ss, more than a dozen
years before.

There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history of
the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth. The variety of her
accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of
its species she went very near perfection. One is never quite certain
whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father
Richard--one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and
clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the
Revolutionary period--did her more harm than good. It certainly loaded
her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it
might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done much
less, perhaps nothing. As it was, she lived for more than eighty years
(till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for more
than sixty. Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, for
our present purpose, in three groups--her short stories written mainly
but not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies.
Of these the middle division has been, and no doubt has deserved to be,
the least popular: but its principal example, _Belinda_ (1801)
(_Patronage_, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is
considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date,
deserves special notice here. It preceded Miss Austen's work in
publication, and is specially cited by her as a capital example of novel
in connection with the work of Miss Burney: and it is evidently founded
on study of the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthy
continuation. Maria has nothing so good as Fanny's Smiths and
Branghtons: but the whole book is far superior to _Evelina_. The
extravagance of the _fin-de-siecle_ society which it represents has
probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the
other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners:
and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift of
nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good and
quite possible girl, is not sufficiently "reliefed out"; and the most
important figures of the book, Lord and Lady Delacour, almost great
successes, are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralising
which she had caught from Marmontel.

The following of that ingenious and now too much under-valued writer
stood her in better stead in the _Moral