rtance is thus very great: and it only wanted the proverbial or
anecdotic "That!" to make it much greater. "That!" as it generally is,
was in her case the last fusing touch of genius to accomplish the
_grand oeuvre_--the perfect projection. She had humour, pathos,
knowledge of the world, power of drawing it, acquaintance with
literature, shrewd common sense, an excellent style when she was allowed
to write in her own way, the feelings of a lady who was also a good
woman. King Charles is made to say in _Woodstock_ that "half the things
in the world remind him of the Tales of Mother Goose." It is
astonishing, in the real complimentary sense, how many things remind one
of situations, passages, phrases, in Miss Edgeworth's works of all the
kinds from _Castle Rackrent_ to _Frank_. She also had a great and an
acknowledged influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly not
disavowed influence on Miss Austen. She is good reading always, however
much we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the
platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a
platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father. She was a girl of
fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in
_Evelina_, and she lived to see it triumph in _Vanity Fair_. But her own
work, save in some of her short stories, which are pretty perfect,
represents the imperfect stage of the development--the stage when the
novel is trying for the right methods and struggling to get into the
right ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached the others.

There are those who would assign what they might call "higher genius,"
or "rarer gift," or something similar, to her countryman Charles Robert
Maturin. The present writer is not very fond of these measurings
together of things incommensurable--these attempts to rank the "light
white sea-mew" as superior or inferior to the "sleek black pantheress."
It is enough to say that while Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adopted
the novel, and even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at least
pseudo-romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing. His life was hardly
half hers in length, and his temperament appears to have been as
discontented as hers was sunny: but he had his successes in drama as
well as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had a
wide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recently
printed both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks