sed, the highest greatness. Did
Madame de Stael put her sure finger on the cause when she said, after
reading _Fashionable Tales_ and expressing her great admiration, "_Que
Miss Edgeworth etait digne de l'enthousiasme, mais qu'elle s'est perdue
dans la triste utilite?_" Yet to preach utility was held by Miss
Edgeworth as a duty; but for this she might perhaps never have written
at all, since no pecuniary needs drove her to authorship. And allowing
for this moral strain in her works, and the blemishes that result
thence, which compared with all she achieved are but trivial, in
estimating her work as a whole, we may well afford to change what
Chateaubriand called "the petty and meagre criticism of defects for the
comprehensive and prolific criticism of beauties." We must not look for
features such as she cannot furnish, any more than we should seek for
figs upon an apple-tree. There are certain things Miss Edgeworth can do,
and do inimitably; there are others entirely foreign to her sphere. Her
novels have been described as a sort of essence of common sense, and
even more happily it has been said that it was her genius to be wise. We
must be content to take that which she can offer; and since she offers
so much, why should we not be content? Miss Edgeworth wrote of ordinary
human life, and not of tremendous catastrophes or highly romantic
incidents. Hers was no heated fancy. She had no comprehension of those
fiery passions, those sensibilities that burn like tinder at contact
with the feeblest spark; she does not believe in chance, that favorite
of so many novelists; neither does she deal in ruined castles,
underground galleries nor spectres, as was the fashion in her day. In
her stories events mostly occur as in sober and habitual fact. In
avoiding the stock-in-trade of her contemporaries she boldly struck out
a line of her own which answers in some respects to the modern realistic
novel, though devoid, of course, of its anatomical and physiological
character. She used materials which her predecessors had scorned as
worthless. She endeavored to show that there is a poetry in
self-restraint as well as in passion, though at the very time she wrote
it was the fashion to sneer at this, and to laud as fine that
self-forgetfulness, that trampling down of all obstacles, no matter of
what nature, sung by Byron and Shelley. She permitted just that amount
of tenderness which the owner could keep under due control. She had no
taste