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a delightful triumph, to touch the higher spirits.' At a later period, in reference to an invitation to breakfast at Rogers', he sets down: Went and found Miss Edgeworth, Luttrell, Lord Normanby and Sharpe. Miss Edgeworth, with all her cleverness, anything but agreeable. The moment any one begins to speak, off she starts too, seldom more than a sentence behind them, and in general contrives to distance every speaker. Neither does what she say, though of course very sensible, at all make up for this over-activity of tongue.' Moore (like Rogers) judged people subjectively, not objectively -from his own feelings, sympathies or antipathies, not from their qualities, merits or demerits.' We are as certain as if we were present that Miss Edgeworth put him out, anticipated him in a favourite story, or added a touch of Irish humour which he had let slip. From personal recollection of her manner of conversing, we can state positively that it was utterly remote from eagerness for display or over-activity of tongue. Lord Byron says her conversation was as quiet as herself. Lockhart, who was fastidious enough in all conscience, was delighted with her; and Scott writes (in 1827):It is scarcely possible to say more of this very remarkable person than that she not only completely answered but ex'ceded the expectations which I had formed. I am particularly pleased with the naïveté and good-humoured ardour of mind which she unites with such formidable powers of acute obser'vation.'

Fashion, in its best sense, is essentially a discriminating and almost a democratic principle; it unscrupulously overrides birth, fortune, and even fame, for purely personal distinction and agreeability. We have known many a lion and lioness dropped after a short trial. We never knew one retain the coveted position long by mere literary celebrity, much less by restless anxiety for display. The object of the most refined and cultivated society of London and Paris, in their ordinary intercourse, is not to instruct or be instructed, to dazzle or be dazzled, but to please and be pleased. Now, Miss Edgeworth was pre-eminently the fashion year after year, and she wisely acted on Colton's maxim in Lacon': In all societies it is advisable to associate, if pos'sible, with the highest. In the grand theatre of human life, 'a box-ticket takes you through the house.' During her visit to London in 1822, we find her spending a morning in Newgate with Mrs. Fry, receiving Sir Humphry Davy in the afternoon, taken by Whitbread to the ladies' gallery in the House of Commons, and finishing with Almack's in its heyday: ‘Fanny and Harriet have been with me at that grand exclusive

paradise of fashion, Almack's. Observe that the present Duchess of Rutland, who had been a few months away from town, and had offended the lady patronesses by not visiting them, could not at her utmost need get a ticket from any one of them, and was kept out to her amazing mortification. This may give you some idea of the importance attached to admission to Almack's. Kind Mrs. Hope got tickets for us from Lady Gwydir and Lady Cowper (Lady Palmerston); the patronesses can only give tickets to those whom they personally know; on that plea they avoided the Duchess of Rutland's application, she had not visited them," they really did not "know her grace," and Lady Cowper swallowed a camel for me, because she did not really know me; I had met her, but had never been introduced to her till I saw her at Almack's.

Fanny and Harriet were beautifully dressed: their heads by Lady Lansdowne's hair-dresser, Trichot; Mrs. Hope lent Harriet a wreath of her own French roses. Fanny was said by many to be, if not the prettiest, the most elegant-looking young woman in the room, and certainly "elegance, birth, and fortune were there as"sembled," as the newspapers would truly say.'

Lord Londonderry hurries up to talk of Castle Rackrent' and Ireland, and introduces them to Lady Londonderry, who invites them to one of her grandest parties. And then they become very intimate with Wollaston and Kater, Mr. Warburton, and Dr. and Mrs. Somerville. They and Dr. and 'Mrs. Marcet form the most agreeable as well as scientific 'society in London.' And then they dine with Lydia White, and become acquainted with Mrs. Siddons, who relates an incident of her career which it was worth going a long way to hear from her own lips:

'She gave us the history of her first acting of Lady Macbeth, and of her resolving, in the sleep scene, to lay down the candlestick, contrary to the precedent of Mrs. Pritchard and all the traditions, before she began to wash her hands and say, "Out vile spot!" Sheridan knocked violently at her door during the five minutes she had desired to have entirely to herself, to compose her spirits before the play began. He burst in, and prophesied that she would ruin herself for ever if she persevered in this resolution to lay down the candlestick! She persisted, however, in her determination, succeeded, was applauded, and Sheridan begged her pardon. She described well the awe she felt, and the power of the excitement given to her by the sight of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Sir Joshua Reynolds in the pit.'

To excuse her constant yearning for the stage after her formal retirement, she was wont to say that nothing in life could equal the excitement caused by that sea of upturned faces in the pit. This story leads naturally to one told by Sir Humphry Davy:

'Sir Humphry repeated to us a remarkable criticism of Buonaparte's on Talma's acting: "You don't play Nero well; you gesticulate too much; you speak with too much vehemence. A despot does not need all that he need only pronounce. Il sait qu'il se suffit." "And," added Talma, who told this to Sir Humphry, Buonaparte, as he said this, folded his arms in his well-known manner, and stood as if his attitude expressed the sentiment,'

Before hastening (and we must hasten) to the conclusion, we may mention, in passing, that the third volume of the Memoir contains a long correspondence with Captain Basil Hall, to whom she acted as literary adviser, and an account of an expedition to Connemara with Sir Culling and Lady Smith, which rivals the best Irish sketches in her books. She complained bitterly of the loss of her own literary monitor and coadjutor; and shrank from completing and publishing much which, under his approving eye, she would have given to the world. We have heard on good authority that she left chests full of stories in manuscript which the family have refrained from printing. Her literary labours do not appear to have been very profitable. Lockhart, who acted for her in some of her later arrangements with publishers, states that she never realised for the best of her Irish tales a tithe of the sum (7007.) given for Waverley. Yet Waverley on its first appearance was called a Scotch Castle Rackrent.' *

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Harry and Lucy' was begun by her father and his second wife Honora, in 1787, to illustrate his notions of practical education. Day offered to assist, and with this view wrote Sandford and Merton,' which was first designed for a short story to be inserted in Harry and Lucy.' Edgeworth, therefore, had some reason for boasting that the public owed 'Sandford and Merton' to him. This is not the first time that a work of lasting reputation has been produced in the same manner. Eothen' was written to assist the author of The 'Crescent and the Cross,' and was at one time intended to appear as a kind of supplement to that work.

There is a letter from Scott to Joanna Baillie, in which he writes:

'I have not the pen of our friend Miss Edgeworth, who writes all the while she laughs, talks, eats, and drinks, and I believe, though I do not pretend to be so far in the secret, all the time she sleeps, too. She has good luck in having a pen which walks at once so unweariedly and so well. I do not, however, quite like her last book

* Life of Scott, vol. iii. p. 124. The Quarterly Review, vol. ii.

p. 356.

on Education ("Harry and Lucy"), considered as a general work. She should have limited the title to "Education in Natural Philo"sophy," or some such term, for there is no great use in teaching children in general to roof houses or build bridges, which, after all, a carpenter or a mason does a great deal better at 2s. 6d. a-day. Your ordinary Harry should be kept to his grammar, and your Lucy, of most common occurrence, would be kept employed on her sampler, instead of wasting wood and cutting their fingers, which I am convinced they did, though their historian says nothing of it.'

...

The fault of all her and her father's children's books is that they exact too much from both pupil and teacher, and greatly overestimate the probable or even possible results of their system. They place no bounds to what education can effect. This is more especially the defect of Frank-a work, in other respects, of signal excellence, which well deserves to retain its rank as the first of English boys' books.

Scott's visitors were wont to express the same wonder at the unseen and unaccountable performances of his pen which he expresses of the unwearied walk of hers. The difference between them in this respect was that he got up early and wrote for two or three hours before breakfast, after which he felt at full liberty to amuse himself with his guests. She generally sat down to her writing-desk (a small and plain one made by her father) in the common sitting-room, soon after breakfast and wrote till luncheon, her chief meal; then did some needlework, took a short drive, and wrote for the rest of the afternoon. She probably varied her habits during Scott's visit to Edgeworth-Town.

On May 7th, 1849, being then in her eighty-third year, she writes to Mrs. Richard Buller: 'I am heartily obliged and delighted by your being such a goose, and Richard such a gander, as to be frightened out of your wits at my going up the ladder to take off the top of the clock.' She actually had mounted the ladder, as if emulous of the fate of that old Countess of Desmond, who broke her neck by a fall from a cherry-tree. On the 22nd she was taken suddenly ill with pain in the region of her heart, and expired within a few hours in the arms of her step-mother, the author of the Memoir.

The general character of Miss Edgeworth's productions was so exhaustively discussed in her lifetime, and the traditional estimate of them is so fixed and unanimous, that little remains for us but to take a retrospective glance at their prominent features-to sum up her many merits, and few demerits, as one of the most fertile, popular, and influential English novelists of her age. All are agreed in ranking amongst her qualities the finest powers of observation; the most penetrating good

VOL. CXXVI. NO. CCLVIII.

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sense; a high moral tone consistently maintained; inexhaustible fertility of invention; firmness and delicacy of touch; undeviating rectitude of purpose; varied and accurate knowledge; a clear flexible style; exquisite humour, and extraordinary mastery of pathos. What she wants, what she could not help wanting with her matter-of-fact understanding and practical turn of mind, are poetry, romance, passion, sentiment. In her judgment the better part of life and conduct is discretion. She has not only no toleration for self-indulgence or criminal weakness: she has no sympathy with lofty, defiant, uncalculating heroism or greatness: she never snatches a grace beyond the reach of prudence: she never arrests us by scenes of melodramatic intensity, or hurries us along breathless by a rapid train of exciting incidents to an artistically prepared catastrophe. Neither does she shine in historic painting; and she would have failed in high art' had she aspired to it. Her gaze was too constantly fixed on the surface to admit of much depth or breadth of thought; and she was deficient in the art of combining more than a limited number of scenes and characters into a plot.

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The late Earl of Dudley, a fervent admirer, christened her the Anti-sentimental Novelist; and Madame de Staël was reported to have said, 'que Miss Edgeworth était digne de l'enthou siasme, mais qu'elle s'est perdue dans la triste utilité.' When this was repeated during the visit at Coppet in 1820, the Duchesse de Broglie declared, Ma mère n'a jamais dit cela ; 'elle en était incapable.' For all that, we suspect she did say it. The internal evidence is strong, and the remark is partly founded in truth. Miss Edgeworth is worthy of the highest admiration of the soberer kind; she does not inspire enthusiasm; and she would have been more useful, as well as a thousandfold more attractive, had she thought and written less about utility.

Goethe was wont to maintain that the writer of a work of fiction should take no thought of the moral: that he should keep true to nature and leave the moral to take care of itself. This may be accepted as a sound canon of criticism, subject to a limitation obviously understood. The poet, dramatist, or novelist may safely give the rein to invention under the conscious control of good feeling and good sense. It is not his or her business to vindicate the ways of God to man; much less to warp events in such a manner as to vindicate them. In the case of a story-book for children, there is no great harm in playing Providence in this fashion; for the parent or master can so manage the distribution of rewards and punishments as