Maria Edgeworth, fresh from a conventional boarding school, was quick to appreciate his odd humours and philosophic mind. She obediently swallowed his doses of tar-water, submitted to the severest tests in exact reasoning, and under his influence, acquired that intense regard for truth which stamped all her later writings. Yet it was not through any theories derived from him or from her father that she became the greatest writer of Moral Tales, but through her own experience of life and character; and her work for children must be considered apart from her Rousseauist principles. Mr. Day, indeed, whose ideal of womanhood was in some ways little in advance of Rousseau’s, did his best to crush her first effort (the translation of _Adèle et Théodore_) by expostulating with her father for encouraging it; but Maria was too much his pupil to give way to a prejudice based solely on his horror of “female authorship”.