he Englishman who
had wronged and deserted her. "Mistris Fanni to one reader," was the
significant heading to the preface of that book.

Miss Edgeworth's purpose in _Leonora_ certainly led her into an entirely
new path. To use her own words, no one would have believed that she
could have been such an expert in the language of sentimental logic. For
her doubly romantic purpose she was able to argue with all the sophistry
and casuistry, of false, artificial and exaggerated feeling that can
make vices assume the air of virtues, and virtues those of vices, until
it is impossible even to know them asunder. The story itself rests upon
a narrow and not very probable foundation. Its great fault is that it is
too long drawn out for its base. The principal characters are a
virtuous, outwardly cold and precise, inwardly warm-hearted English
wife, and a well-bred English husband, led astray by the machinations of
a Frenchified coquette who sets upon him from pure _desoeuvrement_,
and for whom any other person who had come into her path at that moment
would have been equally acceptable game. The work is thrown into the
form of letters, which gives to Miss Edgeworth an opportunity,
inimitably carried out, of making all the personages paint themselves
and speak in the language that is most natural to them. These letters
are excellently varied. Lady Olivia's teem with French and German
sentiment and metaphysics of self-deception; Leonora's are as candid and
generous as herself--yet though her motives are lofty, we discern a
certain air of aristocratic hauteur; while the good sense in General
B---- 's is bluntly expressed.

The fault of the story is that the husband's conversion ought to have
been brought about by purely moral means, and not by the accidental
interception of his false mistress' letters. Thus the value of the whole
moral is destroyed by its creator. That _Delphine_ in a manner suggested
this story, that but for this romance _Leonora_ might not have assumed
its peculiar shape, may be taken almost for granted. A certain notion of
refuting this corrupt story, then at the high tide of its popularity,
may also have been present in Miss Edgeworth's mind, who at no time was
so much self-absorbed as to lose sight of the ultimate aim in all her
writings. Those were the days of excessive sensibility, when to yearn
after elective affinities was the fashion. From such a state of feeling
Miss Edgeworth's temperament and training sec