s the
proverb said, "An empty mind is the devil's house." In her kindly way
Miss Edgeworth can be scathing, and she exercises this power upon women
of mere fashion. The ladies of the period were less occupied with public
and philanthropic schemes than they are now, and hence had more time to
expend on follies and frivolities. The whole pitiful system of unreal
existence led by these women is exposed with an almost remorseless
hand, for Miss Edgeworth had no tenderness for foolish failings.
Inimitably, too, we are made to see how then, as now, there was
tolerated in fashionable society a degree of vulgarity which would
neither be suffered nor attempted in lower life. It was just because
Miss Edgeworth's lines were cast among the rich and idle that she was
able to understand all the misery and heartlessness of the lives of a
large section of this community. We see how their petty cravings, their
preposterous pursuits, bring positive misery on themselves if not on
others; how their dispositions are sophisticated, their tempers warped,
their time and talents wasted, in their restless chase after social
distinction, after the craze of being in the fashion. "The scourges of
the prosperous;" thus happily have these giant curses of mere
fashionable life been defined. Miss Edgeworth certainly understood fully
the nature of the disorder of her patients, the _ennui_, the stagnation
of life and feeling that devoured them and sunk many of them at last to
a depth at which they no longer merited the name of rational human
beings. At the same time (and this is a point which must be insisted
upon) there is no sourness about Miss Edgeworth's pictures of good
society; her pen, in speaking of it, is not dipped in vinegar and
wormwood, as was the pen of Thackeray, and sometimes even that of George
Eliot. Without snobbishness, without envy, she writes quite simply, and
absolutely objectively, of that which surged around her whenever she
left the quiet of Edgeworthstown and visited in some of the many noble
houses of Ireland, Scotland and England, in which she was a familiar
friend. That her pictures of contemporary society were correct has never
been disputed. She reproduced faithfully not only its coarser and silly
side, but also the more brilliant conversational features, that make it
contrast so favorably with that of our own day, in which the art of
talking has been lost. Lord Jeffrey, an authority, and one not given to
flattery, says tha