My ideas of him are so much associated with his books, that to part with them would be, as it were, breaking some of the last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object.

The being in the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his 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.