complaint and
defence, which he repeated, and I may say acted, for me. The
speeches I instantly wrote word for word, and the whole was
described exactly from the life of his representation.'

Edgeworth was anxious that his children should have no unpleasant
associations with their first steps in reading; he therefore took
great pains to find out the easiest way of teaching them to read,
and wrote for this purpose A Rational Primer. Maria adds: 'Nothing
but the true desire to be useful could have induced any man of
talents to choose such inglorious labours; but he thought no labour,
however humble, beneath him, if it promised improvement in
education. . . . His principle of always giving distinct marks for
each different sound of the vowels has been since brought into more
general use. It forms the foundation of Pestalozzi's plan of
teaching to read. But one of the most useful of the marks in the
Rational Primer, the mark of obliteration, designed to show what
letters are to be omitted in pronouncing words, has not, I believe,
been adopted by any public instructor.'

Among the calls on Edgeworth's time about 1790 was the management of
the embarrassed affairs of a relation; he had some difficulties with
the creditors, but in trying to collect arrears