ng that he has not got a Trinity
College degree; the plain girls, who want to go into convents; the pretty
girls, who want to get married; and the shopkeepers' daughters, who want
to be thought young ladies. There is a whole pell-mell of men and women,
a complete panorama of provincial life, an absolutely faithful picture of
the peasant in his own home. This note of realism in dealing with
national types of character has always been a distinguishing
characteristic of Irish fiction, from the days of Miss Edgeworth down to
our own days, and it is not difficult to see in Ismay's Children some
traces of the influence of Castle Rack-rent. I fear, however, that few
people read Miss Edgeworth nowadays, though both Scott and Tourgenieff
acknowledged their indebtedness to her novels, and her style is always
admirable in its clearness and precision.

* * * * *

Miss Leffler-Arnim's statement, in a lecture delivered recently at St.
Saviour's Hospital, that 'she had heard of instances where ladies were so
determined not to exceed the fashionable measurement that they had
actually held on to a cross-bar while their maids fastened the fifteen-
inch corset,' has excited a good deal of incredulity, but there is
nothing really improbable in it. From the sixteenth century to our own
day there is hardly any form of torture that has not been inflicted on
girls, and endured by women, in obedience to the dictates of an
unreasonable and monstrous Fashion. 'In order to obtain a real Spanish
figure,' says Montaigne, 'what a Gehenna of suffering will not women
endure, drawn in and compressed by great coches entering the flesh; nay,
sometimes they even die thereof.' 'A few days after my arrival at
school,' Mrs. Somerville tells us in her memoirs, 'although perfectly
straight and well made, I was enclosed in stiff stays, with a steel busk
in front; while above my frock, bands drew my shoulders back till the
shoulder-blades met. Then a steel rod with a semicircle, which went
under my chin, was clasped to the steel busk in my stays. In this
constrained state I and most of the younger girls had to prepare our
lessons'; and in the life of Miss Edgeworth we read that, being sent to a
certain fashionable establishment, 'she underwent all the usual tortures
of back-boards, iron collars and dumbs, and also (because she was a very
tiny person) the unusual one of being hung by the neck to draw out the
muscles and increase the growth,' a signal fail