There is no doubt whatever of the immense pains which Mr. Edgeworth bestowed upon Maria’s literary training; and Maria herself felt that she owed everything to him. It may, however, very well be doubted whether his influence upon her was good from the literary point of view. He gave her method and system, and he cultivated her natural faculties for observation; but there was something very mechanical and pedantic in his mind—an affectation, a want of humour, and a want of spontaneity: she, when left to herself, was content with grouping the facts of life and nature as she saw them around her, without trying to be more instructive than they are. _Castle Rackrent_, which is the best of her Irish stories, was entirely her own, and bears no traces of her father’s hand. This is the only one of her tales of which she did not draw out a preliminary sketch or framework for her father’s criticism. She says herself of this story, “A curious fact, that where I least aimed at drawing characters I succeeded best. As far as I have heard, the characters in _Castle Rackrent_ were, in their day, considered as better classes of Irish characters than any I ever drew; they cost me no trouble, and were made by no _receipt_, or thought of philosophical classification; there was literally not a correction, not an alteration, made in the first writing, no copy, and, as I recollect, no interlineation; it went to the press just as it was written. Other stories I have corrected with the greatest care, and remodelled and re-written.” If she had given the world more work of this kind, and less of the kind produced under her father’s methods, her name would to-day occupy a higher place than it does in the hierarchy of literature.