Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1820; 3rd ed. 1844) are autobiographical up to 1782; the completion, less interesting, is by his daughter Maria.

A Penitent.

The family at Black-Bourton at this time consisted of Mrs Elers, her mother Mrs Hungerford, and four grownup young ladies, besides several children. The eldest son, an officer, was absent. The young ladies, though far from being beauties, were handsome; and though destitute of accomplishments, they were notwithstanding agreeable, from an air of youth and simplicity, and from unaffected good nature and gaiety. The person who struck me most at my introduction to this family group was Mrs Hungerford. She was near eighty, tall and majestic, with eyes that still retained uncommon lustre. She was not able to rise from her chair without the assistance of one of her granddaughters; but when she had risen, and stood leaning on her tortoise-shell cane, she received my father, as the friend of the family, with so much politeness and with so much grace as to eclipse all the young people by whom she was surrounded. Mrs Hungerford was a Blake, connected with the Norfolk family. She had formerly been the wife of Sir Alexander Kennedy, whom Mr Hungerford killed in a duel in Blenheim Park. Why she dropped her title in marrying Mr Hungerford I know not, nor can I tell how he persuaded the beautiful widow to marry him after he had killed her husband. Mr Hungerford brought her into the retirement of Black-Bourton, the ancient seat of his family, an excellent but antiquated house, with casement windows, divided by stone framework, the principal rooms wainscoted with oak, of which the antiquity might be guessed from the varnish it had acquired from time. In the large hall were hung spears, and hunting tackle, and armour, and trophies of war and of the chase, and a portrait, not of exquisite painting, of the gallant Sir Edward Hungerford. This portrait had been removed hither from Farley Castle, the principal seat of the family. In the history of Mrs Hungerford there was something mysterious, which was not, as I perceived, known to the younger part of the family. I made no enquiries from Mrs Elers, but I observed that she was for a certain time in the day invisible. She had an apartment to herself above stairs, containing three or four rooms; when she was below stairs, we used to make a short way from one side of the house to the other, through her rooms, which occupied nearly one side of a quadrangle, of which the house consisted. One day, forgetting that she was in her room, and her door by accident not having been locked, I suddenly entered: I saw her kneeling before a crucifix, which was placed upon her toilette; her beautiful eyes streaming with tears, and cast up to Heaven with the most fervent devotion; her silver locks flowing down her shoulders; the remains of exquisite beauty, grace, and dignity in her whole figure. I had not, till I saw her at these her private devotions, known that she was a Catholic; nor had I, till I saw her tears of contrition, any reason to suppose that she thought herself a penitent. The scene struck me, young as I was, and more gay than young-her tears seemed to comfort, not to depress her-and for the first time since my childhood I was convinced that the consolations of religion are fully equal to its terrors. She was so much in earnest that she did not perceive me; and I fortunately had time to withdraw without having disturbed her devotions.

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), daughter of the eccentric Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was born at Blackbourton on New-year's Day 1767, and in 1775 was sent to a school at Derby, in 1780 to a fashionable establishment in London. When still a child she was famed for her story-telling powers, and at thirteen she wrote a tale on Generosity. She accompanied her father to Ireland in 1782, and thenceforth till his death the two were never separate. For his sake mainly she sacrificed her one romance, refusing the hand of the Swedish Count Edelcrantz in 1802 at Paris, where, as again in 1820, and during frequent visits to London, she was greatly lionised. She was at Bowood (Lord Lansdowne's) in 1818, and at Abbotsford in 1823, Scott two years later returning the visit at Edge

worthstown.

MARIA EDGEWORTH. From a Drawing by Joseph Slater.

For the rest, her home life was busy and beneficent, if uneventful. Her eyesight often troubled her; but, active to the last, at seventy she began to learn Spanish, and at eighty-two could thoroughly enjoy Macaulay's History. She died in her stepmother's arms.

To the literary partnership between father and daughter we are directly indebted for Practical Education (2 vols. 1798) and the Essay on Irish Bulls (1802). But most of her other works, though they do not bear the joint names, were inspired by her father, and gained or (it may be) lost by his revision. Published between

1795 and 1847, they filled upwards of twenty volumes (1893 reprint in 10 vols.). Besides the Moral Tales, the Popular Tales, and Tales from Fashionable Life (Ennui, The Dun, &c.), and Harrington (an apology for the Jews), there are her three Irish masterpieces, Castle Rackrent (1800), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond

(1817). These, Scott says, 'have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up. Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable taste which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country of the same kind with that which she has so fortunately achieved for Ireland.' The praise from Scott is extravagant; but Turgenief has put it on record that he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. . . . It is possible, nay probable, that if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of County Longford and the squires and squireens, it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia.' Her novels are doubtless too didactic; the plots may be poor, the dramatis persone sometimes wooden; but for wit and pathos, for lively dialogue and simple directness, for bright vivacity and healthy realism, and for their vivid presentation of their times and of that 'most distressful country' in which their best scenes are laid, they well deserve still to be read. And her children's stories-'Lazy Laurence,' and 'Simple Susan,' and the other delightful old friends-are worth all the unchildish books about children which mawkish sentimentality has brought into recent vogue.

Irish Landlord and Scotch Agent.

'I was quite angry,' says Lord Glenthorn, with Mr M'Leod, my agent, and considered him as a selfish, hardhearted miser, because he did not seem to sympathise with me, or to applaud my generosity. I was so much irritated by his cold silence that I could not forbear pressing him to say something. "I doubt, then," said he, "since you desire me to speak my mind, my lord -I doubt whether the best way of encouraging the industrious is to give premiums to the idle." But, idle or not, these poor wretches are so miserable that I cannot refuse to give them something; and surely, when one can do it so easily, it is right to relieve misery, is it not?"Undoubtedly, my lord; but the difficulty is to relieve present misery without creating more in future. Pity for one class of beings sometimes makes us cruel to others. I am told that there are some Indian Brahmins so very compassionate that they hire beggars to let fleas feed upon them; I doubt whether it might not be better to let the fleas starve."

'I did not in the least understand what Mr M'Leod meant; but I was soon made to comprehend it by crowds of eloquent beggars who soon surrounded me; many who had been resolutely struggling with their difficulties slackened their exertions, and left their labour for the easier trade of imposing upon my credulity. The money I had bestowed was wasted at the dramshop, or it became the subject of family quarrels; and those whom I had relieved returned to my honour with

fresh and insatiable expectations. All this time my industrious tenants grumbled because no encouragement was given to them; and looking upon me as a weak, good-natured fool, they combined in a resolution to ask me for long leases or a reduction of rent.

'The rhetoric of my tenants succeeded in some instances; and again, I was mortified by Mr M'Leod's silence. I was too proud to ask his opinion. I ordered, and was obeyed. A few leases for long terms were signed and sealed; and when I had thus my own way completely, I could not refrain from recurring to Mr M'Leod's opinion. "I doubt, my lord," said he, "whether this measure may be as advantageous as you hope. These fellows, these middle-men, will underset the land, and live in idleness, whilst they rack a parcel of wretched under-tenants." But they said they would keep the land in their own hands and improve it; and that the reason why they could not afford to improve before was, that they had not long leases. "It may be doubted whether long leases alone will make improving tenants; for in the next county to us there are many farms of the Dowager-lady Ormsby's land, let at ten shillings an acre, and her tenantry are beggars; and the land now at the end of the leases is worn out, and worse than at their commencement."

'I was weary of listening to this cold reasoning, and resolved to apply no more for explanations to Mr M'Leod; yet I did not long keep this resolution: infirm of purpose, I wanted the support of his approbation, at the very time I was jealous of his interference.

'At one time I had a mind to raise the wages of labour; but Mr M'Leod said: "It might be doubted whether the people would not work less, when they could with less work have money enough to support them."

'I was puzzled, and then I had a mind to lower the wages of labour, to force them to work or starve. Still provoking, Mr M'Leod said: “It might be doubted whether it would not be better to leave them alone."

'I gave marriage-portions to the daughters of my tenants, and rewards to those who had children; for I had always heard that legislators should encourage population. Still Mr M'Leod hesitated to approve : he observed "that my estate was so populous that the complaint in each family was that they had not land for the sons. It might be doubted whether, if a farm could support but ten people, it were wise to encourage the birth of twenty. It might be doubted whether it were not better for ten to live and be well fed, than for twenty to be born and to be half-starved."

'To encourage manufactures in my town of Glenthorn, I proposed putting a clause in my leases compelling my tenants to buy stuffs and linens manufactured at Glenthorn, and nowhere else. Stubborn M'Leod, as usual, began with: "I doubt whether that will not encourage the manufacturers at Glenthorn to make bad stuffs and bad linen, since they are sure of a sale, and without danger of competition.'

'At all events I thought my tenants would grow rich and independent if they made everything at home that they wanted; yet Mr M'Leod perplexed me by his "doubt whether it would not be better for a man to buy shoes, if he could buy them cheaper than he could make them." He added something about the division of labour and Smith's Wealth of Nations. To which I could only answer, "Smith's a Scotchman." I cannot

express how much I dreaded Mr M'Leod's I doubt and it may be doubted." (From Ennui.)

An Irish Postillion.

From the inn-yard came a hackney chaise, in a most deplorably crazy state; the body mounted up to a prodigious height, on unbending springs, nodding forward, one door swinging open, three blinds up, because they could not be let down, the perch tied in two places, the iron of the wheels half off, half loose, wooden pegs for linch-pins, and ropes for harness. The horses were worthy of the harness; wretched little dog-tired creatures, that looked as if they had been driven to the last gasp, and as if they had never been rubbed down in their lives; their bones starting through their skin; one lame, the other blind; one with a raw back, the other with a galled breast; one with his neck poking down over his collar, and the other with his head dragged forward by a bit of a broken bridle, held at arm's-length by a man dressed like a mad beggar, in half a hat and half a wig, both awry in opposite directions; a long tattered coat, tied round his waist by a hay-rope; the jagged rents in the skirts of this coat shewing his bare legs, marbled of many colours; while something like stockings hung loose about his ankles. The noises he made, by way of threatening or encouraging his steeds, I pretend not to describe. In an indignant voice I called to the landlord: 'I hope these are not the horses-I hope this is not the chaise intended for my servants.' The innkeeper, and the pauper who was preparing to officiate as postillion, both in the same instant exclaimed: 'Sorrow better chaise in the county!' 'Sorrow!' said I-'what do you mean by sorrow?' 'That there's no better, plase your honour, can be seen.

We have two more, to be sure; but one has no top, and the other no bottom. Any way, there's no better can be seen than this same.' 'And these horses!' cried I: 'why, this horse is so lame he can hardly stand.' 'Oh, plase your honour, though he can't stand, he'll go fast enough. He has a great deal of the rogue in him, plase your honour. He's always that way at first setting out.' And that wretched animal with the galled breast!' 'He's all the better for it when once he warms; it's he that will go with the speed of light, plase your honour. Sure, is not he Knockecroghery? and didn't I give fifteen guineas for him, barring the luckpenny, at the fair of Knockecroghery, and he rising four year old at the same time?' Then seizing his whip and reins in one hand, he clawed up his stockings with the other; so with one easy step he got into his place, and seated himself, coachman-like, upon a well-worn bar of wood, that served as a coach-box. Throw me the loan of a trusty, Bartly, for a cushion,' said he. A frieze-coat was thrown up over the horses' heads. Paddy caught it. 'Where are you, Hosey?' cried he to a lad in charge of the leaders. 'Sure I'm only rowling a wisp of straw on my leg,' replied Hosey. 'Throw me up,' added this paragon of postillions, turning to one of the crowd of idle by-standers. Arrah, push me up, can't ye?' A man took hold of his knee, and threw him upon the horse. He was in his seat in a trice. Then clinging by the mane of his horse, he scrambled for the bridle, which was under the other horse's feet, reached it, and, well satisfied with himself, looked round at Paddy, who looked back to the chaise-door at my angry servants, secure in the last event of things.' In vain the

Englishman, in monotonous anger, and the Frenchman in every note of the gamut, abused Paddy. Necessity and wit were on Paddy's side. He parried all that was said against his chaise, his horses, himself, and his country with invincible comic dexterity; till at last both his adversaries, dumfounded, clambered into the vehicle, where they were instantly shut up in straw and darkness. Paddy, in a triumphant tone, called to my postillions, bidding them get on, and not be stopping the way any longer.' [One of the horses becomes restive.] 'Never fear,' reiterated Paddy. 'I'll engage I'll be up wid him. Now for it, Knockecroghery! O the rogue, he thinks he has me at a nonplush; but I'll shew him the differ.'

After this brag of war, Paddy whipped, Knockecroghery kicked, and Paddy, seemingly unconscious of danger, sat within reach of the kicking horse, twitching up first one of his legs, then the other, and shifting as the animal aimed his hoofs, escaping every time as it were by miracle. With a mixture of temerity and presence of mind, which made us alternately look upon him as a madman and a hero, he gloried in the danger, secure of success, and of the sympathy of the spectators. Ah! didn't I compass him cleverly then? O the villain, to be browbating me! I'm too 'cute for him yet. See there, now; he's come to; and I'll be his bail he'll go asy enough wid me. Ogh! he has a fine spirit of his own; but it's I that can match him. 'Twould be a poor case if a man like me couldn't match a horse any way, let alone a mare, which this is, or it never would be so vicious.' (From Ennui.)

English Shyness, or 'Mauvaise Honte.' Lord William had excellent abilities, knowledge, and superior qualities of every sort, all depressed by excessive timidity, to such a degree as to be almost useless to himself and to others. Whenever he was, either for the business or pleasure of life, to meet or mix with numbers, the whole man was, as it were, snatched from himself. He was subject to that nightmare of the soul who seats himself upon the human breast, oppresses the heart, palsies the will, and raises spectres of dismay which the sufferer combats in vain-that cruel enchantress who hurls her spell even upon childhood, and when she makes youth her victim, pronounces: Henceforward you shall never appear in your natural character. Innocent, you shall look guilty; wise, you shall look silly; never shall you have the use of your natural faculties. That which you wish to say, you shall not say; that which you wish to do, you shall not do. You shall appear reserved when you are enthusiastic-insensible, when your heart sinks into melting tenderness. In the presence of those whom you most wish to please, you shall be most awkward; and when approached by her you love, you shall become lifeless as a statue, and under the irresistible spell of 'mauvaise honte.' Strange that France should give name to that malady of mind which she never knew, or of which she knows less than any other nation upon the surface of the civilised globe!

There is a Memoir of Miss Edgeworth (privately printed, 3 vols. 1867; edited by Aug. J. C. Hare, 2 vols. 1894), on which are founded the Life by Helen Zimmern (Eminent Women' series, 1883) and the exquisite sketch by Miss Thackeray [Mrs Richmond Ritchie] in her Book of Sibyls (1883). See, too, the introductions by the latter to the excellent reprints of Castle Rackrent, The Absentee, and Ormond, issued in 1895, and the autobiographical Memoir of Miss Edgeworth's father, completed by herself.

a fantastic exhibition. It is evident that the authors were under the real ascendency of imagination; so that, though they must at times have been conscious of committing great excesses, yet they were on the whole wonderfully little sensible of the enormous extravagance of their fictions. They could drive on their career through monstrous absurdities of description and narration, without, apparently, any check from a sense of inconsistency, improbability, or impossibility; and with an air as if they really reckoned on being taken for the veritable describers of something that could exist or happen within the mundane system. And the general state of intellect of the age in which they lived seems to have been well fitted to allow them the utmost license. The irrationality of the romancers, and of the age, provoked the observing and powerful mind of Cervantes to expose it by means of a parallel and still more extravagant representation of the prevalence of imagination over reason, drawn in a ludicrous form, by which he rendered the folly palpable even to the sense of that age. From that time the delirium abated; the works which inspirited its ravings have been blown away beyond the knowledge and curiosity of any but bibliomaniacs; and the fabrication of such is gone among the lost branches of manufacturing art.

Yet romance was in some form to be retained, as indispensable to the craving of the human mind for something more vivid, more elated, more wonderful, than the plain realities of life; as a kind of mental balloon, for mounting into the air from the ground of ordinary experience. To afford this extra-rational kind of luxury, it was requisite that the fictions should still partake, in a limited degree, of the quality of the earlier romance. The writers were not to be the dupes of wild fancy; they were not to feign marvels in such a manner as if they knew no better; they were not wholly to lose sight of the actual system of things, but to keep within some measures of relation and proportion to it; and yet they were required to disregard the strict laws of verisimilitude in shaping their inventions, and to magnify and diversify them with an indulgence of fancy very considerably beyond the bounds of probability. Without this their fictions would have lost what was regarded as the essential quality of romance.

If, therefore, the epithet Romantic, as now employed for description and censure of character, sentiments, and schemes, is to be understood as expressive of the quality which is characteristic of that class of fictions, it imputes, in substance, a great excess of imagination in proportion to judgment; and it imputes, in particulars, such errors as naturally result from that excess.

It is not strange that a faculty of which the exercise is so easy and bewitching, and the scope infinite, should obtain a predominance over judgment, especially in young persons, and in such as may have been brought up, like Rasselas and his companions, in great seclusion from the sight and experience of the world. Indeed, a considerable vigour of imagination, though it be at the expense of a frequent predominance over juvenile understanding, seems necessary, in early life, to cause a generous expansion of the passions, by giving the most lively aspect to the objects which must attract them in order to draw forth into activity the faculties of our nature.

It may

also contribute to prepare the mind for the exercise of that faith which converses with things unseen, but converses with them through the medium of those ideal

forms in which imagination presents them, and in which only a strong imagination can present them impressively. And I should deem it the indication of a character not destined to excel in the liberal, the energetic, or the devout qualities, if I observed in the youthful age a close confinement of thought to bare truth and minute accuracy, with an entire aversion to the splendours, amplifications, and excursions of fancy. The opinion is warranted by instances of persons so distinguished in youth, who have become subsequently very intelligent indeed, in a certain way, but dry, cold, precise, devoted to detail, and incapable of being carried away one moment by any inspiration of the beautiful or the sublime. They seem to have only the bare intellectual mechanism of the human mind, without the addition of what is to give it life and sentiment. They give one an impression analogous to that of the leafless trees observed in winter, admirable for the distinct exhibition of their branches and minute ramifications so clearly defined on the sky, but destitute of all the green soft luxury of foliage which is requisite to make a perfect tree. And the affections which may exist in such minds seem to have a bleak abode, somewhat like those bare deserted nests which you have often seen in such trees.

If, indeed, the signs of this exclusive understanding indicated also such an extraordinary vigour of the faculty as to promise a very great mathematician or metaphysician, one would perhaps be content to forgo some of the properties which form a complete mind, for the sake of this pre-eminence of one of its endowments; even though the person were to be so defective in sentiment and fancy that, as the story goes of an eminent mathematician, he could read through a most animated and splendid epic poem, and on being asked what he thought of it, gravely reply, 'What does it prove?' But the want of imagination is never an evidence, and perhaps but rarely a concomitant, of superior understanding.

Catherine Maria Fanshawe (1765-1834), the deformed and sickly daughter of a Surrey squire, was, like the two sisters with whom she lived in London, an accomplished draftswoman; and, though her poems were not printed till much later, was famous as a poetess towards the end of the eighteenth century. Her best-known poem is the famous 'Riddle on the Letter H,' commonly credited to Lord Byron, of which the first line was altered—apparently by Horace Smith-to the form now current, "Twas whispered in heaven, 'twas muttered in hell;' though some of her serious poems are equally noteworthy. The serio-comic Elegy on the Birthnight Ball is also famous; it begins :

Now cease the exulting strain,
And bid the warbling lyre complain ;

Heave the soft sigh and drop the tuneful tear,
And mingle notes far other than of mirth,
E'en with the song that greets the new-born year,
Or hails the day that gave a monarch birth.

A Riddle on the Letter H. 'Twas in heaven pronounced-it was muttered in hell, And echo caught faintly the sound as it fell; On the confines of earth 'twas permitted to rest, And the depth of the ocean its presence confessed.