cle in the _Daily News_ of September 7, 1883,
published as these proofs are going to press, by 'One Who Knew' Ivan
Turgueneff, that great Russian whom we might almost claim if love and
admiration gave one a right to count citizenship with the great men of
our time. An elder brother of his knew Miss Edgeworth, perhaps at
Abbotsford, for he visited Walter Scott there, or at Coppet with Madame
de Stael. This man, wise and cultivated in all European literature,
'came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein from
which most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work.
She took the world as she found it, and selected from it the materials
that she thought would be interesting to write about, in a clear and
natural style. It was Ivan Turgueneff himself who told me this, says the
writer of the article, and he modestly said that he was an unconscious
disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. He had
not the advantage of knowing English; but as a youth he used to hear his
brother translate to visitors at his country house in the Uralian Hills
passages from _Irish Tales and Sketches_, which he thought superior to
her three-volume novels. Turgueneff also said to me, "It is possible, nay
probable, that if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish
of the co. Longford and the squires and squirees, that it would not have
occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the
classes parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing out the
beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme
simplicity and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones
of the earth."'

'During her visit she saw much of my father,' says Lady Holland; 'and
her talents as well as her thorough knowledge and love of Ireland made
her conversation peculiarly agreeable to him.' On her side Maria writes
warmly desiring that some Irish bishopric might be forced upon Sydney
Smith, which 'his own sense of natural charity and humanity would forbid
him refuse.... In the twinkling of an eye--such an eye as his--he would
see all our manifold grievances up and down the country. One word, one
_bon mot_ of his, would do more for us, I guess, than ----'s four
hundred pages and all the like with which we have been bored.'

The two knew how to make good company for one another; the
quiet-Jeanie-Deans body could listen as well as give ou