Maria Edgeworth’s family was one of English origin, which had settled in Ireland in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Edgeworths intermarried into Irish, Welsh, and English families, but always maintained strong Irish sympathies. There were many remarkable men and women in the Edgeworth family before the birth of our heroine, but space forbids the mention of more than one, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose name and fame are intimately associated with those of his daughter. Mr. Edgeworth was a most extraordinary man; at one moment one admires him, at another one laughs at him, but one must always be astonished by him. “To put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes” would have been a congenial task to him. He made clocks, built bridges, raised spires, invented telegraphs, manufactured balloons, ink, and soap, constructed locks on his bedroom doors of such a complicated nature, that his guests were afraid to shut their doors lest they never should be able to open them again. When on a journey in France about 1770, he stayed at Lyons, and carried out a plan for diverting the Rhone from its course, thereby saving a large tract of country that had previously been inaccessible; for this service the city of Lyons rewarded him by a grant of land; this property, however, was confiscated a few years later during the Revolution. He raised a corps of volunteer infantry in Ireland, to which Roman Catholics as well as Protestants were admitted, although at that time the sentiment of religious equality was regarded as akin to infidelity and disloyalty. He was born in England, and educated partly here and partly in Ireland; like most of the Edgeworths, he came of a mixed race, his mother being a Welsh woman of considerable literary acquirements and faculties; his first remarkable performance was a runaway marriage, which he contracted at the age of nineteen, with a Miss Elers, a lady of German origin, whom he appears rather to have disliked than otherwise. A runaway marriage with a girl whom he really loved would have been too commonplace a proceeding in those days for this eccentric young gentleman. Speaking of this lady, Mr. Edgeworth wrote: “My wife was prudent, domestic, and affectionate, but she was not of a cheerful temper. She lamented about trifles; and the lamenting of a female, with whom we live, does not render home delightful.” It is not recorded if Mrs. Edgeworth found the lamenting of the male with whom she lived any more delightful, nor indeed is it evident that her husband devoted much of his overflowing energy to lamentation. As he did not find his home delightful, he spent very little time in it, and was not long before he found pleasant society elsewhere.